Subscribe to Lemonada Premium for Bonus Content

On the first episode of Season 4, Gloria’s taking a look at how quality childcare and early education can help families break out of poverty, and what that means for our country’s future. First, Gloria hears from Professor Jorge Luís Garcia, an economist at Texas A&M University whose research shows that investing in young children pays dividends for decades. Then she connects with Emily Centeio, who grew up in a low-income immigrant household and now helps to run an early learning center, Epiphany, dedicated to helping families like hers break out of poverty.

Special thanks to our partners who have made this season possible!

This series is produced with Neighborhood Villages. Neighborhood Villages is a Massachusetts-based systems change nonprofit. It envisions a transformed, equitable early childhood education system that lifts up educators and sets every child and family up to thrive. In pursuit of this vision, Neighborhood Villages designs, evaluates, and scales innovative solutions to the biggest challenges faced by early childhood education providers and the children and families who rely on them, and drives policy reform through advocacy, education, and research. Visit www.neighborhoodvillages.org to learn more.

This season was made possible with generous support from Imaginable Futures, a global philanthropic investment firm working with partners to build more healthy and equitable systems, so that everyone has the opportunity to learn and realize the future they imagine. Learn more at www.imaginablefutures.com.

This series is presented by The J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation.

This series is presented by the Bainum Family Foundation. Through their WeVision EarlyEd initiative, they are elevating the voices of families and early childhood professionals, their “proximity experts,” to generate equitable and practical solutions to make the ideal vision of child care in America real. You can learn more at wevisionearlyed.org.

This season is presented by The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, an organization working to improve the lives of individuals living in poverty and experiencing disadvantage throughout the world. Learn more at hiltonfoundation.org.

Follow No One is Coming to Save Us wherever you get your podcasts, or listen ad-free on Amazon Music with your Prime Membership. You can also get premium content and behind the scenes material by subscribing to Lemonada Premium on Apple Podcasts.

Laugh, cry, be outraged, and hear solutions! Join our community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/nooneiscomingtosaveus.

Stay up to date with us on X, Facebook and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia.

Want to become a Lemonada superfan? Join us at joinsubtext.com/lemonadasuperfan.

Click this link for a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this and all other Lemonada series: lemonadamedia.com/sponsors.

To follow along with a transcript, go to lemonadamedia.com/show/ shortly after the air date.

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Gloria Riviera, Jorge, Old Recording, Recording, Emily

Recording 

Poverty perpetuates itself. Children are inheritors of poverty’s curse and not its creators. We don’t intend to lose generations of our children to this enemy of the human race. We know that the government cannot raise or Love A Child, but that is not what we’re supposed to do. What the government is supposed to do is to help to create the conditions and give people the tools that will enable them to raise and love their children while successfully participating in the American workplace. Every dollar we invest in high quality early childhood education can save more than $7 later on by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime. We know this works. I was a single dad for five years raising two kids. Had a lot of help, though, but middle class and working folks shouldn’t have to pay more than 7% of their income to care for the young children. My plan would cut the cost of child care and half for most families.

 

Gloria Riviera 

You just heard almost 65 years of presidents telling the American people that we need to invest in child care and early education, and yet here we are. It’s 2024 and we’re still fighting to make sure our kids’ most basic needs are being met. All of these presidents proposed big, ambitious plans for making child care work, none of them have solved the fundamental problem. Quality child care and early education in this country are too damn expensive. It is not pretty, and we are all paying the price for it. I’m Gloria Riviera, and this is No One Is Coming To Save Us a show about the child care crisis in America. So as we started planning out this new season, we decided to take a deeper look into five of the most fundamental issues facing our country and how they’re impacted by child care, poverty, mental health, housing, climate change and the public school system. You know, all those light, fun, whimsical topics that we like to specialize in. This week, we’re focusing on economic mobility, the American Dream, the idea that no matter who you are, you can grow up to be economically successful. Of course, as we all know, it’s. Rarely that easy. 15% of American kids live in poverty. 15% that’s 11 million children, practically the population of Georgia. Poverty is tough on everyone, but it’s particularly harmful to our youngest children those first five years that we’ve talked about so much on this show deeply impact the rest of a child’s life. That is the time when kids cognitive and emotional foundations are laid out. If a family doesn’t have economic stability in those first few years, it can take kids a lifetime to get out of poverty. It is a vicious cycle. But you know what makes a big difference? High quality childcare and early education. We have decades of data showing that every time we invest in our kids, it makes a huge difference for families in poverty and for our country as a whole. But you don’t have to take my word for it, because guess what? I brought along an expert. Hi there, Jorge. How are you?

 

Jorge 

Hey, how are you?

 

Gloria Riviera 

Where am I speaking to you now? Where are you now? Professor Jorge Luis Garcia is an expert on early education and economic mobility. Born and raised in Mexico, he’s taught at universities in Illinois, South Carolina, California and now Texas. He’s best known for his work with James Heckman, a Nobel Prize winning economist at the University of Chicago. Together, they’ve conducted some foundational research on the long term economic effects of quality childcare.

 

Jorge 

We have done a lot of work on two programs, especially the Perry Preschool project and the Carolina besidearian project.

 

Gloria Riviera 

The Perry Preschool project and the Carolina abecedarian project, Peri and ABC for short, these two studies are the bedrock of modern Early Education Research in the United States, Perry started in 1962 and ABC began in 1972 these studies asked a pretty simple question, can preschool programs help families make it out of poverty? They recruited almost 250 kids, mostly African American, all from low income families, and gave them access to high quality preschool programs for free, and I do mean high quality. These programs included cutting edge curriculum design, home visits from school staff, all of the things that help children thrive. Millions of dollars were invested into these kids, and we’re still following up with them. More than 50 years later.

 

Jorge 

We have gone back to the subjects and asked them about their lives, their life cycles, their health and so on. I mean, we have even drawn blood from them and so on. So the work has been very extensive. We know about their kids, their siblings and so on.

 

Gloria Riviera 

Now if you’re a nerd about early education, you’ve probably already heard of these studies, but I’m just learning about them now, and the results are blowing my mind. Perry and ABC show that for every dollar we invest into early education, we make between seven and $14 back. Let me break that down for you. So when researchers invested money in these programs for low income families and removed the financial burden of child care, they saw that these families started doing better economically, which means they paid more money in taxes and they were less likely to need social services like subsidized housing or healthcare, and they were less likely to end up in the criminal justice system. Poverty is expensive, so when we invest in our kids and they make it to the middle class, we see huge results. That is a bet I will make every time. Oh, and in case you need more convincing, you know the families who will benefit from these programs, their descendants have better lives too. Jorge calls it a three Gen impact when families have access to quality child care. Of course, the parents and the kids benefit, but if you look at the latest data, it’s clear that when those preschoolers grow up, their kids benefit too.

 

Jorge 

This three generation impact that we found that’s actually relatively new to the literature. So you know, before these works, we mainly were focused on, well, you give a bunch of kids these high quality early education program and you get to serve them when they’re adults, you see their outcomes, and you kind of speculate that if they have good outcomes and as adults, they’re going to be relatively better parents, right? But then, when we followed up, the participant. So the Bayer preschool and the Carolina veterinarian projects, we asked them about their kids when their kids were already older than 20, so we could see outcomes in terms of, how are they doing in terms of their health, their employment. So we observed large gains in terms of, for example, their employment. Actually, the gains were almost identical to the gains that the participants, the original participants received, right? So that’s great, because you were thinking that you were going to spend in a policy for one generation, but all of a sudden you impacted a second generation. So from a cost effectiveness perspective, that’s great.

 

Gloria Riviera 

I just want to underscore how wild that is. The money put into these programs in the 60s and 70s is still paying off now, more than 50 years later, and more recent, research is just as clear that quality childcare can make all the difference in the world, like the infant health and development program.

 

Jorge 

This program started in 1985 and the important part of this new work that I’m putting out is that no one has had documented the longer term impacts of that program. Now we don’t have data all the way to age 40 or 50, as we do with ABC and Perry, but we have data up to age 18, which is very telling of what the subjects are doing and are about to do, because we know teenage pregnancy, we know early life involvement with the criminal justice system. We know whether they took the SAP or the ACD to go to college and so on. And the nice part about this experiment is that it was not only implemented in one place, it was implemented in eight different places of the US. And we see that across the board, the impacts persist up to age 18, which is something that’s, you know, relatively new to this literature.

 

Gloria Riviera 

So let me ask you about what happens when you see families who who just can’t afford quality early child care, they can’t do it. What is their life look like.

 

Jorge 

When people don’t have access to early education? Then the time of the mothers is going to be heavily restricted, so some of the mothers are not going to be able to either finish their studies or integrate into the labor force, and we know that if you’re not able to stick to your job, then your wage growth possibilities are not there, right? And then the other thing, the other aspect we saw, is that the same kid would come with different adults in different days, and that’s not great for kids, because they don’t recognize who is the person in charge of their lives, and this instability in their lives is not good for them. Now, if we offer an alternative in which a counterfactual to all this instability is quality education and development when compared to the control group that received nothing, their earnings are substantially different, their health is substantially different, their involvement with crime is substantially different, and so on.

 

Gloria Riviera 

Okay, so here’s where we are. The data couldn’t be more clear. Quality childcare and early education make a huge difference for families in poverty. But what does that actually look like on a day to day basis? After the break, we’re going to zoom in on one of the most incredible early education centers I’ve ever heard of a school specifically set up to help families escape poverty. We’ll be back in a minute.

 

Gloria Riviera 

That is the sound of the ribbon cutting ceremony in 2018 at the epiphany Early Learning Center in Boston, an early education center set up specifically to help low income families make it out of poverty, it is a special, special place.

 

Old Recording 

Our hopes for the families we serve are boundless stability in housing, food security, alleviated stress, health and wellness, Academic and Career Services and a strong sense of community and belonging. This is a second home.

 

Gloria Riviera 

Epiphany was founded as a middle school for low income kids back in 1998 and over the years, the epiphany team came to see that they could make an even bigger impact by helping kids before they got to kindergarten, since they opened the doors to their early learning center five years ago, they’ve created one of the most impressive early education programs I’ve ever heard of. They enroll kids ages zero to five, and I really do mean zero to five kids are signed up for the program before they’re even born, and they stay in it right up until kindergarten. Imagine all the obstacles a young family has to get out of poverty. Child Care is too expensive for one but not an epiphany. Their programs are funded entirely by grants and donations. They are free to families. Child Care, as it is, doesn’t give parents enough time to even get to work. A lot of programs only include five or six hours of child care a day, and in some places, you have to pay by the minute. Beyond that, not an Epiphany, they have a 12 hour school day, so your kids get a lot of support, and parents have a lot more flexibility. Oh, and they’ll feed your kid two great, healthy meals while they’re at it. They have counselors, housing resources, family navigators. I could go on and on and on. Everything at Epiphany is focused on getting these families what they need to thrive, and it’s run by some remarkable people. Emily, thank you so much for joining us. We’re so pleased, and it’s so nice to see you.

 

Emily 

Yes, thank you for having me. It’s nice to see you too.

 

Gloria Riviera 

Ah, thank you. Well, just know that Emily Senteo is the Director of Student Support at Epiphany. She’s at the center of everything epiphany does. She’s like a concierge making sure the families have everything they need to succeed. She’s been there since the very beginning of the Early Learning Center, when they decided early education was their next big priority.

 

Emily 

So while the middle school was running, I would go out and do these home visits, as I would meet families, and there was often siblings at home, you know, maybe in front of the TV tablets on parents phones. And, you know, fast forward 10 years, these kids would end up at epiphany, and we were seeing kids coming in with just some lagging skills. And just all this development and research was coming out on the importance of zero to five, specifically zero to three and brain development, how much of our brain develops and the early connections. But just the idea of going younger was really exciting, because you would see it, you would see it impact the parents and how limiting it could be for them in terms of them being at home all day and not having support with the child’s development, as well as the child just feeling it made me think about my experience in school that first day when I was five years old and I was so nervous to go.

 

Gloria Riviera 

Emily understands these families experiences on a really deep level. She grew up in a low income household with parents who immigrated here from Cape Verde, off the coast of Western Africa.

 

Emily 

Both my parents immigrated here in the 70s, late 70s, they were both teenagers. The families knew of each other, they have some really funny stories of how they just grew up from different backgrounds, but the same island in Cape Verde and fogo.

 

Gloria Riviera 

They didn’t actually meet until they got to Boston. But you know the story, boy meets girl, they fall in love, buy a house and have five beautiful daughters. But that doesn’t mean it was easy.

 

Emily 

At the time, my mom stayed home with us, but then I remember going to school, and I did not speak English yet, so it was a hard place to navigate. And my father, he worked a lot, so he would work double shifts at work, as well as during seasonally, he would pick up other jobs. So the winter season, he would work with an uncle who had an oil company, and he would go out and work with him. He would do winter shoveling anything, just to sort of generate any extra income.

 

 

So while Emily’s dad was out finding jobs to keep the family afloat, her mom was making most of the educational decisions. There’s a reason Emily ended up working at epiphany. 25 years ago. Her mom told her she got a spot in their middle school.

 

Emily 

I remember being told it was a 12 hour school day and losing my mind, what do you mean? It’s like, your school’s gonna be from eight to eight. And it was like, well, school all day, and she explained, no, well, there’s like schooling in the morning. You’ll have time to do your homework. You’ll have dinner there as well. I was really sad about it. I wanted to have dinner with family. I wanted to come home.

 

Gloria Riviera 

Adjusting to life at epiphany, it was tough, but Emily got a lot out of the experience.

 

Emily 

It was the first time though, that teachers around me made it aware that I could do the work and that I was a hard worker and that I could be challenged, and that I was unique in seeing that they knew it was important for us to be engaged in the work that we were doing and building our own self intrinsic motivation, because eventually, by eighth grade, I wanted to get good grades. I wanted to feel included. I wanted to be a part of epiphany. And that all stemmed from that. I was trying to self isolate, but they would not let me.

 

Gloria Riviera 

That’s why Emily is so passionate about the work that’s happening at epiphany. It made a huge difference in her life. But again, Emily didn’t get to epiphany until she was 11, and she knew that if they started with even younger kids, they’d have a bigger impact.

 

 

What if I already had that foundation of of having peer relationships and having connections outside of the home at a, you know, at an earlier age, you know, k1 would have been a piece of cake. Economic Mobility is generational. I feel I’ve seen being here for these 15 years, well, longer. I’ve worked here for 15 years, but I’ve been a part of the community for 25 Yeah, and I think it’s just seeing that. And I see the graduates from the middle school every day. I see graduates from the EOC coming back and talking to, you know, I still talk to their parents, and so I’m really excited to see the outcomes of what this is going to look like when our six year olds are 18.

 

Gloria Riviera 

We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, we’ll hear more about how epiphany directly impacts the economic status and the lives of the families they serve.

 

Gloria Riviera 

And we’re back. One of the most incredible things about epiphany is that they don’t just serve one group of people, and all of the groups they serve have different needs. An immigrant family, newly arrived in the US, needs different kinds of support from an African American family that’s dealt with centuries of systemic racism. Emily told us more about how epiphany tailors their work to meet the needs of every individual family.

 

Emily 

One of the things that we’re definitely seeing, and you know, I don’t know what to attribute this to, and maybe it’s sort of the migrant history, but in our Latin families, as well as like Cape Verdean families, Haitian families, they usually need sort of supports around housing.

 

Gloria Riviera 

Navigating the complexities of the US housing system is hard for everyone, but it’s especially tough if you’re new here and you don’t speak the language. So epiphany works to plug that gap. Not only do they help with housing? They also have plenty of multilingual folks on staff to help families get their needs met. On the other hand, a lot of African American families experience intergenerational poverty, so they often already know how to get help with housing, but that kind of help can also make it more difficult to escape poverty.

 

Emily 

Most of our African American families are in a sort of voucher system that makes it very difficult to generate income, because if you make more money, your rent goes up. So that’s something that we see impacting families whose housing is linked to their income.

 

Gloria Riviera 

Emily’s talking about one of the most difficult catch 20 twos for families escaping poverty. If you’re living in poverty, you can get vouchers to help with your housing costs, but if you get a better job, the government might say, Hey, you don’t need that support anymore, and you end up paying more for rent, so bizarrely, you can end up worse off financially by getting a better job. Oh, Emily, how look at me. You’ve told me, like five seconds of this, and I can barely stand it. How do you keep going when these stories keep coming and coming and coming?

 

Emily 

Yeah, it is. It can be really frustrating, and it really is sort of looking at the uniqueness of every family. And we really are focusing on the children and really instilling and pouring and focusing on our youth.

 

Gloria Riviera 

And the work that you’re intentionally focusing on is the work of economic mobility. Yes, okay, so what does that look like? What kind of supports are you offering to these parents?

 

Emily 

There’s an array of programs which has shifted as we’ve seen our community change. You know, the pandemic shifted a lot in our culture, and we provide a clinician who is trained in early childhood relationships, mental health supports for parents. We also have a family navigator that’s there for any sort of crisis management. May come up. A lot of it is around housing, co parenting, supports, transportation. That’s an array of things, yeah.

 

Gloria Riviera 

Also among that array of things, families get resources for health care, food insecurity and a college savings account with $3,000 in it graduates from epiphany become part of a social network that follows them well into adulthood, and Epiphany has shared their model with other schools around the country. Do you have conversations with your colleagues about a specific goal of moving families out of poverty by the time the child is ready to go to kindergarten?

 

Emily 

So when we built the program, that was our goal, and that was our intent. And then the pandemic happened, and then we started really realizing that there’s so many systems sort of pushing back at us that we realized it wasn’t going to be a, you know, sort of five years we got this, what we’re seeing in five years is that there’s just a level of awareness within our families around us, giving them the foundation and understanding what they need to do to then, you know, kind of continue to grow in economic mobility. I did have a family where there was a mother who wanted to pursue a career that at the time, she couldn’t, but once the children got older and things had shifted, was able to work more improvements in her co parenting relationship. And, you know, fast track a year, she’s going to get her bachelor’s. She’s very excited about sort of taking classes full time. And there’s this foundation of I can do this, and also just building. One of the big things that I see, too is like building, like our self worth. I see that grow here when people come in, and if you were able to even see the space, it is phenomenal and beautiful. And sometimes parents are shocked when they come in here, we really want to build that. We deserve this. Our children deserve this, and you deserve this.

Gloria Riviera

Yeah, I mean, what I love about what you’ve just said is that throughout this conversation, you’ve talked about building self worth, first within yourself and then within the students, and now you’re talking about building self worth within the parents, right? Do you see your own family’s story reflected in the families you’re serving and have served over the last 15 years?

 

Emily 

Yes, definitely. There’s one family, Mom and Dad reminds me of my parents. And what’s so beautiful to me is thinking about how it’s just the way that my parents were sort of told, like, you know, dad works. Mom can do all the school stuff. And when he first used to come in, he’s kind of just would stay outside, and we’re like, no, come in and come into the classroom, talk to the teachers, and really nervous about his language skills. And was like, nope, we have Spanish speaking teachers. And this family reminds me of my family, and even how they, like family, planned to around, like the idea of community and relationships for them as they didn’t really have that, you know, because of when they came to this country, it was like, the way that the mother picked the school was so intentional and working with me, and she’s so independent, but at the same time was like, hey, Emily, I just need a little insight, a little help, and her reflective capacity, and how she parents with her children. And it’s just really beautiful to see that. I was like, these kids are going to be phenomenal, and she knows that, and he knows that. And it’s just beautiful to see that this early, you know, they pick up and they know that their child is loved. They know that they always can come back. It’s, it reminds me of my family quite a bit.

 

Gloria Riviera 

My last question, three words to describe yourself when you walk through the doors at Epiphany, and three words to describe yourself now.

 

Emily 

Oh, that’s a good one. So when I walk through the doors of epiphany as a fifth grader?

 

Gloria Riviera 

Yeah.

 

Emily 

Okay, nervous, insecure, confused, walking through the door now, would say, fulfilled, confident and growing.

 

Gloria Riviera 

Wow, look at you. That’s pretty good. It was so nice to talk to you.

 

Emily 

Thank you so much. Great to talk to you, too.

 

Gloria Riviera 

Emily and her colleagues aren’t just saying we won’t give up on you. And they’re not just saying we believe in you. They are saying you deserve our belief in you. They’re saying we expect brilliance from you, because you are capable of it, and that can make such a massive difference, especially in those crucial early years.

 

Gloria Riviera 

We can all agree it makes sense, on an emotional level, to invest in our kids. I mean, we hear it so much, it’s a cliche almost, right? Children are the future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Those are the song lyrics, right? But it’s true. And guess what? It’s not happening across the board. Children are the future, and that’s not just true in a nebulous, wishy washy, Kumbaya kind of way. It’s true economically. If we want to live in a prosperous country, a country where everyone has what they need, a country with less intergenerational poverty and more opportunity. We need to create more programs like epiphanies. Sometimes it feels like Groundhog Day around here. We have to keep explaining how important early education is over and over again. I know preschool makes a difference, because I’ve seen it happen. My own kids came home from preschool every day ecstatic, well, most days, but really they had this constant elation that they had learned what they learned. Mom, did you know that two plus two equals four, and so does flea plus one. Boom, mind explosion. And it made me so happy to see it happen. Every child should have that kind of experience, especially kids living in poverty, and we can give them that we can we have to. We’ll see you next week for our episode on early childhood mental health. Until then, hang in there. You can do this.

 

CREDITS

There’s more No one Is Coming To Save Us with Lemonada premium subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content, like unheard clips from our interviews. Subscribe now on Apple podcasts. No One Is Coming To Save Us is a Lemonada Original produced with Neighborhood Villages. I’m your host, Gloria Riviera. Crystal Genesis is our senior producer, Tony Williams and Tiffany Bui are our producers. Additional editing on this episode by Rachel Pilgrim.  Tony Williams, and Johnny Vince Evans are our audio engineers. Our music is by Hannis Brown. Jackie Danziger is our VP of narrative content. Executive producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer, along with me Gloria Riviera. The series is presented by Imaginable Futures, the J Willard and Alice S Marriott Foundation, The Banhum Family Foundation and The Conrad N Hilton foundation. If you like the show and you believe what we’re doing is important, please help others find us by leaving us a rating and writing a review, and most importantly, tell your friends. Follow No One Is Coming To Save Us wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership, thanks for listening, and we’ll be back next week.