Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, education policymakers have debated the best ways to prevent and remedy learning loss. For our nation’s youngest learners, this loss has been multilayered, with developmental and academic losses compounded by diminished access to early childhood programs themselves.

During the 2020-21 school year, for example, the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University documented historic declines in the number of children enrolled in state-funded pre-K programs, with participation in six states decreasing by 30 percent or more. That same year, the nation’s kindergarten enrollment dropped by an estimated 340,000 children, with the steepest declines demonstrated among students from low-income families.

It might be tempting to write off this particular phenomenon as a one-time reaction to the onset of a historic global public health crisis. And there may be some wisdom to this line of thinking, as recent data suggests that public school pre-K and kindergarten enrollment are both demonstrating signs of a rebound.

But the same cannot be said of the American child care industry, where both longstanding and real-time economic forces continue to conspire against providers and families, depressing enrollment and staffing well below pre-pandemic levels. There is every reason to believe America’s child care crisis will get worse before it gets better.

Even before the pandemic, child care was a textbook example of a broken market—a faulty three-legged stool in which parents often pay more for infant care than for housing or in-state college tuition, providers squeak by on the narrowest of profit margins and the whole sad affair is balanced on the backs of a low-income workforce comprised largely by women of color.