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department of education
Will Employers Invest in Our Kids? An Interview with Nancy Folbre
Children are getting more expensive for parents even as investment in future workers is becoming less cost-effective for employers. What should be done about it?
Jan 11, 2026
The Trump administration has suspended over $10 billion of federal childcare funds for five Democratic-led states over alleged fraud. So what if childcare in the United States is already outrageously expensive, much higher than in other developed countries? And why is it that childcare in the US is so expensive?
Socialist and feminist economist Nancy Folbre sheds light on these questions in the interview that follows by pointing out the various changes that have taken place over time in the organization of social reproduction and argues, in turn, that universal childcare, an idea that is becoming increasingly popular with voters across many parts of the United States, is very much needed.
Nancy Folbre is professor emerita of economics and director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
C. J. Polychroniou: You’ve written widely about the rising price of parenting. Despite concerns about a national birthrate that is now below replacement level, there seems to be relatively little public effort to increase economic support for parents and children in this country. Why?
Nancy Folbre: The undeclared wars the Trump administration is conducting include a brazen process of reducing public support for the next generation. This process began last spring when billionaire Elon Musk spearheaded budget cuts and layoffs in programs benefiting children and began dismantling the Department of Education. It escalated in the first week of 2026 when the administration used accusations of fraud from a partisan video of childcare centers in Minnesota as an excuse to freeze federal childcare funds to five Democratic states.
The strategy is transparent: Tar all social spending with a sticky claim of fraud and abuse. This includes spending on parents and children, already hurt by cuts to Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. These cuts have reduced the affordability of family care for all but the affluent, making a mockery of the Trump administration’s promises of prosperity for all.
An understanding of the deeper forces driving this strategy requires a deep dive into historical changes in the organization of our social reproduction.
A similar logic applies in a different direction to investments in us and our children—why risk them if they are not cost-effective? Robots may soon be cheaper, and they never go on strike OR vote.
Children are getting more expensive for parents even as investment in future workers is becoming less cost-effective for employers. Economic pressures became evident centuries ago when child labor was outlawed and technological change increased the demand for skilled labor. This shift in demand helped incentivize investments in public health and education that were financed by higher taxes. The need for future workers—and soldiers—also intensified the need for wages sufficient to support at least a modicum of family care.
While employers constantly sought ways to reduce labor costs, their need for an ample supply of skilled labor at least partially aligned their incentives with those of workers themselves through support for the so-called welfare state (better termed a “social investment” state) that helped develop and maintain the capabilities of the working population.
Fast forward to the present. The huge amounts of money being invested in artificial intelligence represent a new bet on reducing labor costs both directly (through reduced employment and wages) and indirectly (through reduced investment in health, education, and social services).
A recent Wall Street Journal headline put it this way: “AI Job Losses Are Coming, Tech Execs Say. The Question: Who’s Most at Risk?” The answer: most of us—because general artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to reduce private incentives to invest in humans rather than data centers. Elon Musk, who spearheaded efforts to cut federal spending in early 2025, is happily promoting Tesla’s new Optimus robot.
C. J. Polychroniou: You seem to be suggesting that class conflict affects public policies, which affect demographic outcomes (and vice versa). How do most economists think about these issues?
Nancy Folbre: Mainstream economists seldom pay much attention to collective identities or interests such as those based on class, gender, citizenship, or parenthood. Their general confidence in the efficiency of market forces makes them hopeful that that the labor market will adjust to changing prices—that new jobs will replace those rendered obsolete. However, college-educated, entry-level workers in the US are already experiencing diminished job prospects. Some economists predict that the “adjustment costs” will be high—a polite way of saying that the younger generation is in for an unpleasant economic shock.
Some ideological adjustment is also underway. The theory of “human capital” successfully promoted the view that the labor market would reward the skills represented by a college degree, reinforcing the claim that employees are generally paid according to the value of what they produce. The very term “human capital” suggests that there is no real distinction between capitalists and workers—everyone can be a capitalist by investing in their own earning power.
This utopian fantasy has long been countered by evidence that the environment people grow up in—including many factors well beyond their own control—shapes their economic trajectory. The fantasy is countered even more powerfully by evidence that the returns to a college education are now declining for individuals coming from low-income families. The surge of investment in AI raises the distinct possibility that the supply of “human capital” is likely to further exceed the demand for it, threatening downward mobility for a segment of the paid labor force once considered relatively secure.
Of course, even conservative economists recognize that a good education—from preschool to college--does more than merely increase lifetime earnings. It enhances the skills that people need to manage their own lives—skills like troubleshooting phones, making good decisions about what to buy, how to save, how to vote, and how to parent. Well-educated people live longer—and not just because they tend to earn more money.
But these benefits are not as profitable as increased productivity for a private firm.
Because they have characteristics of a public good, their economic contribution is difficult to measure, much less privately capture. Policies such as universal childcare, paid family or sick leave, and options to engage in employment from home yield significant economic returns, but these are not channeled directly to those who pay for them.
Standard economics textbooks note that firms have economic incentives to pollute the environment if this increases profitability, even if future inhabitants of the planet will pay a high price. A similar logic applies in a different direction to investments in us and our children—why risk them if they are not cost-effective? Robots may soon be cheaper, and they never go on strike OR vote.
C. J. Polychroniou: It sounds like you’re arguing that the theory of “human capital” no longer holds much water. But there are some economists out there who have articulated larger criticisms of capitalist institutions in general. How do these criticisms connect the rising private cost of children, fertility decline, and the possible obsolescence of the white-collar labor force?
Nancy Folbre: Kind of a long story, but I’ll keep it short! Economists like myself, influenced by socialist and feminist ideas, highlight the institutional arrangements that shape the distribution of the costs of raising children and the reproduction of human society itself. In many precapitalist societies, parents enjoyed at least partial payback for the costs of childrearing, as adult children contributed to family income and the support of their elders. Capitalist institutions encouraged labor mobility and reliance on individual earnings, weakening such family and community-based transfers.
Democratic engagement and bargaining over the role of the state gradually led to a different system of intergenerational transfers, taxing employers and the working-age population to help finance public education for the young and pensions and healthcare for the elderly.
This institutional compromise helped stabilize the process of “social reproduction” but also led to unequal distribution of its costs. It allowed employers to keep their contributions to the production of the next generation relatively low. It delivered fewer benefits to parents (those devoting time and money to producing new workers and taxpayers) than to non-parents. It also reinforced a gender division of labor that imposed a disproportionate share of the private costs of family care on women.
We can’t continue to treat care as a kind of expensive hobby rather than a productive contribution to our collective future.
These inequalities amplified increases in the private cost of raising children (for mothers in particular), encouraging efforts to limit family size. New technologies, increased demand for skills, and opportunities for employment outside the home also played an obvious role.
Until recently, fertility decline was considered an economic boon, allowing more women to enter paid employment and promoting the growth of Gross Domestic Product. As is now widely recognized, however, below-replacement fertility poses problems of its own. When women bear less than about 2.1 children over their lifetime, they don’t generate enough surviving children to “replace” their biological parents.
If this rate persists, the size of the youngest generation declines steadily over time, increasing the share of the elderly population relative to the employment-age, tax-paying population. The economic burden of increased old-age dependency increases political conflict over who should pay the costs—and can intensify the economic stresses of caring for younger dependents as well.
Reduction in the size of the global population offers some potential benefits, given current threats to the global environment (not to mention the dicey future of decent jobs). But if we prove unable to get back up to replacement levels of fertility at some point in the future, we will render ourselves extinct. I’d call that a pretty acute crisis of social reproduction.
C. J. Polychroniou: How can we avert such a crisis? Are you suggesting that we adopt pronatalist policies? How do responses in other countries differ from those in the US?
Nancy Folbre: No. We’re not in a state of demographic emergency and we don’t need to encourage a higher birth rate. Much of the global population is suffering from lack of decent employment. And the number of children in the US harmed by poverty makes investment in child health and education a much higher priority than increasing births here.
However, investments in child “quality” can help stabilize and strengthen private commitments. Many other countries are implementing policies designed to make family care more affordable. As is well-known, most affluent European countries have put such policies in place. South Korea began providing universal childcare services in 2013 and is now increasing parental leave allowances. Canada is a more nearby example, with its rollout of a new federal childcare system that will offer universal childcare services at a private cost of $10 a day. Within the US, both New Mexico and New York City are setting an example with new initiatives.
The US as a whole is lagging beyond for several reasons. Racial and ethnic divisions, regional differences, and exceptionally high levels of earnings inequality have weakened the solidarity needed to build a “pro-care” coalition. Imperialist rhetoric and illegal military actions have literally bloodied the water.
As I argue in my forthcoming book, Making Care Work, we need to do a better job explaining the public benefits of investment in human capabilities, including the care of people experiencing illness, frailty, or disability. We can’t continue to treat care as a kind of expensive hobby rather than a productive contribution to our collective future.
Let’s talk about how to move forward in another interview—I think that a universal basic income will be part of the solution, even though it will face vehement opposition. Will employers invest in our kids? Only if we can make them.
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Children Are in the Crosshairs of Trump and McMahon's Attack on Public Education
The pair's efforts to return education to the states appear motivated not by improving educational outcomes, but by creating tax breaks for the rich while privatizing public education and weakening teachers’ unions, a pillar of the Democratic Party.
Sep 27, 2025
After surviving a contentious US Senate confirmation hearing, Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO turned secretary of education, received a profound first directive from President Donald Trump: “Put yourself out of a job.” Like other appointees, Mrs. McMahon has done exactly as ordered by a president who accepts nothing less.
As Secretary, McMahon has championed Trump’s executive order dismantling her department and delivering its K-12 responsibilities to state and local governments. She has fired 1,315 department employees, targeting jobs in the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences, groups that investigate civil rights complaints in schools and provide advice on best practices in teaching. As a result, the department’s staff has been nearly halved since January.
And now Secretary McMahon is spiking the ball in a 50-state tour called “Returning Education to the States.” More than a celebration of the administration’s defeat of brainy bureaucrats at the Department of Education, the tour touts the passage of the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA) as part of the president’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The act creates a national opt-in voucher system for students to attend private or religious schools, to be funded by an extraordinarily generous dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donations to Scholarship Granting Organizations.
The problem is that in these related cases—the attacks on the department of education and the creation of a national voucher system—Secretary McMahon and President Trump are not acting in the interests of students, nor do they seem to be thinking about them at all. These efforts to return education to the states appear motivated not by improving educational outcomes, as we’ll explore, but by creating tax breaks for the rich while privatizing public education and weakening teachers’ unions, a pillar of the Democratic Party.
But First, a Little Backstory...
To fully grasp the stakes of the attack on the Department of Education, we must remember why the federal government got involved in education in the first place. Conservatives rightly note that the Constitution does not mention education, leaving it instead as a reserved power for the states. They’re also correct that despite providing only 10% of total public school funding, the role of the federal government in education has grown significantly over the past half-century.
Yet federal power in education grew neither by accident nor by conspiracy, but in response to systemic failures that states could not and in some cases would not address.
In 1965, following the Civil Rights Act and amid the War on Poverty, the Johnson administration sought to tackle two forms of intransigence: the South’s resistance to school integration and the persistence of poverty amid plenty. A former schoolteacher himself, President Lyndon Johnson proposed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which directed federal funds, called Title I, to low-income schools and students. Crucially, it tied Title I funding to compliance with desegregation orders. This strings-attached model became the foundation of the federal approach to K-12 education and is critical to understanding its outsized voice.
When Secretary McMahon announced that her “Returning Education to the States” tour would kick off in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, it sounded like yet another state’s rights dog whistle.
Flash forward a decade: When President Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education in 1979, conservatives saw it as the fulfillment of a politically motivated campaign promise to secure support from the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the country. Politics was surely part of the calculus, which conservatives have long resented.
Yet beyond the politics of the moment, the new department was also created to increase efficiency and effectiveness, allowing the federal government to consolidate its education-related functions into a single agency. Navigating the two largest streams of K-12 funding—Title I and IDEA—would be less complicated under its purview. Continuing the strings-attached model, the department established an Office of Civil Rights to investigate whether schools receiving funds were in compliance with federal civil rights laws. But this last piece represented a continuation of federal oversight that some states resented, especially across the South.
So in 1980, when Ronald Reagan campaigned against the new department and called for returning control to the states, he appealed—intentionally or not—to two groups. The first were earnest conservatives who, after decades of government expansion, sought a renewed federalism that would respect greater state and local autonomy. The second were those who felt the federal government had overreached, in schools and elsewhere, by enforcing civil rights laws in the South. Reagan’s advisors seemed to understand this double-meaning and tapped into it with dog whistles, directing the Gipper to open his 1980 campaign with a “state’s rights” speech in Neshoba, Mississippi, a town made infamous by the 1964 murders of three prominent civil rights activists.
President Reagan was ultimately unable to get rid of the Department of Education. Instead, Reagan decided that if he couldn’t kill the department, he would render it useless by appointing leaders, like Secretary William Bennett, who did not believe in its purpose. This was the template for Trump’s appointment of both Betsy Devos and Linda McMahon.
Back to the Present
When Secretary McMahon announced that her “Returning Education to the States” tour would kick off in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, it sounded like yet another state’s rights dog whistle. Compounding that feeling is the fact that the secretary’s layoffs in March targeted the department’s Office for Civil Rights, leaving it unable to perform its oversight and investigative duties and leading to a long list of civil rights cases that may never be reviewed.
But more than civil rights oversight is at stake. The Institute of Education Sciences, which researches best practices in teaching and provides comparative data about educational outcomes, was also targeted in the Secretary’s layoffs. The institute additionally oversees the National Assessment of Educational Programs (NAEP) tests, which are used to gauge academic achievement by various measures across the country.
None of this is in the interests of students.
President Trump and Secretary McMahon have shown no consideration of the fact that, as research suggests, many of these programs will fail students, affecting millions of children nationwide.
The growing backlog of cases in the Office for Civil Rights does nothing to protect vulnerable students, just as the effective shuttering of the Institute of Education Sciences does nothing to improve teaching and learning. But rendering the Office for Civil Rights useless does give cover to states to do as they please—and if doing so hurts test scores, a dataless Institute of Education Sciences will lack the information critical for accountability.
Secretary McMahon and President Trump have also expressed interest in turning Title I, the largest stream of federal money for K-12 education, into block grants. Doing so, as Project 2025 advises, would give states greater discretion over how the funds are used. Without vigorous oversight, it is likely that some states would not direct the money toward low-income schools and students. The president has already issued guidance for how states can redirect Title I money into voucher programs and, according to Politico, has worked with House Republicans to propose a $5.2 billion cut to the program for fiscal year 2026.
But the most immediate push for vouchers comes in an overlooked part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” called the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA). It establishes the first national voucher system, allowing students in states that opt in to use vouchers to send students to private or religious schools. The program is funded through federal tax credit. These breaks are an unusually generous dollar-for-dollar credit on any donation to Scholarship Granting Organizations. And, shockingly, donations can include stocks that will be valued at their pre-capital gains amount, meaning donors will save more from the donation than they would make from cashing out the stock.
More than an appealing program for the wealthy, the ECCA voucher program is politically appealing to Republicans because it undermines public schools—and their teachers’ unions—in states that opt in. When students accept vouchers to leave for private schools, the traditional public school they previously attended loses that money, forcing them to continue providing the same services for all students but with less funding. And while conservatives frame this as “school choice,” the choice lies equally with private schools that, unlike public schools that are required to educate every student, have the right to reject applicants on the basis of talent, character, and even disability—leaving public schools to educate only the most challenging students.
In other words, the program sets up public schools to fail—and when they do, they will likely be blamed for their own failure, leading to additional disinvestment and greater failure.
One thing is clear: The ECCA voucher program, like the rest of Trump and McMahon’s K-12 policy, isn’t about helping students, nor is it even about education; it’s about fattening pockets and weakening political opponents. The tax credit is a boondoggle for the wealthy at a cost of billions to the public. But the credit is also a tool for attacking a pillar of the Democratic Party by undermining traditional public schools and teachers’ unions. Children are in the crosshairs of this battle but under Trump, the Republican Party is unwilling to value them above entrenching their own political power and financial interests.
It is a tragic moment in K-12 education. To be clear, there are valid debates about school choice and vouchers. There have even been successes in certain targeted voucher studies, and we should learn from them. But overwhelmingly, recent studies show that voucher programs have yet to scale well and have consistently led to lower test scores. Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio have large, longstanding voucher programs. In the past decade, each has witnessed a decline in math and reading scores for students entering from public school.
In 2016, researchers at Tulane University found that voucher users who performed “at roughly the 50th percentile” before entering the program fell “24 percentile points below their control group counterparts in math after one year.” Martin West, professor of education policy at Harvard and a 2012 campaign adviser to Mitt Romney, described the results as “as large as any” he’s “seen in the literature.” Results are similarly poor in Ohio, where the erstwhile voucher-supporting Thomas B. Fordham Institute concluded, “Students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.”
Even in the best cases of scaled-up experiments, as in Florida and Arizona, results are mixed. Some studies suggest slight academic improvement while others range from no benefit to moderate academic decline. And yet without nuance or humility, the Trump administration is all-in on vouchers as the future of education, at least in the Republican-led states. President Trump and Secretary McMahon have shown no consideration of the fact that, as research suggests, many of these programs will fail students, affecting millions of children nationwide.
If the administration truly had a non-ideological interest in vouchers as part of a commitment to improving educational outcomes, they would recognize the shortcomings of many recent voucher experiments and propose more targeted voucher programs that expand on areas where they’ve shown some success.
But they haven’t done that because it’s not about students. And for all the wrong reasons, we’re about to scale vouchers across much of the country at a time when the Department of Education, the leading K-12 oversight body, is on life support.
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'We Will Fight': Denver Schools Defy Trump's Attacks on Trans Students Despite Threats to Federal Funds
"The district has made clear it will not fold quietly, signaling that some institutions still have the resolve to stand against a federal campaign of erasure," wrote one LGBTQ+ rights journalist.
Sep 03, 2025
As educational institutions around the country capitulate, Denver's public school system said Tuesday that it would defy demands from the Trump administration to discriminate against transgender students even if it means losing federal funds.
Alex Marrero, the superintendent of Denver Public Schools (DPS), said the school "will protect all of their students from this hostile administration," by refusing to implement a ban on gender-neutral bathrooms mandated by Trump's Department of Education.
On Thursday, the department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) sent Denver Public Schools an email demanding that the school remove a multi-stall, gender-neutral restroom at one of its high schools, which it claimed violated Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.
As Erin Reed, an independent journalist who covers LGBTQ+ rights, notes, the facility built by DPS and other schools is "similar to facilities in major airports, European cities, and increasingly across the United States." The school, meanwhile, has said that the facility was requested by students themselves and has 12-foot high partitions to protect their privacy.
The OCR went further. To be compliant with Title IX, it said, the school also had to "adopt biology-based definitions for the words 'male' and 'female'," meaning they needed to classify transgender students by their biological sex at birth rather than their preferred identities, including banning them from restrooms that do not correspond to their biological sex.
The Trump administration also called on the school to eliminate components of its "LGBTQ+ Toolkit," which includes guidance on how students and faculty can create a welcoming environment for their trans peers. Among other things, the document encourages members of the school community to step in to stop bullying of LGBTQ+ students, respect the preferred pronouns of all students, and for faculty to enforce dress codes in a gender-neutral way.
As Reed put it, the department was effectively "claiming that Title IX actually mandates discrimination against transgender students."
If DPS refused to comply within 10 days, the department threatened to strip the district of federal funding, which makes up 7% of the school's annual budget, according to Chalkbeat. A large portion of that federal money goes toward low-cost school lunches for poor children.
In a statement issued Tuesday, DPS's school board and administration put out a statement "disagreeing unequivocally" with the government's interpretation of the law.
"Title IX permits schools to provide sex-separate restrooms. It does not require that to be the only option," DPS argued. "The interpretation put forward by OCR would undercut our equity commitments, contradict our mission, harm the very students we are entrusted to support, and would have a devastating impact on East High School and the broader LGBTQ+ community. What matters most is that students are safe, have privacy, and can learn without fear."
"The decision to implement gender-neutral restrooms at East followed direct feedback from LGBTQ+ students who reported they did not feel safe," the statement continued. "For these students, access to a restroom where they feel secure is not symbolic. It is about dignity, health, and the ability to learn. When students speak, we listen and we act."
Superintendent Marrero, meanwhile, put out a short video on Instagram expressing his support for the district's LGBTQ+ students.
"As you might have seen in the news, the federal government has decided to take a firm stance and have us roll back our support to the LGBTQ+ community, and of course, we're not having it," Marrero said. "We will continue to stand in solidarity, and as you engage this weekend and beyond, I just wanted to let you know that we got you, and everything is going to be ok."
In a statement published alongside the video, Marrero wrote: "We will fight. In the courts, if we must. In the public square, when necessary. Always in partnership with those who believe that every student deserves to show up to school ready to learn, free from fear."
With this pledge to stand by its LGBTQ+ students, DPS joined five school districts in Virginia that last month responded with similar defiance when the Trump administration ordered them to stop allowing trans students to use bathrooms matching their gender. Those districts—which include Loudoun, Arlington, and Fairfax Counties—have launched a lawsuit against the Trump administration to keep their federal funding.
"Elite institutions like Brown, Columbia, and Penn—as well as multiple hospitals serving transgender youth—have already capitulated, signing away protections through bathroom and sports bans or cutting off medical care entirely," Reed wrote. "Denver Public Schools, by contrast, has drawn a line. With the Department of Education's deadline looming next Monday, the district has made clear it will not fold quietly, signaling that some institutions still have the resolve to stand against a federal campaign of erasure."
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