A Children's Agenda for NYC
by Andrew
Covid-19 has left New York City’s 1.7 million children in dire need of a bold policy agenda that ensures they are no longer an afterthought, but the focus. Unfortunately, this isn't a new need; long before the pandemic, we were failing too many of our children on basic measures of well-being. Children from low-income communities, who are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and Latinx, have been particularly ill-served. Mayor-elect Eric Adams has a singular opportunity to change this stark reality given the availability of once-in-a generation federal funding.
To start, Mr. Adams should embrace the fact that municipal government is designed to fix problems within silos, but children don’t live their lives within the narrow constructs of city bureaucracy. To address this challenge, he should appoint a Children’s Cabinet, responsible for coordination and alignment and empowered to completely reorganize--or demolish and rebuild--the incomprehensible, and unnavigable, patchwork of programs and services for children that exist across city agencies.
The Children’s Cabinet should hold itself accountable by taking three steps. First, it should ensure all city agencies adopt a “children’s standard” that makes the well-being of kids a first priority when making policy decisions. Second, it should make certain all city agencies develop, and make transparent, child impact statements, such as those developed in New Zealand, akin to environmental impact statements. Finally, it should develop an integrated data system starting at birth that tracks childhood outcomes and makes statistics available to the public in a single place. Mr. Adams' proposed Efficiency Czar would be well-positioned to implement this type of data system.
The Children’s Cabinet must prioritize children's entire experience, complex as it is. Children need a comprehensive agenda because well-being and learning are so inextricably linked. Five priorities should serve as the foundation of Mr. Adam’s children’s agenda.
First, every New York City child, beginning the day they are born, should have access to affordable and developmental child care because research confirms that high-quality early childhood education and care is associated with positive developmental outcomes, including cognitive, language development, and school readiness. Despite the progress made under Mayor De Blasio, the city’s patchwork system of child care, Head Start, and public and private pre-K continues to frustrate parents. But navigating the system is far from the only issue. Access and quality remain key challenges. Before the pandemic began, it was estimated that there were only 15 slots for every 100 New York City children between the ages of zero and five. On day one, Mr. Adams should direct his Children’s Cabinet to recommend actions within the first 100 days of his mayoralty to triple the number of high-quality child care slots for the most vulnerable families in year one.
Second, every child in New York City should have access fair, safe, and secure housing because research confirms the association between stable housing and education success. There are more than 100,000 school-age students who lack permanent housing. On day one, Mr. Adams should announce a targeted assistance program to ensure 100 percent of all homeless families with children rapidly reconnect to permanent housing within the year. And to make certain that homeless students don’t remain in the shadows, ignored and overlooked, if he doesn't plan to live in Gracie Mansion, Mr. Adams should consider housing homeless children there until permanent housing can be established.
Third, Mr. Adams should remove barriers to adequate healthcare starting the day New York City children are born because poor health leads to poor learning outcomes. On day one, Mr. Adams should direct the leadership of NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation to put in place a process to ensure that every newborn leaves the hospital with Medicaid, CHIP, or marketplace coverage if they don’t have employer-sponsored insurance.
Fourth, Mr. Adams should ensure that every child, beginning in early education settings, is exposed to a challenging curriculum and teachers that prepares them to be reading on grade level by third grade because research confirms that third-grade literacy is associated with increased high-school graduation and college attendance. For example, he should both increase wages for childcare workers and dramatically expand access to evidence-based professional development on the science of reading and language.
Finally, every high school sophomore should have a roadmap to higher education or well-paid work. New York City’s education to workforce system, like America's more broadly, is so badly fragmented that it is difficult for students to build the knowledge and awareness necessary to map an informed path to success, let alone travel it. On day one, Mr. Adams should consider rebalancing workforce spending to favor training programs that can provide skills that lead to jobs with opportunities for advancement instead of dead-end entry-level positions with little opportunity for upward mobility.
This will take aligned action beyond government, and frankly, the public sector has demonstrated that it struggles in delivery of service across the areas mentioned above. Executive leadership may improve this paradigm, but industry, community-based organizations and nonprofits, labor organizations, advocacy groups, parents, and philanthropy, all have critical roles to play. What's certain is that Mr. Adams should focus on what is already working in the communities across the city, while at the same time, incentivizing industry and community-based organizations to expand their impact.
Will a children’s agenda be expensive? Unquestionably. But we have the funding to make this possible, and the cost of inaction--or status-quo deprioritization--would be a moral bankruptcy of the bitterest, most terrifying kind.