Tuesday, October 17, 2023
Chair Lewis, Chair Garlick, and Members of the Joint Committee on Education:
My name is Jonathan Cohn, and I am the policy director at Progressive Massachusetts. We are a statewide, multi-issue, grassroots membership organization focused on fighting for policy that would make our Commonwealth more equitable, just, sustainable, and democratic.
We urge you to give a favorable report to S.301 and H.489: An Act providing affordable and accessible high-quality early education and care to promote child development and well-being and support the economy in the Commonwealth (“Common Start”).
Massachusetts comes in #1 in various state rankings, and we have much to be proud of. But one #1 in which we should not take pride is that we have the most expensive child care in the country.
The $20,913 average annual cost of infant care in Massachusetts is more than half of what a full-time minimum wage worker earns in a year, and more expensive than tuition at our public colleges and universities. These costs are prohibitively expensive for low- and middle-income families, who are forced to choose between making ends meet and saving for the future on one hand, or affording child care on the other. With such high costs for just one child, families with multiple children are put in especially dire financial straits.
The system is also not working for early childhood educators, who often don’t receive a living wage, and child care providers, who face high operational costs and unstable funding. And when early childhood educators leave the field or providers close, that makes the system even less affordable and less accessible. We need a multi-faceted solution for a multi-faceted problem.
High-quality early education programs get results. Children benefit with enhanced resiliency and employment opportunities over their lifetimes. Providing children with high-quality early education and child care is one of the most effective ways to further a child’s success in grades K-12 and beyond—and that pays off in the long run.
The Common Start bills would strengthen our commonwealth’s child care and early education infrastructure. They would provide stable funding for providers, ensuring greater access for families and supporting higher pay for educators. They would increase financial assistance to families offset the exorbitant costs of child care and early education. In that regard, we would underscore the importance of a framework as offered in the Senate bill, which fully covers the cost of child care for the lowest-income families and caps the cost of child care at 7% of total income for working- and middle-class families.
These bills also include measures to incentivize the provision of care during nonstandard hours, build cultural competency training into the workforce development system, and better provide accommodations for students with disabilities.
We were glad to hear Governor Healey, Senate President Karen Spilka, and Speaker Ron Mariano all underscore the importance of taking action on these issues in their opening speeches at the start of this legislative session. We urge you to take swift action to report out these bills so that can become a reality.
