logo
    • Magazine
    • Membership
    • Donate
  • Racial Justice
  • Economic Justice
    • Collections
  • Climate Justice
  • Health Justice
  • Leadership
  • CONTENT TYPES
  • Subscribe
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Complimentary Webinars
    • Premium On-Demand Webinars
  • Membership
  • Submissions

An Interview with Eric Karolak

The Editors and Eric Karolak
June 21, 2009
Share
Tweet
Share
Email
Print

Editor’s note: To determine whether there were indeed negative trends in enrollment of self-paying parents for child-care programs, the Nonprofit Quarterly interviewed Eric Karolak, the executive director of the Early Care and Education Consortium, an alliance of the nation’s leading child-care and early-learning providers. Karolak confirmed the trend on a national basis. With all the discussion of reductions in charitable dollars and government dollars, little attention has been given to fees paid by the users of services, though this constitutes a hefty proportion of the nonprofit economy. We will follow this issue carefully as we continue to report on nonprofits’ well-being during this project.

As the executive director of a child-care network, Eric Karolak is active in national advocacy for early-education programs. Having sensed shifts in the child-care community, NPQ asked how these developments might put some child-care programs at risk.

It’s problematic to collect information about a practice community that is so diverse and diffuse and that includes small home-based day-care and large center-based programs as well as a mix of nonprofit and for-profit players, some with strong national brands. “The metrics in our field are not the greatest,” Karolak observes.

[These national metrics are] pretty poor; and that’s compounded by the fact that, like politics, all child care is local. Each locality is experiencing a different mix of factors on a different mix of child-care facilities. So it’s very difficult to talk about this quantitatively in either a broad-brush manner or a way that will necessarily resonate with everyone. The public-transit industry can tell you how its ridership changes month to month, but we don’t have anything comparable in child care. Still, there are clear indications of the effects of the recession on child-care programs. Quite simply, in many neighborhoods and communities, as employers cut back the hours that they employ people or [they] lay off parents, [and] that is affecting child-care demand.

Self-paying parents are the ones first affected, says Karolak, confirming other anecdotal reports. “They may have their hours reduced, one parent may be laid off, or they may just be more worried about those possibilities, so they tighten their belts. Some of the stories that we have collected and shared online are rather dramatic: for instance, parents having to choose one child over another in terms of who can access care and what kind of care. It’s an enormously difficult spot for many working parents.”

Of course, many facilities feature a mix of private-­paying parents and those receiving child-care assistance, a combination that makes the whole enterprise work. So what happens to private-paying families can affect the level of quality all receive or affect availability of the program altogether. Karolak projects a likely second wave of enrollment declines for families that receive state and federal support for access to child care. “As state budgets are affected by declining tax revenue, there’s a tightening of state budgets,” he says. “There are at least 48 state budgets with enormous gaps that we know are only going to increase. It’s likely to get worse before it gets better, because typically state budgets lag behind the national economy.”

This situation, warns Karolak, may have a decimating effect on access to quality programs.

Sign up for our free newsletters

Subscribe to NPQ's newsletters to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.

In Ohio, for instance, there is a wonderful program—the Early Learning Initiative, or ELI—that provides full-day, full-year early-education programming that meets the needs of working families. This is a program with high standards that produces consistently higher scores on kindergarten readiness assessments, higher outputs in terms of what children are capable of doing as they arrive at the schoolhouse. Facing a $3.2 billion budget gap, Governor Ted Strickland recommended eliminating ELI, which enrolls 12,000 children annually. Providers and other advocates mounted a strong grassroots lobbying campaign and were able to save ELI from elimination. This means that thousands of children will lose this vital path out of poverty.

It’s illustrative of the kind of difficult decisions that states across the country are facing and, to my mind, the wrong decisions they are making given the range of choices that will have long-term impacts not only for the child heading to school in the next year or two, but down the road as well.

Karolak says that in this downturn, the early-childhood field is at a defining moment. It comes after years of stagnant government funding, and Karolak urges his colleagues to act.

The stimulus bill that was passed in February 2009 included a total of $5 billion for various early-education programs, including Head Start, and that was a huge important step. But after about seven years of nearly flat funding, the problem is that the baseline is really off. In the president’s FY2010 budget proposal, there is no additional money for child care.

We need to face facts and say this isn’t good enough. We need to not just tread water but to go beyond the emergency stopgap funding in the recovery act and build those increases into the baseline funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant. We’ve had downturns before; they’ve come and gone. This community needs to exert strong leadership that knows the value of advocacy and doesn’t sit and wait for things to happen but seeks to influence the landscape that we’ll all be presented with six and 12 months down the road.

To comment on this article, write to us at [email protected] Order reprints from http://store.nonprofit­?quarterly.org using code 160203.

Share
Tweet
Share
Email
Print

Become a member

Support independent journalism and knowledge creation for civil society. Become a member of Nonprofit Quarterly.

Members receive unlimited access to our archived and upcoming digital content. NPQ is the leading journal in the nonprofit sector written by social change experts. Gain access to our exclusive library of online courses led by thought leaders and educators providing contextualized information to help nonprofit practitioners make sense of changing conditions and improve infra-structure in their organizations.

Join Today
logo logo logo logo logo
See comments

Spring-2023-sidebar-subscribe
You might also like
Hierarchy and Justice
Cyndi Suarez
Salvadoran Foreign Agent Law Threatens Human Rights Movements
Devon Kearney
Charitable Tax Reform: Why Half Measures Won’t Curb Plutocracy
Alan Davis
Healing-Centered Leadership: A Path to Transformation
Shawn A. Ginwright
Into the Fire: Lessons from Movement Conflicts
Ingrid Benedict, Weyam Ghadbian and Jovida Ross
How Nonprofits Can Truly Advance Change
Hildy Gottlieb

NPQ Webinars

April 27th, 2 pm ET

Liberatory Decision-Making

How to Facilitate and Engage in Healthy Decision-making Processes

Register Now
You might also like
Hierarchy and Justice
Cyndi Suarez
Salvadoran Foreign Agent Law Threatens Human Rights...
Devon Kearney
Charitable Tax Reform: Why Half Measures Won’t Curb...
Alan Davis

Like what you see?

Subscribe to the NPQ newsletter to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

See our newsletters

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.

NPQ-Spring-2023-cover

Independent & in your mailbox.

Subscribe today and get a full year of NPQ for just $59.

subscribe
  • About
  • Contact
  • Advertise
  • Copyright
  • Careers

We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

 

Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly
Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.