National Women's Law Center

For Immediate Release: Tuesday, May 16, 2000
Contact: 202-588-5180

MILITARY PROVIDES MODEL FOR CHILD CARE REFORMS, NEW NWLC REPORT CONCLUDES

At a time when child care around the country is woefully inadequate, the U.S. military has achieved a remarkable transformation of its child care system and its experience provides important lessons for policy makers, child care providers and parents concerned about improving child care everywhere. These are the major findings of the National Women's Law Center's new report, Be All That We Can Be: Lessons from the Military for Improving Our Nation's Child Care System, which was released today and presented to Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen at a news conference at the Pentagon.

"If the U.S. military can do an about-face and dramatically improve its child care system in a relatively short period of time, there is great hope for improving child care across the United States. The lessons learned from this example should be applied to expand access to high quality, affordable child care for everyone," said Nancy Duff Campbell, NWLC Co-President.

Secretary Cohen said, "Quality military child care is essential for the readiness of our Armed Forces. America's military is the best in the world not just because of our technology, training and tactics but, above all, because we recruit and retain the best men and women the country has to offer. The military runs what is essentially the largest employer-sponsored child care program in the country, serving over 200,000 children per day in over 300 locations."

NWLC's report describes the deficiencies in military child care before the reforms; the specific steps that the military used to turn its system around; and, most importantly, a series of lessons learned showing how the military's experience can be applied more broadly to improve civilian child care.

With the advent of the All Volunteer Force in 1973, the military experienced significant demographic changes that had a direct impact on the demand for child care. The Services were no longer comprised mainly of single men, but increasingly of career-oriented men and women with children. But the military child care system did not meet the needs of these families. It was plagued by many of the deficiencies that are familiar to civilian parents today - poor quality care, a lack of standards addressing issues such as maximum group size and educational activities, high staff turnover due to low salaries and poor working conditions, long waiting lists for available slots, and unaffordable parent fees. Prodded by Congressional hearings and the enactment of the Military Child Care Act of 1989, the Department of Defense now runs a military child care system that is a model for the nation.

"The concerns that made investing in child care for the military a high priority - a desire for a stable workforce and for healthy child development - apply equally outside the military. We need the same commitment to get results in every state and for every child," said Campbell.

Be All That We Can Be provides six key lessons from the military for state and federal policy makers:

Lesson 1: Do Not Be Daunted by the Task: It is Possible to Take a Woefully Inadequate Child Care System and Dramatically Improve It.

The military consciously set out to, and did, build a system that links centers, family child care homes, before- and after-school programs, and resource and referral services to assist parents in finding care through a single point of entry.
No state has such a systemic approach, whose adoption would dramatically improve child care across the country.

Lesson 2: Recognize and Acknowledge the Seriousness of the Child Care Problem and the Consequences of Inaction.

Policy makers in Congress and in DoD acted to improve military child care because they recognized the harsh consequences of poor child care on military readiness and child welfare.
With some exceptions, policy makers at the state and federal levels have not made the same commitment to improving civilian child care, despite the similar threat to workforce performance and the healthy development and learning of children.
It is essential that policy makers recognize these connections and consequences and take action.

Lesson 3: Improve Quality by Establishing and Enforcing Comprehensive Standards, Assisting Providers in Becoming Accredited, and Enhancing Provider Compensation and Training.

Develop Comprehensive, Uniform Standards, and Ensure That They Are Met Through a System of Unannounced Inspections and Sanctions for Violations.
- Basic standards - encompassing health and safety, staff/child ratios, staff training, and other matters - have been established and rigorously enforced in all forms of military child care. For example, the military requires and conducts four unannounced inspections of its child care centers and family child care homes per year, and installation commanders are routinely briefed and held accountable for inspection results at their bases.
- On the civilian side, state standards vary considerably and some programs are exempt from any protections. No state requires four annual unannounced inspections of child care centers and fourteen states require visits to family child care homes only once every five years.
- States could significantly increase the quality of care by measuring state standards against those established by outside experts, strengthening them, and applying them to a wider range of care, as well as by adopting the military's model of a rigorous, unannounced inspection program with meaningful, well-publicized sanctions for non-compliance.
Assist Providers in Meeting Additional Voluntary Standards, Such as Those Necessary for Outside Accreditation.
- The military has provided the resources to help its child care centers meet the high national accreditation standards of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, addressing such concerns as staff/child interactions and developmental activities. Ninety-five percent of military child care centers are accredited by NAEYC, compared with just 8 percent of civilian child care centers nationwide.
- Following the military's lead, states should encourage child care providers, through grants or other incentives, to go beyond mandatory minimum licensing requirements and to meet higher accreditation standards.
Increase Staff Compensation and Improve Staff Training, and Link Compensation Increases to the Achievement of Training Milestones.
- In military child care centers, caregivers receive systematic, ongoing training as well as compensation linked to training that is comparable to that of other individuals with similar training, seniority and experience. As a result, staff turnover has been reduced dramatically - from over 300 percent annually at some bases before the reforms to less than 30 percent today - and staff morale and professionalism have improved.
- The civilian child care workforce lacks access to training, is poorly compensated and is prone to high turnover rates that undermine the quality of care. Unlike the military, thirty-one states do not require that child care workers receive any training before they can care for children. Moreover, the average wage for a caregiver is currently $7.40 per hour in a civilian child care center and less than $5 per hour in a civilian family child care home - below the nearly $8 per hour entry-level wage for a military child care center worker, who receives a raise to $10 per hour upon the successful completion of training.
- States should use the military model to develop similar training and compensation strategies.

Lesson 4: Keep Parent Fees Affordable Through Subsidies.

Parent fees in military child care centers are subject to a sliding fee schedule based on income to ensure that personnel with the lowest incomes can afford child care; in addition, commanders provide direct subsidies to family child care homes to help keep parent fees reasonable. On average, fees for center-based military care are 25 percent lower than fees paid by civilians for comparable care, even though military families typically use center care for longer hours and for younger children (including infants) than civilian families.
In civilian care today, a patchwork of government measures assists some families in meeting their child care expenses, but not adequately. For example, the Child Care and Development Block Grant reaches only 10 percent of children eligible under federal guidelines. Moreover, experts recommend that low-income families above the poverty level should be required to pay no more than 10 percent of their income for child care, approximately what military families pay. Yet in 1999, ten states required a family of three at 150 percent of the poverty level to pay more than 10 percent of its income in child care co-payments to receive a subsidy; in an additional nine states, such a family was eligible for no child care subsidy at all.
Policy makers, at both the state and federal levels, should follow the military's example in making significant public resources available to help subsidize care for families who cannot afford to pay the full cost of good child care.

Lesson 5: Expand the Availability of All Kinds of Care by Continually Assessing Unmet Need and Taking Steps to Address It.

The military made a conscious decision to focus its initial efforts on the quality and cost of care, to some extent at the expense of expanding supply. Nevertheless, the military estimates that it is currently meeting about 58 percent of its child care need and has a plan, with specific goals and timetables, to reach 80 percent by 2005.
No state is providing subsidized, high-quality child care to anywhere near 58 percent of its families.
Both the federal government and the states should follow the military's model of continually assessing need and developing specific plans to expand child care capacity.

Lesson 6: Commit the Resources Necessary to Get the Job Done.

The military could not have achieved its successes without a substantial increase in resources. Funds appropriated for military child care have climbed dramatically in recent years, from about $90 million before the enactment of the Military Child Care Act to $352 million in FY 2000.
Although it is difficult to quantify the level of public investment in civilian child care today, it is woefully inadequate to meet the need, especially for low-income families.
Both the federal government and the states should recognize, as the military has, that increased funding for child care ultimately pays for itself in the stability of the workforce and the healthy development of children - and increase their investments dramatically.