Child care in New York City has been in crisis for decades.
Ten years ago, City Hall launched universal pre-K for 4-year-olds to help ease parents’ high child-care costs.
Five years later, 3-K for 3-year-olds aimed to do the same.
Now, with the crisis persisting, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani last month announced plans to expand those programs further with free child care for all 2-year-olds by 2030, with the rollout beginning this year.
Parents were excited.
Parents were lied to.
It’s not going to happen — because building on the existing system is a recipe for disaster.
The city’s cramped public schools lack the space to house its current preschool programs, and mandatory class-size caps mean they’ll soon have even fewer classrooms available for younger children.
That’s why 60% of today’s enrolled tots attend pre-K and 3-K classes run by Community Based Organizations.
The program for 2-year-olds would have to piggyback on the CBO system — and that system is already stretched to the breaking point.
“When you expand programs without stabilizing the ones already in place,” special-education expert Joy Farina Foskett told me, “you’re asking programs to fail.”
The biggest issue is a critical teacher shortage, driven largely by disparities in teacher pay.
The starting salary for a new public-school teacher with a bachelor’s degree and no experience is $71,314 — while a new teacher in a CBO can earn as little as $34,991 to start, the city comptroller’s office reported.
That drives high teacher turnover, which is extraordinarily harmful to the youngest children.
For little ones, “stable relationships with caregivers are foundational to learning, emotional regulation and a sense of safety,” Foskett said.
“High teacher turnover is not just a workforce issue; it is a child development issue.”
The caregiver revolving door “has real measurable consequences, such as disrupted attachments,” agreed Lori Cangiolose of Staten Island’s The Playgroup Experience.
“Stability is fundamental at this age, and turnover disturbs that,” she said. “Families have to repeatedly build relationships and trust with new teachers.”
Another major issue: Expanding the city’s child-care system will mean enrolling more preschoolers with special needs.
Already, said Foskett, “CBOs are increasingly serving children who require inclusive, developmentally responsive support, yet often go without sufficient staffing [or] specialized services.”
“We had one child who would throw materials, push furniture and scream,” recalled Rebecca Schneider-Kaplan of The Children’s Center in Staten Island. “The other students were very upset when this would happen.”
In the class of 18 3-year-olds, led by a team of one teacher and one assistant, “we didn’t have enough teachers to manage the situation,” she confessed.
“We are very concerned that in case of an emergency, it would be difficult to manage that many children with just two people.”
Another concern in an emergency situation is the lack of on-site security.
“Most CBOs do not have security of any kind, and none of them have school safety agents,” said Chloe Pashman, a school director in The Bronx.
“We’ve had a parent mugged in broad daylight in front of the school while he was holding his pre-K child, strange people hanging around the playground attached to our school, and people physically fighting out front,” she said.
On top of all these issues, Hochul’s bare-bones 2Care proposal suggests that the expansion would rely in large part on family child-care providers who already run day-care businesses from their homes.
When the city launched universal pre-K and 3-K, private preschools were “forced to join the city’s program or [would] be forced to close our doors,” one director told me in confidence.
But “the funding and support have never matched expectations placed on programs, educators and owners.”
Will that be true for the city’s thousands of small family providers as well — and will they too be subject to bargain-basement wages and deficient security?
Pashman thinks that’s exactly what would happen.
“Most of our staff is not white, and the majority are women,” she noted. “The city has gotten away with loading 3-K and pre-K on the backs of these women — why wouldn’t they try it with 2-year-olds? It’s a great deal for them. They get us all on the cheap.”
It’s easy to see why parents are excited by the Hochul-Mamdani promise of free child care in a city with a sky-high cost of living.
But as a working parent myself, I can’t stomach the thought of that benefit coming at such a price.
“Against this backdrop, proposals to expand programming such as 2-K or infant and toddler care raise serious concerns,” Foskett said. “Expansion without reform risks weakening the very system NYC depends on.”
Reform must come first.
Alina Adams is the author of “Getting into NYC Kindergarten” and the producer of NYCSchoolSecrets.com.
