Why educators deserve student debt forgiveness

Erica Phillips Guest Commentary

For more than a decade, Laverne Cheeseboro has been caring for children at her family child care (FCC), Heavenly Made Creations. From the first floor of her home in a middle class Philadelphia neighborhood, Laverne’s days start at 7 am and resemble those of many homebased early educators. The six preschoolers currently enrolled receive daily meals, engage in playbased education, and learn through a curriculum built around developing socialemotional skills. But hovering over Laverne’s daily reality is an albatross that holds her – and many potential educators – back from helping more children: $80,000 worth of student debt.

According to a recent survey, home-based educators carry an average of more than $30,000 in student debt, with 60 percent saying that repayment will cause their household financial hardship.

Under our current Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) policies, countless dedicated, passionate educators like Laverne are ineligible to have their student loans forgiven. FCC home programs are small, sole proprietor businesses, distinguishable from non-profits in name only. In reality, these educators are providing essential community benefits under challenging economic circumstances.

Unlike teachers at school districts, child care centers or in non-profit settings though, they are ineligible for deserved financial relief.

It's time for that to change.

We urge the Biden-Harris Administration to act quickly to expand the eligibility for PSLF to include FCC home educators, which will

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dramatically impact the lives of these educators and the families that rely on homebased child care.

At the National Association for Family Child Care, we know how important these educators are to communities across the country. There are nearly 11 million children with working mothers, and more than 40 percent of those children spent more time in family child care than any other child care setting. Additionally, there are one million paid FCC educators caring for our nation's children, 3 million children from birth to 5 years old are in these settings.

FCC is especially utilized by low-income, immigrant, rural families and families of color.

There are many more educators needed, especially in the wake of the pandemic. Yet too many are deterred by the looming specter of student debt in an industry where the median hourly wage of $14.60, making paying off that debt nearly impossible.

While early childhood education credential and degree requirements vary based on state and setting, about 25% of home-based family child care educators hold at least one higher education degree.

For educators in the field, the debt threat keeps them from pursuing further education.

It’s what keeps Laverne from pursuing a master’s degree in child development and psychology; in the wake of post-COVID challenges, she wants to understand more about children’s brain development.

Without loan forgiveness though, she doesn’t see a path to that degree that doesn’t involve adding to her debt total.

And as Laverne attests and we’ve seen, she is hardly the only educator facing this challenge.

Making the necessary changes to PSLF eligibility does not require a systemic overhaul either. There are practical solutions available. By using tools like IRS data, child care licensing information, self-attestation, and data collection from other education programs, we can identify the educators who have fallen through the cracks and change their trajectory.

We’ve already seen the potential effect that loan forgiveness can have. The Department of Education has already approved more than $68 billion in forgiveness to nearly 1 million borrowers since 2021.

Early childhood educators like Laverne deserve that same relief afforded to those in the nonprofit sector.

As President Biden’s Care Agenda shows, our country’s child care crisis runs deeper than any one policy can address. But expanding PSLF eligibility should be a crucial part of a new future for child care in our country.

Erica Phillips is the executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care ( NAFCC), a nationwide nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting high- quality child care by strengthening the profession of family child care for nearly one million paid home- based early learning programs. She is also a 2023 Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow.