Constructing Kids as Public Goods: Ambiguous Policies in the Indirect Welfare State

Valerie Taing, University of California, Davis

How did state actors go from spending federal childcare funding on “work support” for poor parents to an “education service” for their kids? Existing studies of the influence of logics on public policies have focused on the passage of federal laws; this study reveals how state-level bureaucrats respond to federal incentives in ways that institutionalize federal logics. Using the case study of Illinois, drawing on archival records, funding data, and interviews with officials and advocates, I trace the emergence and shift toward education logics in shaping how childcare dollars are evaluated and spent from 1990 to 2022. During the 1990s, Illinois’ initial strategy to comply with the federal welfare reform law of 1996 led to negotiations between officials and advocates that prioritized voucher payments to family caregivers to achieve federal “work participation rates.” By the 2000s, policymakers’ response to federal education reform laws spawned a funding campaign to expand “universal preschool” to disadvantaged young children. Changing opportunity structures renewed negotiations between officials, advocates, and organized labor over rules and incentives rewarding caregivers as “state employees” and “educators”—aligning workfare policies with education outcomes. Consequently, the state’s pursuit of competitive federal grants inspired the creation of “early childhood” offices enlisting professionalized advocates into new government roles. Under the moral authority of early childhood officials, subsidies are evaluated according to “cost-per-child” expenditures—advocates’ preferred metric of quality for capturing increases in center-based employee salaries and benefits. Thus, the state’s evolving funding strategy gradually advantaged the transfer of resources to the center-based form of care provision—reducing the number of children and families served by policies over time. Through observing the interplay between officials’ definitions and advocates’ frames, this study contributes to broader scholarship on the growth of the indirect welfare state by identifying the cultural sources and distributional consequences of professionalization and financialization under workfare.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 69. Education and its Discontents, From Pre-K to PhD