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After a whirlwind week of sweeping new policy directives from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on issues ranging from housing to junk fees, on Thursday New York Governor Kathy Hochul joined the mayor to announce a new statewide universal childcare proposal.
The plan, which will require approval from the state legislature, would direct funding to New York City’s under-resourced preschool program for three- and four-year-olds to make it truly universal, expand to include children statewide, and launch a new program for two-year-olds.
This news comes less than four months after New Mexico’s announcement of its own statewide universal childcare plan, which Roosevelt Program Manager Lena Bilik discussed in a September blog post. In the absence of federal support, these state-level programs reflect the increasingly urgent need for government intervention in the cost-of-living crisis, where the childcare market failure has burdened families and providers alike with unmanageable costs.
Bilik’s previous research on childcare lays out several principles that should guide the rollout of any universal public childcare system:
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