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Comment by otoburb | Hacker News Reader

>>I simply cannot imagine (I mean those words very literally) the horrid state of affairs of making six figures and still being on the verge of poverty.

NYC is rolling out free schooling for children aged 3 and up, known as Pre-3K[1]. It's not a full solution, but it helps alleviate some of the childcare costs in the early years.

The article mentioned: "One semi-local daycare in Manhattan quoted me a waitlist two years deep." Some daycares are in high-demand, but there are also other decent private daycares where the waitlist is (much) shorter or non-existent. While the caregiver outlay is believable, the waitlist datapoint sounds like it was cherry-picked. Depending on the age their child, the author might have had access to free public Pre-3K or Pre-K programs too.

[1] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/enrollment/enroll-grade-by-grade...

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Day cares with wait lists is also something I have never heard of even though I have children and gone through the day care thing and socialize with people who have children. That is so unbelievably foreign to me.

In my experience it's not limited to large metro populations with high COL. We live in a mid-sized Canadian city (~400k population) with a relatively low cost of living and the preferred daycares here all have waiting lists. Basically, if you don't get on them soon after your child is born (or about 12 months before you intend them to start), you'll be left with a lot less choice when they're ready to start.

It is basically limited to places where child care is a) heavily regulated, and b) left up to private providers. Two obvious solutions present themselves: de-regulate and let the kiddos sink or swim; b) have the government either pay for daycare or run them. There are probably others, but no one in Ontario at least seems to have figured one out.

Hard to see either solution coming into play anytime soon. Option (a) is likely out due to recent-enough-to-be-remembered tragedies pushing regulation in the opposite direction and Option (b) seems antithetical to the recently-elected government's style. Also, incorporating this promise into the NDP's election platform didn't seem to help them much. As you can tell, I'm not optimistic ;)

Education in NYC specifically is a clusterfuck of school choice, because school choice doesn't scale up to a school district that has a million-plus kids.

As a result of citywide school choice, people don't really get gentrified out by parents looking for good schools. But many kids will also have really long commute time, and applying for middle and high schools is like a mini college application process, and only people with the time and money can truly navigate it.

I think pretty much any school district with a million+ children is going to have issues, whether school choice is implemented, or not.

Mayor De Blasio kicked off an integration effort[1] in Brooklyn with plans to roll something similar in the other NYC school districts in an effort to counteract the mini-college application process, with mixed reactions depending on where your child would have placed. Reforms are under way for both middle and high school admissions.

[1] https://nypost.com/2018/09/20/de-blasio-kills-admissions-sta...

There will always be issues, but school choice resulted in

- general confusion; the guide to high schools, for example, is bigger than the Yellow Pages, and that's with all the information of a high school summarized into a single-sided page. Couple that with Bloomberg splitting failing schools with five schools in the same building and it's just far too overwhelming.

- horrible commute times. Schools were designed to serve their local neighborhoods and usually aren't placed well, particularly in the outer boroughs. If you have to go to a school other than your neighborhood school it can be quite the schlep, especially once you factor in start times. It's impossible to design start times that work for everyone when students come across the entire city, and the lack of coordination also affects things like the overburdened public transport, which gets slammed when schools let out.

- extreme stress on parents and students. You have to go around and tour schools. You have to meet with teachers and principals. You have to attend multiple massive school fairs with staff pushing their schools on you. It's like a college application process, already stressful enough, except you're doing this to children going through puberty. It's absolute madness for even wealthy parents with time to do all of this; working class people working long hours or odd hours or multiple jobs basically don't have a shot. And can you imagine what not getting into your top choices does to kids' well-being?

If school choice were limited to the borough level, it would be more manageable. But at the city level it's far too much.

I live in a 60k population town, and there's a waiting list for my son's day care.

It was also totally foreign for us too, but after the initial shock wore off we put in some time and found other options quickly enough.

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