Do you need a college degree to take care of toddlers? Millions of parents who never graduated can answer that question. So can millions who have graduated. So can many teenagers who babysit to make money on the side. Of course you don’t.
So at a time when the scarcity and expense of child care are considered a problem by people at all points on the ideological spectrum and in all 50 states, does it make sense to require a costly and time-consuming college degree for day care workers? Of course it doesn’t.
The Washington, D.C., government doesn’t care.
Bureaucrats in Washington’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education, the office that presides over the district’s failing schools, have created and are sticking to an arbitrary requirement that child care workers at facilities caring for more than six children hold an associate’s degree. It’s as if they’re trying to force families with children out of the district.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out a legal challenge to this requirement brought by an experienced day care provider who lacks the requisite degree. Ilumi Sanchez has been caring for children since 1995, and she knows what she’s doing. Yet like hundreds or even thousands of providers, she is about to be thrown out of the job by a completely unnecessary new requirement created by a largely incompetent district government.
The Institute for Justice, which represented Sanchez in her lawsuit, points out that many day care workers lack the means to pay for college. Nearly all of them lack the free time and financial breathing room to attend college while keeping up their hours on the job. Institute for Justice attorney Renee Flaherty said in a statement that the ruling “clears the way for D.C. officials to go forward with their initial plan to throw countless loving, experienced childcare providers out of work because they don’t have the right piece of paper to change a child’s diapers.”
In rejecting Sanchez’s lawsuit, the appeals court preposterously pointed out that classes in literature and mathematics could conceivably be useful to people caring for small children. But strictly speaking, there is no rational need to know Hamlet or calculus to change diapers and keep pre-rational children safe yet preoccupied for hours at a time. Parents are born with these skills — or at least parents are presumed to have these skills, unless the government is forced to intervene and take their children away. For people engaged in day care, most college requirements are completely irrelevant. Yet such classes would have to be paid for and taken to obtain the degree now required for child care.
Yes, it makes sense to have some basic standards for child care providers. They should not have criminal records, for example. In Washington, D.C., they were already required to take a set of specialized orientation and training classes before this new college requirement. That should be enough.
A massively expensive college degree for child care is the granddaddy of all unnecessary licensing requirements. And given that the district has the nation’s most expensive day care at an average of $419 per week, it is the last place where new burdens should be imposed. Why should the most expensive day care jurisdiction in America be artificially constricting supply and adding a massive additional expense, student loan payments, that day care workers’ salaries will now have to cover? This will turn Washington into an even more hostile environment for families with children than it already is, given its high crime, high taxes, and appalling public schools.
