A new report has determined that New York City’s 3-K for All program has generally had a positive economic impact on low-income households.
3-K for All is designed to provide access to free early childhood education in a city where, according to the Day Care Council of New York, the average cost for school-age child care is over $1000 a month.
The Early Childhood Poverty Tracker (ECPT) report, a collaborative effort between Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy and the poverty-fighting Robin Hood Foundation, determined that 3-K for All not only brought wider access to early childhood education, it also made it easier for low-income parents to find employment and to financially buttress their growing families.
The ECPT is based on a poverty tracker first launched back in 2012. Sarah Oltmans from Robin Hood explained that the official poverty measures that looked at fluctuations in food costs as the main way to gage poverty had proved to be inadequate and outdated. “As any New Yorker knows, housing is probably a much bigger expense for people and childcare is, I think, the No. 2 expense for most households,” she said.
“We wanted to create a better picture of poverty in New York and go beyond just looking at a simple measure of income. So, the poverty tracker also takes into account what we call material hardships that look at things like is a family running out of food by the end of the month? Are they living in unstable housing? Is their electricity being shut off because they can’t pay their bills? And we also look at health as well, so it allows us to have a much more robust picture of what people are actually experiencing… it allows us to have a much more dynamic picture and better understanding of how poverty and hardship plays out in people’s lives.”
The ECPT surveyed 1,576 parents who had children under the age of three as they began enrolling in New York City’s universal pre-kindergarten program for three-year-olds. When 3-K for All was initially rolled out in 2017 under Mayor Bill de Blasio, it highlighted the fact that it was offering free pre-kindergarten education to kids in the city’s highest-need districts. Families in the South Bronx, Brownsville, East New York, and Ocean Hill were some of the first to enroll in 3-K for All. By 2019, the program had expanded to areas like East and Central Harlem, Morningside Heights, Inwood, Washington Heights, East New York, Bedford Stuyvesant, Weeksville, Cypress Hills, Mariners Harbor, Saint George, Bloomfield, and New Dorp, among many others.
Eunho Cha, a Columbia University doctoral student who was looking at the data, suggested the creation of a study to look at how the 3-K for All rollout was affecting the labor force participation of mothers and the demographics of who these mothers were. Cha told the AmNews, “We put together demographic information by the school districts and compared them with those 12 districts where earlier 3-K programs were rolled out in earlier phases. [In] these districts, on average, the proportion of Hispanic and Black populations was higher compared to those districts who got the 3-K available in later phases. ….The average percentage of Hispanic groups was 37% whereas the percentage of non-3-K districts was 21%. For the Black population it was 35% for 3-K districts; whereas it was 25% for non-3-K districts.”
Columbia University Professor Jane Waldfogel noted that the ECPT report focused on interviewing the same families three or four times a year between 2017 and 2021. The ECPT report notes that “[W]hen children became age-eligible for 3-K, mothers’ labor force participation increased by 7 percentage points among those living in 3-K districts, compared with only 2 percentage points among those in non-3-K districts. This pattern suggests that the availability of 3-K helped mothers in 3-K districts to begin work or to enter the labor market and look for employment.
“Mothers’ labor force participation dropped after the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Nonetheless, throughout 2020 and the first half of 2021, labor force participation remained higher among mothers in 3-K districts than in non-3-K districts, suggesting that the impact of the higher availability of 3-K for mothers continued after children aged out of 3-K eligibility.”
Freeing up the burden of childcare gave lower income families the opportunity to strengthen their financial resources. New York City’s 3-K for All helps with the academic and developmental preparation of young children and can serve to impact a family’s financial well-being.
And it’s something Prof. Waldfogel points out has not been a one-shot deal: “It’s not just the impact of 3-K while the children are in 3-K; it seems to last and persevere post 3-K. So, whether it’s that moms are able to get into work and then stay in, or whether they then have more work experience and so they are more successful with employers, it looks like it’s not just a temporary phenomenon––it’s lasting. And, you know, we’ve been able to follow these families a couple years post 3-K and it looks like it’s persisting.”