Policymaker Perspectives: Q&A with Bill de Blasio

Bill de Blasio served as mayor of New York City from 2014 to 2021, after serving as the New York City Public Advocate from 2010 to 2013, and as City Councilor representing the 39th district in Brooklyn from 2002 to 2009. In 2014, he created a groundbreaking initiative ensuring that early childhood education at the pre-Kindergarten (pre-K) level became a universal right in New York City, which now serves as a national model. During de Blasio’s time as mayor, he also focused on many other policy areas that impact children and families, including affordable housing, the minimum wage, income inequality, and New York City’s Green New Deal.

He is currently a Fall 2022 Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and here at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. As part of an upcoming series from the Center that will feature perspectives on early childhood policy from a range of contributors, we had the opportunity to hear from Mayor de Blasio on his work in early childhood, as well as current opportunities and challenges in the field. Stay tuned for future Q&As with policymakers.

What led you to identify early childhood education as a critical policy issue, both as part of your campaign and during your tenure as Mayor of New York City?

It was very personal for me. When you become a parent, there’s the realization that you only know a little bit of what you need to know. My wife and I had never thought about how difficult it would be to find a safe, quality pre-K program. Much less one that had space and that we could afford. There were so many layers of stress and confusion, and we had every conceivable advantage on our side. In the end, we were blessed to win a lottery for full day pre-K public school, and we saw the transformative impact—it felt like our children were blossoming daily. That set of personal realizations led to endless conversations with fellow parents around the massive frustration people felt. Very few people felt secure in their ability to get affordable, quality early childhood education, and that transcended across race, class, and urban and rural America.

All of that led me to dream about whether we could address this on a bigger scale. At that point, I was serving as Public Advocate, and a staffer and I literally started doing the numbers on the back of a piece of paper. And we thought, wait a minute, this could actually be done. Of course, that evolved into a political platform and a central issue in my campaign for mayor, which meant we had to outline a way to pay for it. In our case, it was a call for a tax on the wealthy, which proved to be a catalyst in drawing good attention to the issue.

If you were looking at polling, you would never have said pre-K would be the issue to lead with, but it turned out to be exactly right. It was so deeply felt and so deeply needed. It was about today and tomorrow. And we knew that a parent being able to find that education without unnecessary stress and impossible expenses was a huge consideration. What we underestimated was the tremendous familial impact. Free, universal pre-K in a quality setting made it possible for families to cover other expenses, to go back to work, and to feel good about the care their children were getting in a nurturing setting. It also resonated broadly with people’s values and became something greater: a representation of family and community. That combination of factors propelled the issue forward in New York City, and I think it has the potential to propel the field forward in many other ways.

“This is part of why I’m so hopeful about the future of early childhood. The work we did in New York pushed buttons and raised feelings far beyond what a typical political issue might, because it was about helping people be a family in the modern world. It was pro-family, pro-community, pro-work-life balance, and there was more emotional resonance than we ever could have imagined. It’s an issue whose time has come.”

 

Mayor Bill de Blasio visits Sunnyside Community Services in Queens. Credit: Rob Bennett the Office of Mayor Bill de Blasio

With that momentum as a backdrop, what do you see as some of the key opportunities and challenges in the early childhood field today?

In terms of opportunities in early childhood education, I will admit a bias for starting where we can get traction and working our way down the ladder. With kindergarten being universal across the country, the next most available option for building an established, effective model is pre-K—it matches where our capacity is most developed. Getting pre-K done nationally is within our sights, and I’m a fan of taking a universal approach. It’s fair, it’s operationally workable, and it’s sustainable—it builds strong political constituencies and makes it easier to get needed financial and governmental support. It also represents a tremendous opportunity to support children’s development at a crucial moment of their growth. In my mind, it is literally the best way to spend your money.

Of course, we have to be mindful of the profound challenges ahead in terms of government budgets. We need to think about politics and morality together here—as well as what science tells us about how important this is for children’s early development—to build constant, deeper support for early childhood, and create an arc where we’re going to ever deepen our commitment to reaching each child.

In the public sector, as well as in the caring professions, we also have the challenge of being used to scarcity, which means we often think through that prism. We focus on what can’t be done rather than what can, and it becomes a self-limiting practice. We have to aim high and start with an open mindset so we can push into new territory. I would also emphasize to anyone trying to make progress in this space that public support is strong. Early childhood is a resonant, powerful issue across every spectrum. There’s a reason early childhood programs and universal pre-K have had major successes in both red and blue states. The moral and political ramifications of helping our youngest children, as well as the strong science base demonstrating the potential for impact on this front, create much more opportunity for consensus than you have on most issues.

This is part of why I’m so hopeful about the future of early childhood. The work we did in New York pushed buttons and raised feelings far beyond what a typical political issue might, because it was about helping people be a family in the modern world. It was pro-family, pro-community, pro-work-life balance, and there was more emotional resonance than we ever could have imagined. It’s an issue whose time has come.

“If we have attainable goals in terms of the built environment, in terms of health care services, and other sectors focused on kids at the youngest level, setting up a series of potential wins is a great way to build the bigger trajectory for things that will take years and even decades to unfold. It’s about identifying the actionable steps that can keep us moving in the right direction.”

 

Mayor Bill de Blasio visits Sunnyside Community Services in Queens. Credit: Rob Bennett the Office of Mayor Bill de Blasio

Beyond the realm of early care and education, there are many sectors where policy shapes the environments where children live, play, and learn, including everything from housing security, to air pollution, to green space. Can you speak to how you navigated this broader, multi-sector ecosystem and potential strategies to engage a range of stakeholders in this space?

As mayor, I spent a lot of time in communities, and I saw clearly the intersectionality of systems affecting disadvantaged young children. One interesting model where we invested deeply and that is gaining resonance is the community school model. We got stakeholders across the board—from the private sector to civic and community organizations—to partner in support of raising student achievement, developing schools as a neighborhood hub that provide access to a wide range of programs and services that support the whole child, engage families, and strengthen the community. This is a localized example, but a worthy one in terms of the powerful, positive potential of those intersectional dynamics. Again, these are very accessible ideas that are gaining currency, and it feels totally achievable to bring together a wide range of stakeholders to provide active, visible, cross-sector support.

At the same time, this type of effort is labor intensive. And, in a crowded policy space where the competition for attention is stiff, it can be difficult for folks to think about how to move great ideas forward from point A to point B. To advance big ideas, we need to talk about the work plan and the sheer intensity of effort that is needed to get there. We have to be honest about what it takes to really get stakeholders to pay attention and sustain that attention, but it can be done.

On a more cautionary note, while we’d all love to cure the world in one fell swoop, that’s not an accessible notion to the vast majority of people, nor is it functionally doable. We need to acknowledge the interrelatedness of the early childhood ecosystem and all the many sectors that play a role, but not in a way that makes people throw up their hands at the overwhelming totality of all the related factors. Thinking like a mayor, I want to help our children, but I cannot single-handedly fix the problems of transportation, pollution, or healthcare accessibility overnight. What is viable is to address leading edge elements in tangible, timely ways.

Pre-K was roundly criticized as unreachable and unrealistic when I first proposed it in 2012. But we did it, and when you do something that’s not supposed to be doable, it opens minds and engages people and makes them want to take the next step. Once we got pre-K in place we instantly started thinking about 3-K.

In that vein, if we have certain attainable goals in terms of the built environment, in terms of health care services, and other sectors focused on kids at the youngest level, setting up a series of potential wins is a great way to build the bigger trajectory for things that will take years and even decades to unfold. It’s about identifying the actionable steps that can keep us moving in the right direction.

In the same way that you identified pre-K as a space where you could take those actionable steps, can you speak to similar successes you have seen in the policy space in terms of reducing inequities in the built and natural environments where families are raising young children?

Of all the things you could do for a child, providing housing security is one of the most important. We saw yet another very sad report recently, showing the high number of kids in New York City who are either in shelters or housing insecure. One of the things we did during my administration to tackle this issue was to reduce evictions. We created something called right to counsel, which provided a lawyer for any family with an income under $50,000 if they faced a potentially illegal eviction. By providing city financing for legal help for these families, we immediately reduced the number of evictions and protected families who otherwise would have been homeless. While we couldn’t provide an immediate solution to the very complex problem of homelessness, we implemented a discrete and attainable policy that kept thousands of kids in their homes. It took a financial investment along with the very real work that comes with a novel legal and legislative approach. Ultimately, it was an attainable step that provided encouragement in thinking about further next steps.

In terms of creating greater equity in the built environment, we also started a parks equity initiative. New York City has some wonderful marquee parks. And, while they are certainly available to everyone, the spaces that impact kids’ lives are typically the neighborhood parks that no one outside a given neighborhood has ever heard of. Consequently, those local parks often didn’t have as much opportunity for funding, and they didn’t have the types of things you see in some of the more prominent parks. So, we had a real mismatch—the kids in greatest need for whom that relatively small green space was pivotal to their lives and their development, were left with underinvested parks. To flip the script, we devoted a substantial part of our budget to those neighborhood parks. These were spaces that, typically, hadn’t seen any maintenance or updating for 30 years or more, and we devoted much needed resources to make real improvements.

These are just a couple of examples, but hopefully they make the point that these things are doable. To make it happen, you have to commit to a reprioritization of existing resources or find a pathway to new ones. You have to show the constituencies involved that something can change. And people in the policy space have to remember, we can’t fall into the trap of just talking to ourselves—we have to understand what people need and bring them along with us. And when you show people that things can change, even in small ways, it gets everyone excited to do even more.

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