Testimony of Jeremy A. Hoffman, Director of Child Care Policy, before the City Council Committees on General Welfare and Women's Issues

Good afternoon, Chairwoman Palma, Chairwoman Ferreras and members of these two distinguished committees. My name is Jeremy Hoffman and I am the director of child care policy at United Federation of Teachers. On behalf of our union’s more than 200,000 members, including more than 20,000 home-based family child care providers, I want to thank you for this opportunity to offer testimony on implementation of Early Learn NYC, Mayor Bloomberg’s redesign of the city’s contracted subsidized child care and early childhood education system that went into effect last October.

As you know, the UFT’s members include New York City’s public school teachers, paraprofessionals, guidance counselors, psychologists, secretaries and many other school staffers, all of whom play a critical role in educating our students. As such, we are a union that is deeply invested in closing the achievement gap and attaining educational equity for all students.

Our union began organizing New York City’s home-based family child care providers in 2005 because we saw these workers as early childhood educators who play a critical role in laying the foundation for later learning and closing the achievement gap. These hard-working early childhood educators today remain grossly underpaid and until recently did not have full access to professional development opportunities and support, which only began to occur when we, their union, began to provide those services.

Our union wants — and New Yorkers demand — a child care system that meets the needs of working families, increases school readiness and appropriately invests in the early education workforce.

First and foremost, I would like to thank the City Council for its tireless advocacy for child care access and support for working families. Thanks to the Council’s leadership last year, more than $50 million in direct child care subsidies for low-income New Yorkers was restored to the city’s budget, and more than 9,000 child care slots that Mayor Bloomberg tried to eliminate were saved. I can think of few other actions of the City Council over the last half-dozen year that have had a greater impact on low-income working families in our city.

Although it has been more than a year since Early Learn NYC took effect, we continue to have serious problems with the new system that the mayor and the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) have failed to address. We have consistently raised concerns about the Early Learn design since ACS released its initial “concept paper” and you held the City Council’s first hearing back in April 2010. Unfortunately, one year into Early Learn, our concerns have expanded from program design to include a litany of program-implementation breakdowns.

While we often refer to child care in our city as a singular “child care system,” in fact nothing could be farther from the truth. The reality is that we have a multiplicity of programs with overlapping funding streams, varying program eligibility standards and varying program requirements. The services are a veritable patchwork of programs.

The Early Learn redesign that we are discussing today is actually only a redesign of the city’s contracted system that includes many but not certainly not all child care centers in the city as well as their now aligned family child care networks. The redesign is not supposed to have an impact on care delivered to parents who have been awarded a child care subsidy and choose to use that subsidy with either a non-Early Learn center or a non-network-affiliated family child care provider.

The UFT certainly appreciates the challenges imbedded in any attempt to redesign child care in our city and the effort to combine and leverage funding to achieve greater outcomes. However, when reviewing Early Learn, we must start from a parent’s perspective. Has Early Learn helped to make child care in our city more accessible to low-income parents who are dependent on these important services to find and maintain employment?

We believe that the answer to this question is emphatically no.

The UFT is deeply troubled by reports which we continue to receive from the field about parents having trouble accessing child care subsidies or not being informed of the full array of child care options available to them. In addition, Early Learn requires children to leave the home-based family child care setting when they turn four-years-old and instead enroll in a child care center. We question whether such a program is fully allowing parents to make decisions about the type of care that best meets the needs of their child and family.

We are also concerned about the numerous Early Learn program implementation problems that have had a disastrous impact on the home-based child care providers that we represent. As you know, as a result of the Early Learn Requests for Proposals (RFP), the number of city-contracted family child care networks went from nearly 60 down to roughly 25, half of which had previously never operated a family child care network and some of which had scant experience in child care at all.

It’s worth noting that the total number of family child care slots — system capacity — was actually only maintained as a direct result of budget restorations of this City Council. In fact, if it were not for this Council, then the entire borough of Staten Island would no longer have a family child care network since the city failed to award a single family child care network contract to that borough. For the second year in a row, the City Council has designated important funding to Seaman’s Society so that families in Staten Island can continue to access family child care services. Thank you for doing so.

We believe that many of the new networks simply underestimated the administrative work required to recruit providers and families, and what’s more, they were not adequately supported by ACS as they tried to get their operations off the ground. For instance, after the Early Learn contracts were awarded, there where roughly 1,750 UFT family child care providers who found themselves affiliated with city-contracted networks that no longer had a city contract. The city initially played a very limited role in connecting these providers and the families they serve to new networks, forcing the UFT to step in and hold a series of “Network Fairs” to help facilitate this transition. While we did this, the city suspended the requirement for some networks that they only enroll children from the specified zip codes for which they were awarded slots. Similarly, the city allowed some networks to provide care for children over age 4.

Compounding matters, Early Learn was implemented before the city had fully executed contracts in place with the family child care networks. As you know, the city cannot actually disperse funds until a fully executed contract is in place. This means that a number of networks did not initially even have sufficient funds to pay providers who were already providing care.

To this day, we do not know how many children successfully made the transition to a new network and how many families simply lost their child care. Ever since Early Learn was put in place, the city stopped sharing critical enrollment data with any regularity. Before Early Learn, the city regularly produced the “Child Care Snapshot” which among other data broke down enrollment by age of child and type of provider. We believe that ever since Early Learn was implemented, the city has only produced this document once and the city never shared it with us.

So one year later, where are we?

We continue to be concerned that some networks pay their providers less then the state- established market rate percentile, which by federal law is the amount that home-based family child care providers who provide care to subsidized families should be paid.

We continue to be concerned that networks charge an administrative fee to family child care providers, a fee that takes money out of their already too-low pay.

We are also concerned that some networks do not fully disclose to the providers what their rate of pay is or the amount of administrative fees that they deduct from their compensation.

We do not know if networks are uniformly implementing Early Learn program requirements including serving defined zip codes or restricting care to children under age 4.

We also receive reports from the field of some networks that are attempting to make additional demands on their providers that were never explained or agreed to when they affiliated, such as the type of furniture used or their room setups.

We also receive reports from the field that some networks have forced their affiliated providers to engage in fundraising for the networks. The list goes on and on.

Thank you for allowing us this opportunity to share our thoughts and perspectives on Mayor Bloomberg’s EarlyLearn redesign of the contracted child care system. We look forward to working in partnership with you to help correct the problems embedded in EarlyLearn and to develop a system under the next administration that meets the needs of children, their families and the child care workforce.