Taking Care of Kids--and Business

You love little kids. You’ve read the new brain research, and you recognize that a child’s first years are critical to future growth and development. You understand that with the majority of mothers--not to mention fathers--in the workplace, more and more children will need quality day care and preschools. Luckily, you are willing to work for a ludicrously low salary and benefits that are measly at best, nonexistent at worst.

In short, you are a perfect early-childhood educator.

But wait: How are you on spreadsheets?

This is no joke. Caring for young children is way more than wiping runny noses and reciting the ABCs. These days, said Kristen Johnson, “in order to run any qualified early-childhood program or agency, you need to understand the business world.”

Johnson, 23, has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, four years of experience as a day-care teacher, a stint in a Head Start program and a sojourn as an advocate for disabled children. Along with a fierce dedication to small humans, this background makes her typical of two dozen or so graduate students in a highly unusual effort at the University of Pennsylvania that merges the School of Education with the prestigious Wharton School of Business.

The 8-year-old partnership is the brainchild of Penn education professor Joan Goodman, who realized that, as a profession, early-childhood education was “not really professionalized.” Other programs around the country might permit or even encourage the occasional business-curriculum elective, Goodman said, but she could find no other model for a formal partnership between a business school and an education department.

It is not always the smoothest of marriages. The two fields reflect sensationally disparate value systems. Businesspeople, on the one hand, see themselves as running the world--and if the world is viewed in profit shares, they may be right. Early-childhood education specialists regard themselves as agents of social change. They are quite clear in their estimation of the captains of corporate America. “They see them as the forces of evil,” Goodman said.

But even the most devout educational idealist must face marketplace realities. More than 70% of mothers of children age 6 or younger work outside the home, and new welfare laws are pushing more moms into the work force every day. Demand for child care, therefore, is at an all-time high. Figures from the Child Care Information Exchange in Redmond, Wash., show that one out of every two children younger than 6 is enrolled in an early-childhood center or family child-care home, or is cared for by a baby sitter.

Child care costs vary wildly, as does quality. Even the definition of “professional” child care is somewhat murky, said Barbara Willer of the National Assn. for the Education of Young Children in Washington. “In part it’s a self-definition,” Willer noted, encompassing--among other options--group settings, baby sitters, schools, independent for-profit facilities, independent nonprofit centers, for-profit chain centers, church-housed child care and publicly funded programs such as Head Start.

On-site corporate child care represents the fastest-growing segment of this diverse field, said Roger Neugebauer, at the Child Care Information Center. Recently, the burgeoning field has attracted investor attention, or as Neugebauer’s industry trend report put it, “Wall Street has discovered Sesame Street.” Eight of the top 20 for-profit child care organizations are publicly traded, said Neugebauer--compared with just one that was publicly traded three years ago.

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Still, whether at for-profit or nonprofit facilities, teacher salaries remain “our Achilles’ heel,” Neugebauer lamented. Across the country, salaries for early-childhood teachers average between $12,000 and $15,000 per year.

Benefits are poor, turnover is high and the field is almost exclusively female, making it an easy mark for the dreaded description of “women’s work”--jobs that most people believe ought to be done for free. The public perception still paints early-childhood teachers as glorified baby sitters.

Or, as the parents of 31-year-old Debbie Coppola gasped when she left her cushy job with an international pharmaceutical company to enroll in the Penn-Wharton program, “Playing with kids all day, that’s a career?”

But running a day-care center or a preschool is very much a business, said Wharton School of Business professor Beth Feldman Brandt. Brandt teaches “Entrepreneurship and Organization,” a required course for early-childhood graduate students here. In her weekly class, Brandt stresses marketing, economic principles, management, fund-raising, financial planning, human resources and the application of business technology to a classroom.

“What this class does is give them a survey of business topics they should know about in a year--realizing that I can’t make you an accountant in a year, but I can give you enough,” Brandt said.

The very vernacular of Brandt’s class has a professional tone. She speaks, for example, of “the child care market,” “the child care industry” and “demand demographics.” Her students must create a new business, devise a strategy and form partnerships. They study the wide variety of state and local regulations governing child care operations. They discuss licensing, a special concern when children are involved, and how the state or locally mandated ratio of teachers to occupants--that is, children--affects revenues. Caring for children is labor-intensive, with very few corners to cut, and so, Brandt concludes, “you can’t get really efficient at child care.”

By design or by necessity--often by both--many who work with children from birth to age 8 will also become advocates, said graduate student Jennifer Gillen, 26. “We’re going to have to be teachers, administrators, advocates and people who work in policy,” she said. “If you go into this field, I don’t think you choose one path. I think you choose them all.”

This assessment is entirely shared by Goodman, a psychologist who is at work on a book about moral education. For one thing, said Goodman, “I think you need a professional voice to help persuade people that the early years and young children are critical; you ignore them at your peril. People who are well-informed do a better job of bringing home the fact that we are behind every other industrialized nation in this area.”

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As she looked at what was happening to the work force early in this decade, Goodman said, it became obvious that “there was an important role for someone who understands the issues of child care from the ground up.” She envisioned a cadre of early-childhood specialists who were “well-informed about child development and the changing dynamics in families--and who combined that with a broader understanding of the economic, political and social systems in which child care has to be played out.”

Early-childhood education, she decided, needed to be legitimized. And so, in a moment of hubris, she left her tiny office in the Ed School building, where cinder blocks are sloshed with mud-colored paint, and went over to the Wharton School, where professors enjoy private elevators and suites decorated to impress the most prosperous of CEOs. U.S. News & World Report regularly ranks Wharton as the top school in its field, and little wonder. Graduates waltz into salaries that start upwards of $70,000 a year--more than five times that of the average child care worker. The place feels like an incubator for investment bankers, an institution where “bottom line” is emblazoned on the family crest.

A happy coincidence for Goodman was the initiation in 1991 of the Wharton Life Integration Project, a longitudinal study that aims to help future business leaders meld work and personal life demands while also sustaining “the long-term interests of society.” Its director, occupational psychologist Stewart D. Friedman, became an early champion of the partnership with the School of Education. Goodman swiftly drafted Friedman to teach another required course, “Managing People at Work.”

In truth, Friedman took little persuading. The birth 10 years ago of his first child turned him into an instant convert to the work-family cause. Bringing business-school resources to early-childhood educators was a no-brainer to Friedman.

“From the Wharton School’s perspective, it was a way to contribute to a new and growing field,” he explained. “And it really connected with what I personally wanted to spend more time on, which is improving the quality of child care.”

Adding the Wharton School imprimatur became a draw for education school applicants, Friedman said. Graduates sing its virtues as well. The program, said Stacy Kim, helped her to understand the complexity of child care issues. Kim, now pursuing a doctorate in education at Penn, said that learning to speak the languages of educational and social service organizations, as well as employers, has helped her in conducting social policy research. Like it or not, said Kim, “you have to think like a businessperson to succeed.”

The alliance between Wharton and the Ed School has also helped to break down a sense of mutual distrust between the ambition-engulfed Wharton environment and the ideologically impassioned education school, said Goodman. A master’s degree from either program at this private university founded by Benjamin Franklin costs the same, $30,000 a year. But if in business, the master’s is almost mandatory, in early-childhood education, it is an enormous luxury.

“It’s quite a challenge to bring these groups together,” Goodman said. And yet, she added, “by bringing them together, we are mimicking the tensions that are going on in the wider world.”

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Some of what is going on is definitely topsy-turvy, said Melissa Mangano, 25, who gave up a lucrative consulting career to enter Penn’s early-childhood program. She characterized the giant salary gap as “a commentary on the roles of education and business in our society” and conceded that by leaving private industry, “I know for a fact that I gave up my earning potential to become a teacher.”

Mangano said she yearns to own and operate a nursery school. But in the meantime, in seeking early- childhood education jobs, she worries that “I might be intimidating” with the same master’s degree that makes a business-school graduate attractive.

But Sandra Burud, president of Burud & Associates, an El Segundo-based consulting firm that specializes in work and family issues, said such concerns are probably unfounded. Most employer-sponsored child care is contracted out, often to a handful of national chains, Burud said. As corporations become more involved in the early-childhood arena, “the demands on the caregiver have become much more sophisticated,” she went on. “You have to understand the business perspective.” In turn, she said, a better-trained corps of providers is “very healthy for the industry. It does in some ways legitimize the field.”

For students, the cross-fertilization of business and early- childhood education represents a heartening trend. For the first time in recent memory, a president is discussing early education in the same serious tones that are usually reserved for foreign policy. President Clinton recently proposed a $22-billion initiative for child care and, in his State of the Union message, made a point of endorsing reduced class size in the early years.

“Whether it’s just rhetoric, or whether there’s going to be follow-through, it’s encouraging,” grad student Gillen said. In either case, “I see the field as taking a more professional turn. I see the education of teachers in the field becoming more important--and, hopefully, I see the salaries starting to go up. I think we’re at a turning point, or at least at the beginning of a turning point.”