Carolyn Lynch, working mother of two children under the age of five, is required to work to help support her family. She is a supporter of universal child care and access to early education for all families. Her children must attend a child care facility, costing 30% of their household income, until they reach kindergarten when the children can attend the local public school, since she and her husband work. This drastically cuts into the amount of the income the family can put towards savings, utilities, and housing, leaving little money left for the family to use for extra expenses (Pao). This fact of reality is not uncommon among many working families. Carolyn has multiple friends who have had to put their children in low quality child care
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This amount is rather significant regardless of a family's yearly income, so it is absurd that mother’s are expected to be able to take off a year of work without pay and be financially stable to support a child. The argument against a mother’s lengthy maternity leave is the system of structured early education, but values across varying cultures place a lot of emphasis on the formative time spent between a mother and a child, all of which would be lost due to a mother returning to work shortly after giving birth. According to a study done by Lukas, “only 6 percent of parents thought a quality day care center was optimal” (1 Lukas). Alongside this, due to the extremely high costs of child care, it is questionable whether or not the system is even viable. In Germany, the costs are subsidized, leaving the parents with only a fraction of the costs, but the taxpayer is burdened with the costs instead. There have been pushes for an American system change to act similarly to the system of subsidies, but even then, the bill must be paid by someone and unfortunately estimates of cost for a year of daycare for an infant is nearly fifteen thousand dollars (1 …show more content…
The development of a universal early child care program will allow for a cohesive education system all over the nation. The EngageNY program, that Opfer has studied, has proven that there is a simple way to universalize the classroom lessons for each grade level. This program, developed by New York State in 2011, is, “a free online trove of sequenced units and classroom lessons at each grade level… [to help] address state standards for mathematics and English language arts” (Kaufman, Julia). This is just one example of an easy solution to decreasing the number of students in dire need of catching up, thus, closing the education gap. Opfer has also found many benefits from better child care through her research. These benefits include but are not limited to a 23 percent increase in income, a better developed vocabulary and language skills, better nutrition, less arrest, and less special education services and repeated grades. These benefits go beyond the child and benefit society as well. Children who are better educated are more likely to be thriving citizens and create positive impacts on
This amount is rather significant regardless of a family's yearly income, so it is absurd that mother’s are expected to be able to take off a year of work without pay and be financially stable to support a child. The argument against a mother’s lengthy maternity leave is the system of structured early education, but values across varying cultures place a lot of emphasis on the formative time spent between a mother and a child, all of which would be lost due to a mother returning to work shortly after giving birth. According to a study done by Lukas, “only 6 percent of parents thought a quality day care center was optimal” (1 Lukas). Alongside this, due to the extremely high costs of child care, it is questionable whether or not the system is even viable. In Germany, the costs are subsidized, leaving the parents with only a fraction of the costs, but the taxpayer is burdened with the costs instead. There have been pushes for an American system change to act similarly to the system of subsidies, but even then, the bill must be paid by someone and unfortunately estimates of cost for a year of daycare for an infant is nearly fifteen thousand dollars (1 …show more content…
The development of a universal early child care program will allow for a cohesive education system all over the nation. The EngageNY program, that Opfer has studied, has proven that there is a simple way to universalize the classroom lessons for each grade level. This program, developed by New York State in 2011, is, “a free online trove of sequenced units and classroom lessons at each grade level… [to help] address state standards for mathematics and English language arts” (Kaufman, Julia). This is just one example of an easy solution to decreasing the number of students in dire need of catching up, thus, closing the education gap. Opfer has also found many benefits from better child care through her research. These benefits include but are not limited to a 23 percent increase in income, a better developed vocabulary and language skills, better nutrition, less arrest, and less special education services and repeated grades. These benefits go beyond the child and benefit society as well. Children who are better educated are more likely to be thriving citizens and create positive impacts on