Mamdani’s Child Care Czar on NYC’s First-of-it’s-Kind, Universal 2-K Rollout

In New York City, a family needs to make over $330,000 a year — the equivalent of 10 minimum wage jobs — to afford the average cost of child care for a single 2-year-old.

 During his successful bid for mayor, Zohran Mamdani argued these prices, which have increased 43% since 2019, are driving families out of the city.

In response, the Democratic Socialist proposed an ambitious fix: universal free child care for all kids under 5, regardless of their family’s income.

To help him execute on this largely popular, yet hugely challenging promise, he’s brought on Emmy Liss, an expert in the field who was instrumental in the rollout of universal pre-K and 3-K under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. 

Liss has spent the years since working on early childhood policy and advocacy issues, partnering with cities and counties across the country as they launched their own publicly funded programs. She’s also worked as a consultant at New America and a child care policy advisor at the 5BORO Institute.

Liss and Mamdani say they plan to strengthen existing free pre-K and 3-K programs, while also scaling to include all 2 year olds, through a program they’re calling 2-Care. The first 2,000 2-K seats are set to open this fall for families with the greatest need, followed by an additional 10,000 seats the following year. 

The first two years of the program, which the administration has promised will be fully scaled by the end of Mandami’s first term, will be funded by the state, through a $500 million investment, announced by Gov. Kathy Hochul back in January.

New York City parents can currently access free 3-K and preschool through a variety of providers, ranging from district public schools to community-based organizations and licensed home-based centers. In the 2023-24 school year, almost 44,000 students were enrolled in 3-K and just under 60,000 in pre-K.

For the initial rollout of 2-K, Liss told The 74 that the administration will focus on partnerships with community and home-based providers, the organizations and small businesses already doing this work, a number of whom faced immense difficulties under de Blasio’s rollout of universal 3-K and preschool. 

Integrating this patchwork landscape of care options will not be easy, and ultimately Liss said she’s hoping for more than just a shift in policy: she also wants a shift in ethos, in which early education is no longer seen as a privilege, but rather a public good.

“In the same way that we think about public education being available to every New Yorker, child care should be no different,” she said. 

The 74’s Amanda Geduld recently spoke with Liss to dig into the key tenets of the mayor’s plans and hear lessons learned from her last time in city government. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you paint a broad-stroked picture of some of the main goals of the proposed universal, free child care program? How quickly will you be able to scale it over the next four years?

The broad-strokes vision is exactly as you said: Our goal is to ensure that every family has access to a free, high-quality, culturally responsive early care and education setting — across a range of different settings — for their children who are under 5. We know that care has to be provided in a range of settings by caregivers who are compensated and respected and trained appropriately, and that families have options that work for them, whatever their specific needs might be. 

We see benefits to that on so many levels: It benefits children to be in high-quality early learning settings where they can learn and grow and develop, and it benefits parents and their ability to stay in the workforce. 

Obviously, the fact that we are pushing for free is a huge saving to families. That’s $20, $30, $40,000 back in their pocket on an annual basis, which changes their own economic status as a family. We see universal child care as a real mechanism to stop the out-migration of working- and middle-class families in New York City, because that’s who we see leaving the city at really an unprecedented rate. 

And then this has broader and wider economic benefits as well. New York City on an annual basis loses over $20 billion because of child care gaps. Families who leave the city, families who do not have the disposable income to spend in our economy, losses to business as they have higher turnover rates, and all of those trends we hope to see reversed with the implementation of universal child care. 

What we’ve laid out as an implementation plan and vision is that by this fall, we will launch our initial 2-K seats with about 2,000 kids, and we’ll really deliver fully on the promise of universal 3-K and pre-K. Over the course of the first term, we’ll continue to scale up the 2-K program so that we are serving all 2-year-olds whose families want to participate in this program by the end of the mayor’s first term (in 2029). And then we’ll continue to grow and scale from there, working really in partnership with the state as we do.

How will you determine where those initial 2,000 seats are? What sorts of questions will you ask families to determine where the greatest need is?

We’re looking at a couple of different factors. We’re looking at family economic need. We’re looking at unmet-need for child care for 2-year-olds — so parts of the city where we see limited supply of free or subsidized child care options for families today. 

We are also looking at where in the city we have child care providers who have the capacity and interest to begin partnering with us right away. We recognize that there are many parts of the city where there is not enough child care capacity today, and so part of our challenge and opportunity over the next couple years will be to expand capacity in those areas. 

We’ll have more news soon on where we’re headed this fall with 2-K, but those are a couple of the factors we’re thinking about. 

Mayor Mamdani has been explicit in his vision that this will truly be a universal, high-quality program. In terms of accountability, it’ll be pretty easy to determine if it’s universal. But in terms of the quality piece, what are you going to be looking at as benchmarks to make sure that each of these centers are not only available but also high quality?

This was something we thought a lot about in the early rollout of pre-K and 3-K, and I think we’ll continue to apply a lot of the same thinking here. We will look at — just as a baseline — ensuring that all of the places, centers and home-based providers we partner with demonstrate a very high standard of health and safety (and) that we know children are being cared for responsibly in those environments. 

But it’s also about making sure that the caregivers and educators are trained and able to provide a highly responsive and developmentally appropriate experience for the children in their care. In the past, we have leaned really heavily on coaching and support as a vehicle to make sure that we are supporting providers to meet those goals, and I think we’ll continue to build on a lot of that same work. 

Quality can look and feel really different from program to program, and we want to honor and respect the range of different setting types that we partner with, and the different ways that high quality early education can look. 

For us, access and quality have to go hand in hand: that as we grow access, we are continuing to invest in quality as well.

There have been debates nationally about targeted approaches to child care (that only serve the lowest-income families) versus universal ones (which serve all families). For folks who aren’t as familiar with this space or might push back on the goal here of universality, how would you respond to them? And how would you respond to those who might be skeptical of an investment this large in child care generally?

First, I would say that we’ve reached a point in New York City where child care is, frankly, not affordable for anyone. Last year, the comptroller’s office put out research suggesting a family would have to make over $300,000 to comfortably afford child care for even a single child. 

So when those are our economic realities in the city, it’s not as though we were talking about passing on a luxury good. Child care is a necessity, and when you are in a position where families earning mid-six figures can’t afford child care, let alone our most economically vulnerable families, I think that’s a real call to action for the economic imperative that we address this. 

We’re also really trying to shift the conversation here from access to early education being a privilege to something where it really is a public good. In the same way that we think about public education being available to every New Yorker, child care should be no different. 

We also recognize that when you restrict access to incredibly important programs like child care, you actually hurt the families who need it the most. When we put onerous means testing on these programs and ask families to supply months — even years — of pay stubs, ask them invasive personal questions in order to gain access to child care, it keeps families out, and it keeps out the families who need care the most. 

By stripping those barriers away, and no longer asking families to demonstrate that they deserve child care — but actually treating it as the public good we believe it should be — I think we will see participation grow from all families, and especially the families, again, who we know need these services most and are kept out when we put these barriers in place.

Mayor Mamdani has talked about making sure this serves all children, including those with disabilities. How are you thinking about including these children and addressing their specific needs?

As we think broadly about making sure that our supply of early education seats matches family demand, we have to be focused on meeting needs of children with disabilities, and then as we continue to expand to serve children who are younger and younger, making sure that we are drawing all the necessary connections between early education and early intervention; that we are equipping program leaders and teachers with the training they need to support children who may be identified as having a developmental delay or disability; and then continuing to think innovatively about the right program models to meet family need.

Another place where we’ve seen gaps historically is for really young kids living in homeless shelters or who are otherwise not in stable, consistent housing. I know that Mayor Mamdani has said that’s a real priority for him as well. Can you give one or two specific examples of how kids in those environments will be served under this program?

As we look at where to expand 2-K to first, and at areas where there is great economic need, we will look at places where we have large numbers of families with young children in shelter, and as we develop outreach plans to make sure families are finding their way into 2-K we’ll make sure that we’re partnering closely with the shelter providers and others in the community to connect those families to services. 

We recognize that for many families, government isn’t always the most trusted voice, particularly families who have gone through real challenges and have faced government systems in not always the friendliest light. So we have and will continue to look to trusted community partners, who those families may go to for support, to make sure that we can leverage them and they can help connect families to care as well.

The universal 3-K rollout under the de Blasio administration was largely regarded as a successful program, but one critique was that home-based child care providers — who are typically women of color — often felt locked out of the system. You just mentioned (some other states that) did good work to address this. Can you talk about some of the policies they implemented?

If you look back at the implementation of pre-K and then 3-K in the city, I would talk about those two things differently. There are laws and policies and regulations that exist at the state level that make it much harder to bring (home-based) providers into the city’s pre-K program. In other states, the funding structures are set in a way that makes it much more straightforward for those providers to participate in their state pre-K programs. And so I think that’s an area where we can look at other states as examples.

With 3-K, and then as we think about now the expansion of 2-K, the city has tried to take a really different approach, and is trying to make sure that our programs are inclusive of home-based providers. I think in some other parts of the country, they’ve been really thoughtful in the ways that they have done outreach to providers to make sure that they are aware of the opportunities to participate. They’ve provided business coaching and other sorts of operational and administrative support to help those providers come into their public systems. 

They’ve thought about contracting mechanisms that are responsive to providers, so thinking about ways that providers can enter into contracting agreements that don’t have to be in English necessarily, for example, recognizing that home-based providers often do speak and serve children who speak languages other than English.

I think there’s been a real investment in some other communities, and I think New York has done this in pockets, but there’s more opportunity for us to do this and just supporting these providers — these women primarily — and empowering them as business leaders and giving them resources and support so that they can continue to grow and sustain their businesses. 

And then thinking about the ways in which we can take administrative load off of their plates. These are women who are working 10-, 12-hour days, providing care to children, and then on top of that, doing all of the prep work and the cleaning and the cooking and everything. They’re one-woman operations in many cases. So to then ask them to take on an incredible contractual, administrative business load on top of that, I think just looking at all the ways in which we can simplify and streamline the process for them.

A report out of The New School looked at the economic disparities between caregivers working in these different environments and found that those running home-based programs often earn far less than the minimum wage (on average about $6 an hour) and certainly less than those running center-based programs. 

How are you planning on approaching that partnership and making sure that home-based providers are truly earning a living wage and that they can keep their doors open to keep serving families?

We recognize that there are incredibly inequitable gaps here, and that this is something providers have borne for decades and decades. For too long the work of home-based providers in particular, has gone under under recognized, underpaid, under respected, and it’s something we know we have to address, and we’re going to look at all the different options for how we can close some of these gaps.

Child care and early childhood education are obviously areas where you’ve devoted so much of your career, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what drew you to this space initially, and why this is such an important issue to you.

I’ve always been really interested in the role that government can play in actually ending child poverty, and so I started working in education policy, because I saw education as a real anti-poverty lever. I was particularly drawn to early childhood education because it’s not just about the child, but really about the whole family and how we can change the economic reality that families face. 

I was also just so privileged to work in government at the time of the expansion of 3-K and pre-K, because it gave me this very front row seat to what’s possible when government sets big goals. What we were able to deliver over the course of eight years for families — with the expansion of 3-K and pre-K — really just cemented my view about what’s possible when the public sector activates around that kind of a goal, and so I’ve been focused on it ever since. 

Then, on a personal note, as now a parent of young children, I really see the incredibly important role that child care plays in a family’s life, and I think that that motivates me as well — just thinking about my own experience and the access I’ve had, and how that allows me to come and do a job like this every day, knowing that my children are safe and nurtured and cared for and developing and growing. That’s something I want for every parent.