A Win for Early Care and Education Journalism
A new rebrand and wider audience, as Early Learning Nation Becomes zero2eight
In 2022,
and I wrote an op-ed in the Columbia Journalism Review calling on every newsroom to add a child care beat. This followed child care’s gigantic leap from parenting section to front page news, after Covid-19 shut down most child care centers and many parents couldn’t work. During those early months of the pandemic, the number of news stories about the child care industry increased by 90 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. This, we wrote, “sent reporters and news outlets scrambling to cover a complicated subject that spans beats and topics—from business to healthcare to education to child development—as well as regulatory systems and funding mechanisms, state and federal.”Here was our big and bold suggestion:
Rather than selectively engage child care as an add-on or afterthought to those legacy beats, the time has come to make child care its own beat. Complexity and urgency don’t pair well; it’s unrealistic to expect a reporter new to covering childcare to churn out a nuanced story on a tight deadline. Over time, however, a dedicated beat reporter can develop expertise in the nuances, policy implications, and people who shape a subject as complex as child care—all while, hopefully, building public interest and rewarding it with new understanding.
Since that time, more reporters are assigned to a child care beat: people like Jenny Gold at the Los Angeles Times, Chabeli Carrazana at The 19th* and Rachel Cohen at Vox, who regularly write about child care and the caregiving economy for wider audiences. This is in addition to hundreds more outlets that do write stories on child care, as part of their economy or parenting issues. Post-pandemic, more attention is paid to child care as a standalone issue worthy of study and commentary.
One place to have consistently published stories related to child care has been Early Learning Nation. For years, this was supported by the Bezos Family Foundation, led by the indefatigable editor Linda Shockley. If you were lucky enough to publish a piece for Early Learning Nation, you'd join a roster of some of the top journalists to cover caregiving and early education: , Bryce Covert, Kendra Hurley, Mark Swartz and K.C. Compton, to name a few.
About a year ago, Early Learning Nation quietly joined The 74, a news organization dedicated to covering America’s educational system. And this past week, the publication announced a rebrand as zero2eight.
From the announcement:
The crisis impacting the early learning sector is layered. Families are struggling to find affordable, high-quality care. Providers are stretched thin, often unable to make ends meet. The ecosystem of policies and funding is shrouded in uncertainty, creating chaos and instability.
Still, through it all, bright spots have emerged. There are talented educators supporting our nation’s youngest learners in powerful ways. There are researchers, policymakers and advocates working tirelessly to improve the lived experiences of families with young children and early learning professionals. There are programs creatively tackling some of the field’s most pressing issues, like compensation, the rising cost of care and access to high-quality programs. And broadly, the public has become more aware of the need for a strong, sustainable early care and education system.
So why does this matter?
This matters because we need outlets that cover child care as an issue, just as much as we need reporters who want to write about it, and readers who care to read about it.
Placing child care as a vertical within The 74 is also important because it makes clear the connection of early education with the fields of K-12. Those of us who spend time writing about child care have long held the universal funding and accessibility of the K-12 system as something of a marvel. Is K-12 education perfect? No, of course not. But the expectation is there that a child in this country deserves an education and seeing that through should not be up to individual parents and families. As
has said, “kindergarten finds you,” referring to elementary schools that leap at the opportunities to enroll kids in classes. Cue the balloons and excitement, elementary schools will do what they can to make sign up easy. And yet, “easy” is not a word typically associated with finding child care anywhere in this country, especially for the nearly half of all children who live in places that are considered a child care desert, which have no affordable child care options.“Kindergarten finds you,” refers to elementary schools that will do what they can to make sign up easy. And yet, “easy” is not a word typically associated with finding child care anywhere in this country.
So I encourage you to check out zero2eight, sign up for their Substack, and in general keep reading quality journalism on early care and education (including right here!). If we want to shift the way our country values caregiving, we need to tell the stories of the people doing the work, the policies we’re enacting and why it matters.