A recent Center for American Progress and National Association for the Education of Young Children report highlights the child care licensing landscape, details a number of state-level deregulatory proposals that would relax safety standards, and provides recommendations for state policymakers to consider when looking for strategies to reform the licensing system without endangering children’s health and safety.
As families across the country grapple with high child care costs and limited program options, an increasing number of states, in a misguided effort to boost supply, have proposed relaxing child-teacher ratios, increasing classroom group sizes, and reducing educator qualifications. Increasing access to high-quality, affordable child care must be a priority at all levels of government, but harmful deregulation is not the solution to the child care crisis. Loosening critical health and safety regulations—such as increasing the number of children each caregiver is responsible for—would create dangerous conditions for children, reduce quality, and ultimately decrease supply through increased educator burnout and costs for child care programs. Instead, state policymakers should look for opportunities to right-size child care regulations and reduce administrative burdens that are not directly tied to child health, safety, and quality learning.
Supportive child care regulations are essential to protecting child safety and child care quality
Professional licensing processes and regulations across a range of professions are a critical and widely accepted part of protecting public safety and ensuring that workers are not overburdened to the point that they cannot safely do their jobs. Child care should be no exception. Regulations such as maximum child-teacher ratios and group sizes help ensure that children have the supervision and individualized attention needed to keep them safe and engaged in learning, promoting their development and helping set the stage for their future success. Requirements for staff qualifications and professional development recognize and promote the knowledge, skills, and competencies needed to provide high-quality early education. Rolling back these critical regulations reduces quality, increases strain on early educators, and presents safety risks for children—including injury or even death.
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Instead of reducing critical guardrails for safety and quality, policymakers should:
- Identify and ease unnecessary regulatory burdens that are not tied to health and safety, including by making licensing standards and supports easier to understand and access. States can also embed licensing standards in their Quality Rating and Improvement Systems and address restrictive zoning laws that often make it difficult for home-based providers to open and run a child care business.
- Align licensing and regulatory standards to evidence-based markers of quality and safety, including by collaborating with local child care providers across setting types to ensure that licensing standards are supportive and meet the needs of children and educators.
- Improve processes for child care providers to become licensed, including by waiving fees; providing individualized assistance and financial support to help potential providers navigate the licensing process or launch or expand their child care program; targeting outreach to areas with low child care supply and historically marginalized populations; and revising licensing processes based on provider feedback.
- Improve coordination of services by consolidating early childhood program administration, such as through a dedicated state agency focused on early childhood programs and services including child care licensing, subsidy administration, and state preschool programming.
- Make the crucial public investments needed to build supply. Without sufficient public investment to offset the gap between what families can afford and what it costs providers to offer high-quality child care, the child care sector will continue to be plagued by high costs and shortages. Policymakers at both the state and federal levels must make robust, sustained investments to support a pipeline of qualified and fairly compensated early educators, offset high startup and facilities costs to help increase supply, and bring down costs for families.