How U.S. Child Care Is Segregated: a Brooklyn Story
Seven years ago, I enrolled my baby son in that rarity of rarities: a socioeconomically diverse child care center, Hanover Place Child Care, LLC, a large for-profit enterprise in downtown Brooklyn, New York. Usually child care in the United States is rigidly segregated along class lines, but Hanover was one of a handful of the borough’s early education centers providing subsidized care for low-income families that had recently begun enrolling a new group: middle-class families who had the means to pay full-price. By the time we were there, it had become a place where a teen mom's toddler spent her days playing alongside the kid of a housing-court lawyer.
When talking about school-aged children, the benefits of mixing kids from different class backgrounds are substantial and well-documented. But for kids too young for kindergarten, the effects of economic integration are far from understood. This is largely due to lack of opportunity. In the United States, government funding for child care has almost always been reserved for the poor, with everyone else forced to seek private arrangements defined by what they can—and cannot—afford. In other words, segregation by class has been baked into the United States’s approach to child care, leaving few opportunities to explore economic integration.