To Strengthen the Economy, Integrate Child Care and Education
Child care is the topic du jour across the country and across the political spectrum—and for good reason. It is critical to our economy and economic mobility, yet in New York, high-quality, affordable options remain out of reach for far too many families.
Families are central to social and economic development, but parents can’t be present and productive at work if they can’t find reliable care. Employers can’t retain workers who are forced to choose between a paycheck and their children. And children fall behind before kindergarten even begins when early learning is fragmented or unavailable.
For too long, child care has been framed as a private luxury rather than essential public infrastructure.
In our new report, It Takes a Village: Opening Doors to Child Care Through Seamless Integration with the Education System, we examine why child care continues to fail working families despite historic investments and add our voices to the growing momentum created by recent proposal from the Governor and the Mayor of New York City to expand child care capacity.
New York State already invests billions in child care annually and, yet, it remains scarce and expensive. Roughly 60 percent of census tracts statewide qualify as child care deserts, meaning there simply aren’t enough licensed seats for the number of young children who live there. The average cost of child care now significantly exceeds in-state tuition and mandatory fees at both SUNY and CUNY, putting basic care further out of reach than higher education. Staffing shortages mean thousands of licensed slots exist on paper but can’t be used in practice. Parents of infants and toddlers — the very families who most need care in order to work — must navigate a fragmented maze of providers, waitlists, and regulations.
Research consistently shows that access to affordable, high-quality child care increases labor force participation, particularly for women, boosts family income, and strengthens local economies. At the same time, high-quality early education improves school readiness, long-term educational attainment, and lifetime earnings. Early education and economic mobility are inseparable — yet too often our systems treat them as unrelated.
Our report argues for a structural solution by co-locating child care, early intervention, and expanded early education inside public schools.
New York already understands part of this equation. Universal pre-K and 3-K dramatically expanded early education access, and the Governor and Mayor’s recent 2-K announcement will build on that progress. But child care for younger children remains disconnected from the education system, forcing families to juggle multiple providers, locations, and schedules. Providers struggle under high costs and thin margins. The system bends, but it never quite holds.
Co-location changes that. Public schools already have space, utilities, security, and community trust. Across the state — including in many parts of New York City — hundreds of school buildings operate below capacity. Integrating child care into these facilities allows New York to expand supply faster and more affordably than building stand-alone centers from scratch. Shared infrastructure lowers start-up and operating costs, making high-quality care more viable in high-need communities.
For families, co-location simplifies daily life: fewer drop-offs, fewer applications, smoother transitions as children move from child care to pre-K to kindergarten. For children, it means stronger alignment between early learning and what’s expected once formal schooling begins. Kindergarten readiness becomes intentional, not accidental.
Co-location also helps address one of the system’s most persistent barriers—workforce shortages. Integrated, school-based models allow for shared staffing supports, coordinated professional development, and clearer career pathways for learning professionals to move from child care into the broader education workforce. When early educators can see a future in the field, programs stabilize and quality improves.
Just as important, co-location makes smarter use of public dollars. Sharing space, administrative services, and staffing supports reduces duplication while maintaining safety and quality standards by sharing the expertise of nonprofits and education institutions. At a time when affordability pressures hit families and governments alike, that efficiency matters.
We outline concrete steps New York can take to scale this approach. This includes explicitly authorizing the use of school facilities for child care; allowing education, health, and human services funding to be braided together in co-located settings and integrating child care into the state’s education accountability framework so early learning is recognized as the first link in the educational pipeline.
Beyond co-location, New York must modernize and align child care regulations to expand capacity faster while maintaining safety and quality. Providers now face a confusing patchwork of state and local rules governing facilities, inspections, hours, and staff clearances—delays that discourage expansion, especially in high-need communities. Streamlining approvals, aligning building and safety standards, modernizing hours-of-operation rules to match real work schedules, and eliminating duplicative background checks would bring licensed seats online faster and allow programs to operate at full capacity. These reforms don’t lower standards; they remove unnecessary barriers that keep families from accessing care that already meets health and safety requirements.
None of this works without a stable, qualified workforce. Staffing shortages persist because child care jobs are underpaid and offer few clear career pathways. New York should align compensation, credentials, apprenticeships, and higher-education pathways—particularly through SUNY and CUNY—to treat early educators as part of a unified profession.
Integrating child care into the state’s P–20 education framework would further recognize early learning as the first link in the education pipeline, allowing policymakers to track access, quality, and outcomes from birth through adulthood. Together, these steps move child care from a fragmented service into a coherent system that supports families, strengthens the workforce, and improves long-term educational and economic outcomes.
New York has made child care a policy priority. The next step is making it a system priority.
Economic mobility doesn’t begin with a job offer. It begins with the ability to show up at work and to be focused on work — and to have future generations cared for and prepared to enter school ready to learn. If New York is serious about strengthening its workforce and expanding opportunity, child care can’t live on the margins. It belongs at the very start of opportunity, in our schools.
Jim Malatras, Ph.D., is the Director of the Community Impact Policy Institute as well as the Chief Strategy Officer and Senior Vice President of Education at Fedcap. Dr. Malatras previously served as the Chancellor of the State University of New York, Director of New York State Operations, President of Empire State College, and the Chairman of the New York State Reimagine Education Advisory Council.
Jay K. Varma, MD, is a Senior Health Fellow at the Community Impact Policy Institute as well as Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President for Health at Fedcap. An expert on the prevention and control of diseases, Dr. Varma has led epidemic responses, developed global and national policies, and led large-scale programs that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the US, Asia, and Africa.
Bill Nichols is a Senior Fellow at the Community Impact Policy Institute and Editor of Fedcap’s Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, the nation’s leading nonpartisan source for news and analysis in the poverty and opportunity space. A veteran journalist and editor, Nichols was the founding managing editor at Politico and a former White House and State Department correspondent at USA Today.
