If you live in Vermont or Tennessee and have young children, you might want to consider pursuing a new degree or additional training. Student parents in these states are just as likely to receive child care assistance as their peers who are working low-wage jobs and need help covering the cost of care. That’s not true in most states, according to a new report by the Urban Institute, a public policy research institute.
Nationally, just 13.2 percent of federal child care assistance dollars go to families who were either working and pursuing education or training (7 percent) or solely pursuing education or training (6 percent), according to the report.
Parents pursuing an education are “usually the lowest priority” both for child care assistance programs and for workforce development programs, said Gina Adams, a co-author of the report and senior fellow at the Urban Institute with a focus on early childhood issues.
The additional earning capacity that comes from having a post-secondary degree could make a big difference for a lot of families. Of the 13.7 million children living in poverty in 2016, 82 percent lived with parents who held a high school credential or less, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Research has shown that better educated parents have better educated children. But it’s difficult to both support a child and afford a return to school.
“If we’re not creating mechanisms where families trying to get ahead can do it, we’re limiting economic growth for ourselves as a country,” Adams said.
Vermont and Tennessee aren’t the only states to offer some parity for student parents. More than 20 percent of child care assistance dollars go to parent students in Virginia, Washington, Colorado, Mississippi, and the District of Columbia. On the other hand, nine states spend less than 5 percent of their child care assistance dollars on student parents.
States have their own rules about who qualifies for child care assistance, even though at least half the money distributed in most states comes directly from the federal government’s Child Care and Development Fund. Some states require parents to be working. Others have rules about which degrees parents can be working towards, what GPA they must maintain, or how long they can spend trying to earn a degree or certificate. Ten states require that student parents also hold down a job to qualify for assistance. Kansas and Oklahoma regulations even require that a child’s second parent be working before the state will help a student parent cover the cost of child care. (A chart of every state’s regulations can be found in a second Urban Institute report.)
The primary reason student parents aren’t well supported is lack of funding, Adams said. Many states aren’t able to serve all of the families who qualify for assistance under their current rules, let alone the additional families who would qualify if they opened up the restrictions.
“Until there’s enough money to actually meet the need, making improvements in this area is likely to result in trade-offs somewhere else,” Adams said.
This story about child care assistance was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.