Why the Hochul-Mamdani 'progressive' child care plan is regressive
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul. The model of universal child care they are pushing for offers universal access on paper while guaranteeing unequal developmental outcomes in practice. Credit: Mayoral Photography Office via TNS / Ed Reed
This guest essay reflects the views of Todd L. Pittinsky, a professor of technology and society at Stony Brook University, and co-author of "The Caregiving Ambition."
On Jan. 8, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood in the Flatbush YMCA to unveil a $1.7 billion push for universal child care that features "2-Care" for New York City 2-year-olds. The rhetoric soared: "transformative change," "social infrastructure," "high-quality, zero-fee care." Mamdani, who ran on a promise to follow "data and evidence," framed it as the moment when policy finally caught up with ideals.
It wasn't.
Strip away the ceremony and the plan reveals a core design choice that directly contradicts decades of developmental science. New York's universal system is being built around a massive expansion of home-based child care — the cheapest and fastest model to scale. That decision doesn't expand opportunity. It locks in the lowest-quality form of care at statewide scale.
Home-based care sounds comforting — warm, familiar, intimate. It conjures kitchens, couches and caregivers who feel like family. But the research tells a different story. For more than three decades, evidence has been clear: children in home-based child care (paid care in someone else's home, not relatives) consistently lag behind on language, cognitive skills and school readiness, even after accounting for family income and background.
The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's landmark longitudinal study — the gold standard of U.S. child care research — found that home-based settings produced the weakest developmental outcomes of any major care type. This was not a marginal difference. It was systematic.
Quality ratings are even more damning. In a widely cited study, Susan Kontos and colleagues found that only 9% of home-based providers met standards for "good" or "high" quality care. More than 90% failed to clear basic developmental benchmarks. The NICHD reached similar conclusions: most home-based care was rated merely "fair," with a substantial share deemed outright poor. These were not bad apples. This was the orchard.
The reason is structural, not moral. Home-based care lacks the ingredients that make quality enforceable: professional training pipelines, standardized curricula, peer supervision and institutional accountability. A lone provider working out of a living room cannot replicate the learning environment, oversight or developmental scaffolding of a regulated early childhood program. No amount of good intentions can substitute for infrastructure.
So why choose this model?
Because it is cheap, fast and politically convenient. Home-based care can be scaled by simply turning on the funding spigot — no systems to design, no standards to enforce. And under Hochul's plan, even that spigot is guaranteed for just two years. Leaders get to claim "universal access" immediately, while the developmental risk quietly lands on families and future administrations. This is social policy built for news releases, not children.
Home-based care already disproportionately serves Black, Hispanic, immigrant and low-income children. Scaling it statewide ensures that inequality is built into the system from day one.
This is why calling the plan "progressive" is a category error. It offers universal access on paper while guaranteeing unequal developmental outcomes in practice. It is separate and unequal, achieved not through exclusion but through design.
A genuinely evidence-based child care policy would do the opposite of what New York has done. It would treat early childhood as essential public infrastructure, because only systems with real standards, training and oversight reliably deliver quality at scale. Instead, New York is licensing and subsidizing the weakest segment of the market and calling it transformation.
Universal access without universal quality is not progress. It is scaling abandonment. New York promised a future. It delivered an option for headlines and photo ops, not children.
This guest essay reflects the views of Todd L. Pittinsky, a professor of technology and society at Stony Brook University, and co-author of "The Caregiving Ambition."
