Testimony submitted to the City Council Committee on Education

On behalf of UFT members and our union president, Michael Mulgrew, we appreciate the opportunity to submit testimony on this critical issue.

The UFT has long been a strong supporter of efforts to establish high-quality universal prekindergarten services for New York City families. We have been pleased to see the expansion of opportunities for affordable and high-quality formal prekindergarten instruction for children in recent years, and we know the difference in the learning trajectory for children who enter kindergarten with the benefit of a pre-K experience. Providing families with access to high-quality early childhood learning experiences is among the most important things we can do to help prepare young children, especially those living in low-income communities, for school and beyond.

As President Mulgrew said during the launch of the city’s Universal Pre-K (UPK) program in 2014, in order for early childhood education to fully serve the needs of New York City families, it must have three essential components:

1. high-quality teachers with the training to provide children with the right mix of academics and school skills;
2. a substantive curriculum written expressly to provide what the best research and experience tells us young children need;
3. long-term financial support, since the unfortunate history is that for too many programs, funding is provided, then political priorities change and the money dries up. Providers and districts cannot create quality programs if next year's funding is always in doubt.

Unfortunately, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the current administration’s actions around early childhood education have led to concerns from our members and from New York City families that the progress we have made is at risk. We urge the City Council to pay particular attention to troubling shifts in several specific areas: enrollment drops and loss of staffing in the city’s successful 3K programs (designed for 3-year-olds) and pre-K programs, including recent cuts to early childhood literacy coaches and social workers; lack of services for early childhood students with disabilities and those who are English language learners; and lack of consistent, timely and adequate funding for early childhood programs. Related problems include salary parity concerns between different programs and payment delays to child care providers.

Since the launch of the UPK program in 2014, the number of seats for the city’s 4-year-olds grew from 19,000 to a high of nearly 70,000 before the pandemic, and the program has earned praise from researchers and families for quality, affordability and impact. Despite this success, we are concerned that the current administration is not committed to sustaining and expanding this essential program. Recent evidence of enrollment dips in early childhood grades should be a wake-up call for the city, indicating a need for greater attention to this area and recruitment of families for these services that are so crucial to our youngest children’s recovery from the challenges of the pandemic.

While seats in the new 3K program are available in all 32 school districts, about 3,300 applicants did not initially receive an offer for the current school year. Mayor Adams, however, has deemphasized further expansion of both the UPK and the 3K program, and instead he is directing his attention to general child care needs.

The city’s Division of Early Childhood Education, which oversees prekindergarten and 3K, has lost more than 100 staffers this year, and at the end of the summer, the Department of Education abruptly excessed more than 300 Division of Early Childhood Education social workers and instructional coaches who had been working with schools across the city. The result has been confusion and dismay among school leaders, families and the educators affected. As one principal put it, “You have teachers who are struggling, we’ve had years of a global pandemic and trying to support our children in masks, trying to figure out how we do language acquisition, how we support social-emotional needs, how we support families through impossibly complicated and difficult situations — and now this one thing that was actually really helpful is being taken away.”

While we continue to support efforts to make high-quality child care available and affordable for New York City parents, we believe it should not be presented as an alternative to the equally needed expansion of citywide programs for our 3K students and the continued support of UPK. As Deputy Schools Chancellor Josh Wallack, who oversaw the launch of UPK, recently noted, “Pre-K for All succeeded because it brought all of New York City’s children together in one high-quality program and made it easier for all families to raise children here…The city should seize the opportunity to deliver on the promise of 3K for All and help a whole new group of kids and families thrive.”

Directing more funding and effort towards ensuring that preschool-age children with disabilities and English language learners receive the services is another urgent priority that the new administration must address immediately. As we noted in our recent testimony on special education, the foundational problem dates back to the de Blasio administration, since Pre-K for All never included students with disabilities. Recent research has found that about a third of preschool students weren’t receiving their special education services during the pandemic, and that Black and Asian preschool students were both less likely to be identified for services and more likely to be funneled to segregated classrooms that serve only students with disabilities than their white peers. We are hearing from schools and educators that the current problems with special education for pre-K students stem from short-staffing and low compensation (especially in nonpublic schools). While the DOE has been increasing the number of public-school preschool classes and placements, it is happening too slowly.

Similarly, bilingual and dual-language opportunities for pre-K students, while growing some in recent years, has not increased sufficiently to meet the needs of our families. One option we believe might be helpful to consider is a shift to a “trans language” model where multiple languages are supported in a single classroom, especially given both the diversity of languages in New York City communities and children’s wide range of developmental levels in language in their early childhood years.

Finally, there needs to be a substantial increase in city funding for its early childhood programs. The lack of a consistent funding stream, which we highlighted in union testimony in 2014, has not been addressed, and the COVID-19 pandemic has been a devastating impact on many of our providers. One recent study estimated that between 2019 and 2021, New York City lost 22% of its family day care programs, and multiple reports have noted the challenges of community-based child care and pre-K providers in retaining qualified staff and directors in a context where multiple other jobs now offer better pay and benefits.

As we noted in union testimony in December 2020, another factor is the pay-for-enrollment model used in the city, which creates a disincentive to allocate adequate resources to successfully operate these programs. When enrollment drops due to external factors such as COVID-19, the payment model’s flaws are even more glaring. Lack of consistent and reliable funding makes it impossible for child care providers to provide the high-quality support and services needed to properly run these programs.

The impact of these broader trends has been intensified by the city’s inexcusable delays in payments to child care agencies for services they have already provided. In September, the heads of these agencies warned that they might have to close their centers if the city does not pay them the millions of dollars they are owed.

In a joint letter, they warned that the “fiscal stability of the entire sector is at grave risk” and that “without immediate action, the city’s child care plan will not only be left unrealized but more importantly, the early care and education sector, its work force and the children and families that depend upon it will be irreparably harmed.”

The UFT is eager to work in partnership with the City Council, the DOE and the state to resolve these issues. The range of professional development and credentialing services that the union has provided to thousands of family child care providers is one example of our ongoing commitment. We’ve partnered with curriculum development teams from public television, our parent union the American Federation of Teachers and the UFT Teacher Center to deliver age-appropriate instructional support for our members in home-based child care settings. Most notably, the UFT Teacher Center created curriculum for two- to three-year-old children centered around social-emotional learning with an additional component on autism. Additionally, we’ve introduced the Successful Beginnings for Early Literacy Development (SBELD) — a Teacher Center-developed curriculum geared to preparing three-year-old for kindergarten with supports and resources for our child care providers. Further, we are particularly proud of our embedded coaching program. Teacher Center instructional coaches demonstrate how to use the curricula and show providers how to adopt and sustain evidence-based best practices in their homes.

The UFT’s annual Early Childhood Conference held in March also offers workshops for early childhood education providers. Examples include using building blocks to solve problems, employing storytelling as an instructional technique, new strategies to engage English language learners and demonstrating how geometry can be used to aid language development. Plus, we have assisted members in their pursuit of national accreditation with the National Association for Family Child Care. Supporting ongoing professional learning is not just a feel-good notion. It gets results. Our providers are on the front line for identifying children with developmental delays. We train our providers to observe development benchmarks and notice when children are not thriving.

Early childhood programs can play a pivotal role in laying the foundation for a child’s social, emotional and intellectual development, including critical thinking, the ability to concentrate and transition from one activity to the next, and verbal and written communication. Today’s young children can’t afford to lose the opportunity to enter a well-resourced prekindergarten program staffed by qualified educators in upcoming school years. We look forward to working with the City Council to ensure that all children will come to our schools ready to learn.