The deprofessionalization of family childcare providers: Wisconsin’s YoungStar system

Abstract

This article is based on research conducted during a semester-long professional development workshop series for Spanish-speaking family childcare providers in Wisconsin aimed at creating space for dialogue regarding the ways in which care and professionalism are intertwined. We examine the historical, economic, and political forces accompanying Wisconsin’s adoption of YoungStar, a quality rating and improvement system. This model offers “choice” for parents and “support” for providers through a ranking system that turns care into a commodity, acting as a mechanism of homogenization which deprofessionalizes providers. We focus on one provider’s story, employing narrative inquiry to illustrate the complexity of being a caring professional in an era of neoliberal regulation where the borders of the personal and professional often blur.

Introduction

In the Spring of 2016, my colleague and I designed professional development workshops for family childcare providers. In the United States, family childcare refers to those who provide childcare and education in their private home as a small business. In earlier discussions about the conundrums of family childcare work, we imagined what a professional development program might consist of that would empower providers; in other words, we wanted to build a space of power and possibility where practitioners could determine the direction of their development. We wanted to invite providers who were typically left out of local professional development prospects. In our case, this led to a focus on Spanish-speaking providers. We felt strongly that by offering bilingual workshops, we could give some of the most marginalized practitioners space to dialogue. Akin to Atkinson and Elliot’s (2013) assertion, we believed that “educators need time, space, and others with whom to share their doubts, their discomfort, and their fears. But often there is no space for sharing, for listening, and for thinking through the complexities of practice” (p. 128). Thus, our purpose was twofold: to give Spanish-speaking providers space to reflect and share their stories, and to critically research a thinly studied field and thus reimagine new ways of being in relation with others. This marked the beginning of our investigation into the complexities of what it means to be a caring professional in the field of family childcare.

In this article, we discuss problems of care and professionalism confronting the family childcare workforce in Wisconsin, and argue that the new quality rating and improvement system (QRIS), YoungStar, has led to deprofessionalization: family childcare was transformed from standard state regulation via educational, safety, and health requirements to an online system where providers’ names, addresses, star ranking, and violations are now accessible to anyone and marketed as a consumer product for parents. In our analysis of policy documents from the private, non-profit, non-partisan Kids Forward (formerly the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families (WCCF)), the Department of Children and Families’ (DCF) YoungStar website, and through the story of one provider in our professional development workshop series, we elucidate the effects of deprofessionalization. Furthermore, we show that despite its intent, this system has driven out providers from participating in the system and decreased the availability of regulated childcare, thereby exacerbating the need for childcare in Wisconsin. This article concludes with a collective call to action to include providers in the creation of policies and to ignite dialogue that is meaningful, relevant, and respectful of the incredibly important work of providers.

A brief look at early childhood history: Wisconsin and YoungStar

Since Wisconsin became a state in 1848, its stance toward children under 4 highlights the ways in which the responsibility of childcare for the very young has been relegated to the domestic, seen as a private family matter outside of the realm of the public or the state. Wisconsin has an exceptional history of supporting public education for 4-year-olds, but not for those aged 0–4. According to a policy brief from WCCF (2010), Wisconsin was possibly the only state in the United States to include public education for 4-year-olds in the original 1848 State Constitution. This same brief estimated that 75% of 4-year-olds attended public schools in the mid- to late 1800s, where it was also common for 3-year-olds to attend. During this same period, Wisconsin was home to the first private and public kindergarten, brought over by German immigrants and influenced by Friedrich Fröebel. However, this movement dwindled, and by the 1920s, the prevailing view was that “the best place for most children below school age was with their mothers in their homes” (p. 6). The only instances in which childcare was publicly funded was during World War II, when women were needed in the workforce, and through Head Start beginning in the 1960s to serve low-income children. It is still the case that only low-income families qualify for childcare subsidies.

Throughout the history of Wisconsin, childcare for the very young has almost never been funded except for low-income families. YoungStar, Wisconsin’s new QRIS, is the newest iteration to subsidize childcare for low-income residents. Instituted in 2011, it requires family childcare providers who accept state subsidized children to be ranked on a 40-point five-star scale according to their education, learning environment, business and professional practices, and the child’s health and wellbeing. The stated goals are to improve quality of programs, to rank providers and to link their ranking with tiered reimbursement, and to give parents “easy-to-use tools” to provide them with choice—a keystone of neoliberal policy (Grunewald et al., 2017: 8). Participating providers must be 18 years old or older, and be minimally certified through a Resource and Referral Agency by taking two entry-level courses, a Sudden Infant Death training, and a background check. Alternatively, they can be state licensed or have municipal accreditation. In line with Wisconsin’s historical reality, YoungStar’s public support for children is given only to the lowest income families.

Neoliberal reforms and quality debate in and beyond Wisconsin

Neoliberalism, associated with free market capitalism, has implications for policy reforms not just for Wisconsin but for early childhood education globally (Cannella, 2016). The reform movement in Wisconsin, first led by Governor Tommy Thompson in the 1990s, pushed for educational reforms introducing state standards. Federal initiatives also pushed for improving public schooling outcomes (A Nation at Risk, 1983; No Child Left Behind (NCLB), 2001). However, it was George Bush’s 2002 Good Start, Grow Smart that required early childhood education in Wisconsin to align to K-12 schooling. Subsequently, the Obama administration’s 2009 Race to the Top funding opened the door to YoungStar, a QRIS.

Wisconsin policymakers embraced this opportunity wholeheartedly, joining the global trend to professionalize using a QRIS. Indeed, Lee (2016) has identified various dangers associated with neoliberal policies emerging in Hong Kong and Australia, cautioning that this system of classification conflates a discourse of standards, norms, values, and regulations with quality, and that to achieve this quality, newly prescriptive styles of management reconfigure educational knowledge “under the umbrella of neoliberal imagination” (p. 107). By setting such narrow objectives, the complexity of diversity is ironed out as quality intertwines with logical positivism (Dahlberg et al., 2013: 98). YoungStar follows such a neoliberal logic: providers assembled and ranked, normalizing care into a singular notion of “quality.”

Care is often defined in opposition to education by delimiting it to children’s hygiene and emotional requirements. However, while it is considered crucial by parents and assistants, those who provide this care generally have only informal qualifications, such as mothering experience, and receive little research attention (Van Laere et al., 2012: 529). For this reason, this special issue provides a unique opportunity to discuss the overlap of care and professionalism. Through one provider’s story, we hope to elucidate the complexity of being a professional in an era of neoliberal regulation, and raise questions that “stay linked to lives lived, and attendant to these complexities as mattering in contemporary communities” (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990: 7). We discuss how the QRIS has not lived up to its promises to support practitioners and give choice to parents, and we examine how the QRIS has made things worse through a system of rewards and punishment. Tackling the problem of care and professionalism through problematic logics of accountability has implications for early childhood workforces globally.

The [de]professionalization of providers

There have been calls to professionalize the early childhood landscape. Yet, definitions of professionalism vary greatly by source. The National Association for the Education of Young Children refers to the early childhood workforce as professionals, but the word professional is noticeably absent on YoungStar’s website. Osgood (2010) offers a critical perspective on professionalism in a study with UK nursery workers. In this investigation, practitioner’s definitions of professionalism emerged as intrinsically defined, fluid, and embracing of emotion. Furthermore, making the case against professional development, McWilliam (2002) challenges the underlying assumption that all professionals require development and what knowledge is considered relevant. To YoungStar, the attainment of higher degrees is demonstrative of professionalism; yet, as Pérez and Cahill (2016) assert, mandating greater levels of accountability solely via higher education degrees does not lead to a better early childhood education system. Thus, our work aimed to explore professionalism with those who we consider professionals, aspiring to redistribute power by foregrounding marginalized voices. As resistance to the “preoccupation with satisfying the regulatory gaze” (Osgood, 2010), we wanted practitioners to define professionalism for themselves to regain “confidence, expertise and authenticity” (p. 130).

Reform efforts since NCLB aim to make providers accountable with narrowing requirements that increase the schism between care and education, which reside in gendered understandings of professionalism. To increase professionalism, the realm of childcare in which women are the primary workers must adhere to “the dream of modernity” achieved through “the reduction of the complexity and diversity of the products measured and the contexts within which they exist and operate to a limited number of basic measurable criteria which can then be encapsulated in a series of numerical ratings” (Canella, 2014: 100). Additionally, there is increasing “schoolification” in early childhood settings, or the privileging of pre-literacy, numeracy, and science skills along with formal qualifications (Van Laere et al., 2012: 527). Across the globe, care workers are often women, seen as unqualified and in need of management. According to O’Connell (2011), this interventionist form of professionalization requires conformance to the “quality assurance regimes” by imposing performance, fabrication, and audit culture as a rite of passage; this requires providers to trade in their emotive and intuitive traits—traits viewed as the greatest barrier to professionalization (p. 780). In sum, the homogenization of providers and subsequent imposition of a rigid framework silence the voices and values of providers. The emphasis on unmovable definitions of quality and professionalism has led to deprofessionalization (Milner, 2013).

Methodology

At the onset of this project, we employed principles of Participatory Action Research (PAR) (McNiff, 2010; Sherman and Torbert, 2000; Stringer, 2008) to design workshops oriented toward mutually beneficial experiences—a project meaningful to us and transformative to the group with whom we collaborated. We heeded McTaggart’s (1997) tenets of action research and started small in our efforts to change social practice fostering “self-critical communities” through “authentic participation” (p. 79). Throughout this project, we drew inspiration from those who examine power, politics, and inequity in education (Apple, 1993; Cannella and Kincheloe, 2002; Giroux and McLaren, 1989). As such, we aimed to foster intellectual capacity to bring about a Gramscian notion of “community-based liberatory praxis” (Fischman and McLaren, 2005: 433).

We advertised this series openly, and 19 providers signed-up. We then organized six bi-monthly workshops on Friday evenings. We incorporated reflective practice (Schön, 1984) and stories to reveal how narrative compositions of our lives “define who we are, what we do, and why” (Connelly and Clandinin as cited in Huber and Whelan, 1999: 382). We offered this series free of charge with professional development credit through The Registry—Wisconsin’s recognition system. Throughout the series, we employed ethnographic gathering techniques for the collection of artifacts (participant journals and activity creations), session video, and audio.

In this article, we employ narrative inquiry to shed light on the complexities inherent in lived experiences of providers. PAR and narrative inquiry share many traits (Connelly and Clandinin, 2006). Both see the expertise of practitioners and dynamics of shared reflection and learning through the inquiry process as key to justice-driven aspirations of a transformed society. Moreover, both methods are attendant to the relationships between researcher and participant, emphasizing participants’ voice (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990: 3) referring to the way in which we encourage participants to speak and be heard (Lincoln and Guba, 2000). Considering socio-political concerns facing providers, stories help us to remember these educational experiences as lived and felt. Considering this, narrative inquiry is used alongside our analysis of the Wisconsin DCF YoungStar website, in addition to policy reports from Kids Forward.

In a preliminary analysis of our data, one story, told by a participant we will call Luisa, stood out. This “field text” emerged organically as we examined the porousness between the personal situation and the professional knowledge landscape (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). Paradigmatic reasons motivated us (Chase, 2005) as Luisa’s story highlights how individuals are situated in relation to social resources and positionality. Luisa’s interpretation of events brings to the fore the heavily mediated context of care and professionalism in neoliberal times. This case highlights the deprofessionalization of family childcare providers in Wisconsin by looking at how one provider negotiated her personal understandings of professionalism while grappling with the need for greater autonomy, power, and respect.

Luisa’s account was transcribed from video and then re-storied (Ollerenshaw and Creswell, 2002) to give both researchers and participants space to make sense of the experience and to connect this story to the socio-political context. In reordering the narrative, we wove in situational details to expand on the meaning of the story (Huber and Whelan, 1999), considering the complexities lived by contemporary providers within this policy context we’ve analyzed. This method afforded us the opportunity to burrow to focus on the “emotional, moral, and aesthetic qualities” of the narrative (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990: 10). Additionally, sharing this story to the group and later re-visiting it with researchers provided Luisa a chance to participate in a recreation of meaning, providing “points of contact” for criticality and curiosity (Meier and Stremmel, 2010: 2). While the memory was initially a source of shame, retelling it provided Luisa with a space for identity affirmation and connection to the group. In the re-storying, reflecting, and reviving of this incident, Luisa began to see this event in relation to larger issues of autonomy and expertise in the discussion that ensued after she told her story (field notes, 1 April 2016).

The case of Luisa: the question of care and professionalism

Luisa is a 50-year-old owner of a family childcare program and is ranked as a four-star City accredited YoungStar provider. She is from Colombia and has lived in Wisconsin for many years. As long as she has run her business, she has greeted everyone with a kiss and a hug, parents and children alike. For her, this practice is natural, indeed normal. Hugs and kisses at the end of the day are part of her practice, both caregiver and human being.

After a few years of working with one family, the mother became uncomfortable with this practice; she didn’t think this type of physical intimacy was best for her child. Instead of talking to Luisa about their discomfort, the parents reported her to the City accreditation agency. While the parents told the agency that they “liked everything” about the provider, meaning her work and the business, the parents could not bring themselves to go to Luisa to say that they didn’t want her to kiss their child. Instead, Luisa received a call from the City regarding the complaint, advising her to comply with the parent’s wishes (field notes, 1 April 2016).

Luisa told this story in the professional development workshop. The group had been sharing collages representing the incongruence they saw between their work and mainstream’s version of professionalism. For example, providers were comparing a woman in informal clothing changing a diaper to a male in a business suit, a contrast they named between their version of professionalism versus YoungStar. Following this activity, participants began to express concerns that many parents did not value their professionalism. Luisa agreed. When we asked her what happened next, she replied that as a result of this experience, she learned not to give kisses to the children. Many of the providers expressed shock and dismay. One provider protested passionately while slapping her thigh. She argued that this cultural practice should be in the contract, and that if a family did not like it, they should find another provider. Luisa agreed, stating that she personally believed that giving children a kiss and hug was important for their emotional development (transcription of video from 1 April 2016).

Luisa may have been experiencing a clash between her cultural practices and the YoungStar policy context, which positions her values and modes of operation outside the bounds of appropriate “professional” conduct. Yet, the cultural difference is not the undergirding issue, rather a symptom ignored under this regulatory gaze. Instead, it is crucial to note that the family did not first bring up their concerns with Luisa. By going to the agency without first talking to Luisa, the family disregarded her as an authority. Luisa confessed that she had never shared this story with anyone, and the experience had a lasting impact. Because of this painful episode, she experienced feelings of diminishment and deprofessionalization, as well as sadness and embarrassment.

In the YoungStar system, providers cannot modify the singular notion of what it means to be a professional to validate their mode of operation. Burrowing into this, we can examine why this event might be associated with embarrassment and shame. She knew the family well, so her most pressing questions were as follows: Why hadn’t they come directly to her? Did they not see her as an authority or expert? What did it mean for the parents to forgo dialogue for complaint? And who reinforces this relationship? Would it have been appropriate for the City to suggest that the parents first turn to Luisa and call the City if that conversation had not led to a plan that was satisfactory? Does YoungStar reinforce this relationship by positioning care as a consumer product purchased by parents who then have the right to call “customer service,” or the City in this case, to complain if the product does not perform to their expectations?

In early childhood education, teachers and practitioners are often taught to empathize with parents (Langford, 2008), yet this can be problematic without space to disagree or question parent’s choices. In this story, Luisa felt as though her identity as a professional was disregarded. The system supported this; her power and voice were absent in the treatment of this complaint. In educational settings in the United States, increases in managerial power through oversight have enabled students to bypass conversation with teachers for someone “higher up,” going straight to a principal/administrator with a complaint which is translated into a directive for the teacher to carry out. The lack of dialogic response is framed as means to support students-as-consumers (Cheney et al., 1997). Indeed, we see this pattern in Luisa’s story, embedded in the YoungStar system where providers are by-passed for higher authority.

Luisa later admitted that she continued to give the child hugs and kisses, but not in front of the mother. According to Osgood (2010), many providers resort to subversive behavior, suggesting the trust that vanishes with disrespect. She hid from others what she felt was best. This is emblematic of systemic problems: reprimanding leads to lack of trust, which leads to secrecy. In this story, conversation is silenced when Luisa’s expectation of dialogue becomes a call from the city. Yet, Luisa maintains her agency through secrecy, as she continues to kiss and hug the child. Huber and Whelan (1999) note, secrets can illuminate the epistemological nature of places where practitioners are free from governmental and parental scrutiny and “able to live the stories of practice which honor their embodied knowing” (p. 13). With no substantive place for conversation, policies are scripted into practitioners’ lives as the stories they live by become shaped and reshaped without their voice. In this professional landscape, practitioners are left to negotiate rules and regulations in secrecy and silence (Huber and Whelan, 1999). A punitive approach, as Osgood (2010) argues, leads to mistrust and subversive activity. Thus, the effects of undermining professionalism might be far more consequential than the original hug and kiss as a greeting.

The aim of this story is not to demonstrate that Luisa is unprofessional, rather to speak to how the system makes (and breaks) the professionals who work within. Luisa’s ethics are not under investigation; rather, we seek to analyze how the system influences lived experience, including what is or is not shared honestly. We tell this story to show the reality of so many providers, to illustrate the complex context of family childcare in a field that constantly blurs the borders between the personal and professional. To make sense of this story in the broader context of family childcare, we continue to examine YoungStar, the context in which Luisa works.

Analysis of YoungStar as a mechanism of deprofessionalization

YoungStar, Wisconsin’s QRIS, ranks providers on a scale of one to five stars, and exemplifies the multiple ways in which practitioners are being deprofessionalized through neoliberal logics. By examining the story of Luisa in conjunction with YoungStar, we investigate deprofessionalization and the consequences of the QRIS system. It is important to note that Luisa was an accredited provider through the City prior to YoungStar, and when the QRIS was instituted, she was required to participate in the new system. Accredited providers are automatically given a four- or five-star ranking in YoungStar, so Luisa’s story is central in relation to how the QRIS impacts her. Below we discuss the general effect of YoungStar on providers throughout the state as well as its effect upon Luisa.

Decreasing participation of providers and families in YoungStar

Since YoungStar’s inception, there has been a drop in the number of providers and children receiving subsidies, which should constitute a great concern to all who care about the welfare of children and families. For a system that promised to be the panacea for the critical lack of childcare for Wisconsin’s poorest, there is evidence to the contrary. The number of regulated providers has decreased from 7169 providers in 2007 to just 2801 in 2016, or a 61% drop (WCCF, 2017 blog post). Correspondingly, there has been a decline in children served from 58,379 in 2008 to just 46,131 in 2015—a total of 12,248 fewer children, or a 21% drop, and rural areas have been hit the hardest (WCCF, August 2017).

Another July 2015 report from WCCF speculates as to the reasons for the “significant” decline in the number of regulated family childcare providers (p. 5). Reasons reported include job loss, higher costs for parents, a decline in regulated childcare programs participating in Wisconsin’s childcare subsidy program, and parents opting for less expensive, unlicensed childcare (WCCF, July 2015). Any of these reasons warrants investigation. In addition, YoungStar providers paid by the state to care for low-income children saw their reimbursement rates frozen since 2012. Moreover, two-star programs received a 5% cut in reimbursement rates in 2012, which, as the report states, “may have driven programs out” from participating in YoungStar.

Fewer practitioners and children since YoungStar

The lack of regulated childcare is key to YoungStar’s story as children needing subsidized care are dependent on there being sufficient numbers of YoungStar providers. In 2015, there were roughly 300,000 Wisconsin children needing care but only 136,500 available slots in about 5000 programs (WCCF, July 2015). This means that Wisconsin is falling short of the demand for childcare for subsidized and non-subsidized families. Furthermore, this problem is relatively recent. In 2003, there were 8300 regulated family childcare providers, and family childcare was considered one of the “fastest growing small businesses in Wisconsin” (Edie et al., 2003: 8).

Regulation is desirable to ensure the health and safety of children, for providers to be kept up-to-date on current practices/opportunities, and to assess needs of families. Providers like Luisa voluntarily go above and beyond to be accredited because they want to be recognized as professionals in their field and to be a part of a supportive professional network. In contrast, unregulated care is invisible and is difficult if not impossible to monitor (Edie et al., 2003). In unregulated situations, children are more likely to experience abuse from an isolated, overwhelmed provider, and will not reap benefits from provider professional training, experience, and support networks. However, as already mentioned, providers are choosing unregulated work over trying to cope with a system that does not support them as professionals.

When Wisconsin’s DCF adopted YoungStar, it chose a market-based approach designed to mirror business models. Seeing care as a marketable commodity was meant to promote choice for parents and support for providers. Competition in this logic is viewed as the solution for the lack of childcare. The concept of choice is popular in neoliberal education reforms; however, parents now have fewer options and it is unknown whether they consider a provider’s ranking when searching for childcare or just settle for whatever is available. Consequently, over 5 years after its introduction, the efforts to regulate family childcare providers have driven providers out of the system, leading to increased turnover. As for Luisa, she expressed dissatisfaction over how she was being treated in the QRIS, as well as uncertainty as to her future participation in the system. YoungStar is serving thousands fewer children than before, and pushing more children into unlicensed care.

Deprofessionalization through a “carrot and stick approach”

Besides the failure of YoungStar in its policy intent to provide ample choice for low-income children, another criticism includes the “carrot-and-stick approach.” The “carrot-and-stick approach,” a system of rewards and punishments intended to induce desired behavior, links provider ranking with rates of reimbursement for subsidized children. Providers ranked two stars get 5% below the standard reimbursement, three stars get a flat rate, four stars get reimbursed 10% above, and five stars get 25% above. Currently, over 50% of all providers are a two-star, a low rating leaving little room to question why providers would choose not to take on a subsidized child. Although this aspect has possibly less impact on accredited providers such as Luisa who have a higher ranking and therefore greater compensation, her continued participation was uncertain due to, among other concerns, professional autonomy. Additionally, unlike centers who get reimbursed for an entire slot, regardless of how many hours a subsidized child attends, a family childcare provider only gets reimbursed by the number of hours of child attendance. Moreover, it can be difficult for independent providers to collect copayments from low-income families. Thus, since taking a subsidized child does not come with consistent income, one cannot blame providers for prioritizing families with regular schedules and incomes.

Proponents of YoungStar claim it supports providers outside mainstream by measuring them against the same standard. Yet, with a single standard, as Dahlberg et al. (2013) suggest, YoungStar becomes a mechanism of social control, penalizing those who don’t fit. The cost of being a four- or five-star program is harder to achieve due to additional educational and environment requirements, so it impacts, for instance, providers of color who have statistically/historically lower attainment of opportunities/resources. In Luisa’s case, although she prided herself as a professional with a four-star ranking, she knew that the costs of achieving a five-star ranking were beyond her financial ability. Without recognition that providers do not start on a level playing field, YoungStar leaves providers of color at the bottom penalized as subpar and without support to improve their ranking.

As Rose (1990) argues, the intention of welfare mechanisms was never to create equality, they exist merely to buy off the disenfranchised. This is evident in the social immobility in YoungStar where most providers remain two-star. We need to stop imposing penalties on people for not being able to move up the social hierarchy and remember that “the cumulative effect of poor education, poor housing, poor health care, and poor government services create a bifurcated society that leaves more than its children behind” (Ladson-Billings, 2006: 10). YoungStar’s version of professionalism is not working for providers, not because they are doing it wrong, but because they were never consulted in the first place. This model discourages providers and parents from working together to build trusting relationships, arguably a foundational aspect of quality. Furthermore, a punitive approach leads to disillusionment and an exodus from practitioners’ chosen profession.

Collectively reshaping the future

The global forces of neoliberalism, and what it means to be professional under the banner of QRIS, need to be critically and carefully evaluated. We sought to provide space for discomfort felt by providers, often muted in the field, and to connect personal experience to systemic issues, seeing early childhood settings as sites of “immense possibility and power” (Batycky, 2008: 176). Greater opportunities for dialogue might inspire authentic definitions of quality and professionalism based on provider’s ethic of care. This kind of storytelling can be transformative, as it is through stories that we “become fully known to ourselves and others, and see new possibilities for educational change” (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990: 4). This is not something done individually, defined or lived individually, but rather a collective undertaking. Our project started small, but in the words on one participant, “I really wish for the sake of the childcare providers (and children) that this space we’ve created and the ideas grow bigger and bigger in our community.” In reshaping stories, we can reshape “the meaning of the world to which the story refers” (Clandinin and Connelly, 1995: 155–156).