But, I’m not holding my breath! The Obama administration and its new Sec’y of Education is totally on board the testing regime laid down by George W. Bush. How on earth can they hold early childhood educators “accountable” for their work when we can’t possibly test their students? (And Lord help us if they figure out a way to start testing 2-year olds!)

I can to speak to that one: We Stay-at-home moms take a serious hit to our self-esteem by staying out of the workforce. Because I stay at home, it is assumed, by men and women alike, I am unskilled and uneducated. It’s hard not to let those ideas affect me: I sometimes wonder why I bothered with the Masters degree if raising kids, doing errands, and cleaning was what I’d be doing with my life?

This is (a) substantial and (b) doable. In fact, decent government jobs for 2.5 million people sounds like the kind of stimulus we could use.

True! That makes me wonder if some of this is also a part of the problems between the general groups of Working Mothers and Stay-at-home Mothers. Maybe some SAHMs feel they need to defend their positions and therefore pick on the working moms for choosing to work and letting someone else take care of their children.

It is rather neatly done that women are paid less and socialized towards mothering, then daycare is expensive for the babies they have, and so when looking at who should stay home (since daycare is costing almost a full salary), of course it’s the mom. It makes financial and psychological sense, you know? She earns less and would be better with the babies. It’s not like there have been social factors at work since her birth to ensure that both are true (or at least, that the second is believed to be true)! So, mothers are not-so-gently nudged toward staying home. Way to go, big P!

Vance, here in my state, infants are required to have a 1:4 ratio, 7 mo-1 yr is 1:5, 1 – 3 yrs is 1:6, but then when you get into pre-K it’s 1:13! So the real money is in pre-K, where you can have a bunch of kids with just one teacher. My daycare is new, however, and so our pre-K (where I work) is tiny – just 4 kids, and 2 of those come only T/Th. Before we added a fourth kid, this meant that if the one little girl was sick, two of us teachers didn’t get paid that day. But her mom still had to pay for that day, even though she didn’t come – extra money for the daycare!

And honestly, as far as the daycare/preschool industry is concerned – there’s just no profit in it, due to the limited salaried of most working and middle class people combined with (necessary)regulations on the child:adult ratio. In industries with small profit margins, exploitation of workers run rampant as employers/owners try to wring every last cent where they can (ie limiting benefits and slashing salaries).

I think the key here is that this is more women’s work, and thus ill compensated. A reason I think there isn’t more organizing around it is that the “workplace” is not a factory floor but a bunch of disconnected sites, at which isolated and vulnerable people are laboring; I also suspect that unlike being an electrician or whatever many people who work in childcare or eldercare think of it as temporary (whether it turns out to be or not). Finally, I think a lot of women who do have the social status to organize (ie, the ones dealing with contracting childcare and eldercare under the present unjust circumstances) hesitate to do so knowing they’ll be targets of so much hate: bitches who think they are too good to care for their own kids and elderly relatives, agitating for the government to pay for it instead, what a bunch of selfish ice princesses, etc. etc. I mean, the standard American insane denial thing where rather than facing up to life as it is actually lived we pretend it’s not that way and shoot the messenger who mentions it (cf. abortion) (cf. healthcare). *Even though* facing up to life as it is actually lived would be better for everyone, not just some elitist minority. Result? Women live the contradictions but pretend they don’t exist so as not to get hated on or physically threatened for mentioning them.

I also think that modern individualism is still uncomfortable with the idea that women and children are individuals (by which I mean independent agents with full rights), but that’s anothe story…

What progressives in congress, with its historic democratic majorities and a Dem president, have proposed to offer free universal preschool or daycare? None that I have heard of. Shrinkage of the agenda, again…