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Expand the number of child care slots for low-income children: Making high-quality child care affordable to families reduces child poverty by enabling parents to work, and it helps prevent poverty in the long run by promoting the safe, nurturing, and stimulating environments that improve children’s development and future academic success . However, many New York families lack access to affordable, high-quality child care and the demand for subsidized child care far exceeds available supply . Fewer than 25 percent of all eligible children receive a child care subsidy due to funding restrictions .
In the CDF’s estimate, investments in child care subsidies would reduce child poverty by over 4 percent.33 This is also likely underestimating the impact, since the Supplemental Poverty Measure only captures changes in families’ out-of-pocket child care costs and not the total value of the care paid for by the subsidies . In recent years, New York only made modest additional investments to expand child care subsidies .34 Much more must be done to reach families eligible but unable to receive subsidies, and help raise the eligibility to be 200 percent poverty for every county in New York, since many are unable to serve all of these families .
2. Expanding opportunities for poor children to help them succeed and reverse the effects of poverty.
While improving the immediate economic circumstances for poor children helps lift them out of poverty in the near term and helps interrupt the cycle of poverty in the long term, other investments are also crucial to ensure that poor children can escape poverty as adults . The cradle to prison pipeline that disproportionately affects children of color must be replaced with a pipeline to college and career readiness . Children need access to affordable health care, high-quality early development and learning opportunities, after-school programming, high-performing schools and colleges, economic opportunities as young adults, and youth justice services that ensure justice-impacted young people are treated in age- appropriate ways that meet their rehabilitative needs and ensure their safety while in the system and decrease the likelihood that they will reenter the system in the future . New York State has made progress in several of these areas .
Investments in universal preschool: It is well documented that quality early care and education have the ability to eliminate disparities for disadvantaged children; their benefits include improved academic achievement, better health outcomes, and reduced need for costly social spending . Investments in quality early care and education programs provide an economic return to society at a rate of 7 to 10 percent per year .35
New York State’s recent investment in the well-being and success of young children through the expansion of its public prekindergarten programs is a positive step toward ending child poverty . In the 2015-16 school year, an expected 70,000 four-year olds will have access to high quality, full- day pre-K in New York City,36 and districts across the State have the opportunity to expand pre-K
33 CDF Report, supra note 13, at 45.
34 Id. at 21.
35 Investing in Early Childhood Development and Learning is Key to the Success of Our Children and Our Nation’s Long-Term Economic Growth, children’s defense fund (July 2014), http://www.childrensdefense.org/library/data/ early-childhood-short.pdf.
36 See Pre-K for All: 22,000 Families Apply for Pre-K on First Day, NYC (Mar. 17, 2015), http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of- the-mayor/news/174-15/pre-k-all-22-000-families-apply-pre-k-first-day#/0.
Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality