The Expansion Trap

Jasmine Ray
14 hours ago
18 min read

Why Growth Without Stability Is Breaking Early Childhood Education

Expansion sounds good, but it is highly irresponsible at this moment.

In 1965, my great-grandfather, Reverend Dr. Sandy F. Ray of Cornerstone Baptist Church, built an Education Center at 289 Lewis Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. In 1968, he founded Cornerstone Daycare Center. The center has served families in that neighborhood for nearly sixty years. I have been running Cornerstone Daycare Center for almost a decade, first as someone who inherited a legacy, and then as someone who had to fight to keep it alive.

I have seen this system from multiple angles. As a mother, I benefited from universal pre-K under the de Blasio administration. As a provider, I have experienced what it takes to keep a center open when the city treats you like an obstacle instead of a partner. And during the pandemic, I served on the CBO Executive Committee for early childhood education under de Blasio. I sat in the rooms (and over zoom) where decisions were made. I saw how the system was built, and how it was dismantled.

In my book Political Humanity, I wrote about how I navigated some extraordinary systems. This article continues that work. The theme is Surviving Systems, because surviving is what we do. Women-of-color run most of the daycares in New York City. We hold this infrastructure together, and in return, we are underfunded, over-regulated, and punished when we speak up.

I am not here to attack anyone. I am here to document what providers across this city know but rarely say publicly. The silence has not protected us. It is time to try something different.

Eye-level view of diverse group gathered in a community meeting room — Community members actively participating in a local workshop

The Hard Truth

Here is the reality that city government does not want to acknowledge: the New York City Department of Education is not structurally positioned to continue expanding early childhood education, yet it is doing exactly that.

In early 2026, providers across the city received an email from NYC Public Schools titled "Action Required: 2026-27 Expansion Planning." The message described plans to expand access to 2K and 3K in a way that is "stable, sustainable, and responsive to community need." It called community-based providers "central to this effort." Today, just a few weeks later, Mayor Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul made a live announcement, listing the programs set to receive 2K seats. In that announcement, Mayor Mamdani thanked, in order: first, Governor Hochul; second, the City Council members present; third, Assembly members; fourth, Senators;

fifth, Borough Presidents; and sixth, parents, children, and organizers. Not once were providers acknowledged. This is a glaring example of how we, the providers, are consistently left out of the conversation, even as we remain vital to making these expansions happen.

The DOE currently functions as the administrator of early childhood contracts, the regulator of community-based providers, the auditor who can shut programs down, the agency that controls funding levels and payment timelines, and a direct competitor. The DOE is expanding 3K and Pre-K seats inside its own district schools while simultaneously controlling whether community-based programs survive.

The entity that decides how much I get paid, how quickly I get paid, and whether my program stays open is also the entity competing for my seats.

This concentration of power exists despite documented administrative failures. In 2025, the federal Office of Head Start declined to renew the DOE's grant, citing concerns about budgeting, payments, and facilities. That was approximately $78 million in funding. The NYC Comptroller has documented that providers across the city are still owed money from invoices dating back years. Expansion is proceeding without stabilizing what already exists.

I do not believe this is accidental. These systems are not failing. I believe they are doing exactly what they were designed to do: consolidate control and structurally remove community-based organizations from the equation.

The Shift

When I became Executive Director of Cornerstone in 2017, early childhood programs were still overseen by the Administration for Children's Services. The relationship was different then. It was not perfect, but it was workable.

ACS inspections were relationship-based. When inspectors found something, they would sit down with you. They would explain the issue, walk through what needed to be corrected, and give you time to fix it. The assumption was that you wanted to be in compliance. That you cared about the children in your program. That you were a partner, not a problem.

If you did not cure the issue within the correction period, then a call would go to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. But that was the last step, not the first. In those years, I rarely saw DOHMH. They showed up for license renewals and that was about it.

Then everything changed.

ACS lost their federal contract. It went out to bid, and the DOE won it. In 2019, the administration of early childhood programs shifted to DOE, and DOHMH became a much more aggressive presence. What had been a corrective system became a punitive one.

According to testimony submitted to the City Council in 2018, advocates warned that the transition needed to "ensure that the development of 3-K does not create competition between CBOs and DOE sites" and that "existing capacity is used before creating additional capacity." Those warnings were not heeded.

Now when inspectors find something, there is no conversation. There is no two-week window to fix the problem. They hand you a piece of paper listing the violations and tell you to report to the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings. You show up, and they tell you what you owe. A thousand dollars per citation, sometimes more.

The first time this happened to me, I was confused. I said, "the last time I had a citation, someone sat down with me. They gave me time to correct it." The response: "It doesn't work like that anymore."

No explanation. No transition period. Just a new reality.

And the things they cite you for? Minor administrative issues treated like major violations. Paperwork discrepancies. Documentation gaps. Not safety issues.

Let me give you an example. A few years ago, my former Education Director, a 46-year veteran of the DOE, approached Cornerstone after retiring from a long career in New York City public education. She had served as both a principal and an assistant principal. After decades of service, she chose to return because she wanted to give back to her community.

At one point, she stepped away from the center for a few months. When she came back, DOHMH came in and said she was not eligible to work because she had been gone long enough to trigger a rule requiring re-registration with the state and city. There was a disagreement over the exact number of days. On the basis of that paperwork discrepancy, Cornerstone was forced to shut down until her clearance was processed.

This is a woman with nearly half a century of experience in education. She had been cleared by the DOE her entire career. But because of an administrative dispute, our program was shut down. No child was in danger. No safety issue was ever identified. Just paperwork.

I want to be clear: inspections matter. When there is a real safety issue, enforcement is appropriate. But what is happening now is not about safety. It is about compliance as punishment. It is about making providers so afraid of citations that we do not dare speak up about anything else.

The culture shifted from "How do we help you serve children well?" to "How do we catch you doing something wrong?"

The Conflict

Here is a question that should be asked more often: How can the DOE be both the agency that regulates community-based providers and the agency that competes with us for the same children?

Because that is exactly what is happening.

DOE administers our contracts. DOE controls our funding levels. DOE determines how many seats we are allocated and how quickly we get reimbursed for expenses. DOE oversees our annual audits and ultimately decides whether we stay open. And DOE is simultaneously expanding 3K and Pre-K seats inside its own district schools, often in the same neighborhoods where community-based programs have operated for decades.

We are not partners. We are competition. And we are being regulated by the same entity that benefits when we fail.

Since the DOE assumed administration of early childhood contracts, thousands of long-standing childcare providers have closed across the city. According to the NYC Comptroller's spotlight report, the number of family home-based providers licensed by the state fell by nearly 60 percent from 2015 to 2023. These were not fly-by-night operations. These were programs that served their communities for decades.

And when we close, where do those seats go? Into DOE schools.

It does not have to work this way. In New Jersey, before the state expands early childhood seats into district schools, they first ask the surrounding community-based providers if they want those seats. They treat providers as partners, not obstacles. The state and CBOs work in tandem rather than against each other.

New York City has no such system. DOE expands where it wants, when it wants, without consulting the providers who have been serving those communities for years. And because they control the contracts and the funding, there is nothing we can do about it.

The Funding Inequity

When you follow the money, the inequities in this system become difficult to ignore.

I have spent considerable time analyzing the DOE's cost-per-child data, examining what the city pays different providers to serve children in early childhood programs. I started with Staten Island, where I grew up and where my children went to school. What I found confirmed what I had suspected for years: the system is not just unequal. It is structured that way.

Funding levels are not determined by nonprofit status, experience, number of years in service, mission or outcomes. They are heavily influenced by real estate structure. Programs that own their buildings are able to factor higher rent costs into their budgets and, as a result, receive higher per-child allocations. Programs that lease space, particularly those operating out of churches or faith-based institutions, often receive significantly less.

In practice, programs operating in leased church or faith-based spaces average roughly $14,700 per child. Programs with owned facilities and higher allowable rent allocations average closer to $19,500. Private operators fall in between, at approximately $17,900. The difference can approach $5,000 per child.

The determining factor is not ideology. It is real estate.

That is almost $5,000 less per child for religious-affiliated programs. This disparity holds even after controlling for ZIP code, program type, and size. It is not a fluke. It is a pattern.

You might expect religious institutions to receive more support, not less. These are often the programs most rooted in their communities, serving families that other providers will not take. But the opposite is true. And when you examine why, you start to see how the system actually operates.

The single biggest factor determining what a provider gets paid is not the quality of their program. It is not child outcomes. It is not neighborhood need. It is real estate.

If you own your building, you can charge the DOE whatever rent you want, and they will use that to justify a higher cost-per-child allocation. I know providers who own their buildings and tell DOE their rent is $50,000 a month. DOE pays accordingly and they profit tremendously.

But if you lease, especially if you lease from a church, you have no such leverage. Whatever your landlord charges you becomes your fixed cost basis. DOE looks at that number and says, "If that is your fixed cost, we can afford to pay you $14,000 per child instead of $31,000."

Consider who is disadvantaged by this. Women-of-color run most of the community-based daycares in New York City. How many of us own commercial real estate in the five boroughs? Almost none. We lease. We operate out of churches and rented storefronts. And the system penalizes us for it.

Meanwhile, the providers at the top of the funding ladder are not there because they serve children better. They are there because they know how to work the system: how to model and justify inflated rent, how to negotiate contracts, how to lock in favorable terms before costs increased.

The system rewards financial sophistication and leverage. Not community service. Not outcomes for children. That is not equity.

And it gets worse.

The contracts we are operating under today were negotiated during COVID. That was six years ago. Since then, the DOE has renewed those contracts multiple times without adjusting for inflation. There have been no cost-of-living increases for providers, even as our teachers receive COLA adjustments that we are expected to absorb.

Although those adjustments were negotiated years ago, the DOE has yet to release those funds to programs. There is no mechanism to account for rising rent in gentrifying neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy. No rebasing. No appeal pathway.

I emailed the DOE directly about this. The response was unambiguous: "Due to the procurement rules that we are bound to, we are not able to increase the rates at the time of the renewal processing."

No flexibility. No consideration for market reality. Just a policy that creates artificial winners and losers based on when you happened to negotiate your contract.

When I told them I might have to shut down, they responded the same day, ready to accept my closure. No conversation. No attempt to help. The message was clear: if you cannot afford to operate, close. The DOE is not interested in helping providers survive. They are waiting for us to fail. And when we fail, they take our seats.

The Audit Hypocrisy

Here is what makes all of this even more difficult to accept: the DOE cannot manage its own house.

In 2023, under the same leadership still steering the early childhood system, the federal government audited the DOE's Head Start programming. They found significant problems with budgeting, payments, and facilities. Two years later, in 2025, the federal Office of Head Start declined to renew the DOE's grant. That was approximately $78 million in funding. The federal government looked at how DOE was running things and said: we are not giving you more money.

This is the same agency that aggressively audits community-based providers.

It is not just Head Start. The NYC Comptroller has audited the DOE multiple times and found systemic failures. One audit found that DOE failed to deliver mandated services to English Language Learners. Another found that thousands of children with disabilities were not receiving the special education services they were legally entitled to, even as spending on special education claims surged tenfold over a decade. The money increased. The services did not follow.

An agency that cannot meet its own compliance obligations is positioned as the primary authority over providers who have been running programs successfully for decades.

We are being policed by an agency that cannot pass its own tests.

Why the Silence Persists

Providers know all of this. We talk about it privately, in group chats, on calls, at conferences when the officials are not around. We know the system is broken. We know the DOE is failing its own audits while punishing us for minor infractions. We know the funding is inequitable. We know we are being squeezed out.

So why do so few of us say it publicly?

Because speaking up comes with a cost. And most providers have calculated that the cost is too high.

When you raise concerns, things start happening. Your reimbursements get delayed. Inspectors show up more frequently. Small issues that would have been overlooked suddenly become citations. You cannot prove it is retaliation. There is no memo that says "she complained, so make her life difficult." But the pattern is unmistakable. You learn to keep your head down and your mouth shut.

Again, women run most of the daycares in this city. We already operate with almost no margin for error. We are not going to risk our programs, our staff's jobs, our families' income, by picking fights with the agencies that control whether we stay open. So we stay quiet. We absorb the dysfunction. We take out personal loans to make payroll when the DOE does not pay us on time. And we hope things get better.

They do not get better.

Let me offer a recent example that illustrates how quickly regulatory pressure can escalate.

In February 2026, following a favorable court ruling related to our occupancy, the question of our lease status surfaced almost immediately. Within days, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene contacted us seeking clarification.

I provided the agency our attorney’s contact information. Shortly thereafter, we were inspected.

The timing was difficult to ignore.

The inspector arrived at 2:10 in the afternoon. According to my Education Director, he did not leave until after 5:00 pm. Three hours. She texted me during the inspection: "He just entered the building at 2:10pm. It's after 5:00pm. He's keeping us here on a fault-finding mission."

Three hours is unusual for a routine inspection. Inspectors have a checklist of approximately 50 items: EpiPens, classroom cleanliness, file and documentation compliance, building conditions, cleaning supply storage, temperature in the classrooms, anything that could be dangerous. They check the boxes and move on. It does not take three hours.

Unless you are looking for something.

They went through everything. And according to the documentation I received, we passed on the substantive items. Classrooms: clean. Files: in order. Safety protocols: in place. Children: safe.

But the inspector was not done. My director told me he called headquarters and said, "These are the small things I found." And whoever was on the other end told him: "Write them up. Write them up right now."

So here is what Cornerstone got cited for, according to Summons #01815-2609, issued February 13, 2026:

First: the emergency light in the hallway of the second floor did not illuminate when the test button was pushed. Fair enough.

Second: the fire alarm control panel in the main building (the church, not our daycare) showed system trouble indicators. The summons noted the panel displayed "Alarm smoke det 207" and indicators were observed blinking. The fire alarm system in the landlord's building, on the landlord's network, became a citation on our record.

Third: the refrigerator. The summons states that the "program failed to maintain dairy products at or below 41°F as required" and that "four thermometers inside the refrigerator registered temperatures above 41°F." The summons notes that more than 40 containers of non-fat yogurt were observed stored in the kitchen refrigerator.

Here is what the summons does not say: what temperature was recorded. Was it 42°F, a deviation of one degree? Or was it 50°F, a meaningful food safety concern? The document does not specify. That ambiguity matters. One reading suggests a minor variance; the other suggests negligence. Without the actual measurement noted, the citation cannot be evaluated for proportionality.

What I can tell you is this: in nearly ten years at Cornerstone, I had never experienced an inspection that involved measuring refrigerator temperatures.

Last month, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene emailed our Education Director stating they had “received information regarding the program having trouble renewing its lease” and requested clarification.

Shortly thereafter, we underwent a three-hour inspection. No material safety violations were identified. We were cited for yogurt.

Every citation comes with a fine. Typically in the thousands. Accumulate enough citations and they can shut you down. That is the mechanism. If they cannot find anything significant, they find something small. And they build a file.

This is how regulatory pressure operates when funding authority and oversight authority sit within the same institution. It is not a memo. It is not a policy. It is a pattern of pressure that teaches you to stay quiet.

And it is not just inspections. It is money.

On more than one occasion, I have personally loaned the program money to make payroll so teachers would not be impacted by DOE reimbursement delays. My own funds. Because if I did not, my teachers would not get paid. And if my teachers do not get paid, they leave. And if they leave, I am out of compliance on staffing ratios. And if I am out of compliance, DOHMH shows up. And then I am fighting citations instead of serving children.

According to testimony from UFT President Karen Alford delivered in January 2026, the union stood on the steps of City Hall in October 2024 "to demand that 47 of our union child care providers be paid over $500,000 owed to them for services they had provided the prior May and June. Despite not receiving pay for months, these educators continued to provide care because their communities relied on them, even though it meant many of them ultimately had to close their doors."

This is what providers deal with. This is why we do not speak up. The system is designed to exhaust you into silence.

But silence has not protected us. It has not made the system fairer. It has not stopped the closures or the funding inequities or the regulatory pressure. Silence just lets them keep doing what they are doing without anyone documenting it.

So I am documenting it.

It is easy to name what is broken. It is harder to say what should happen next. But if I am going to ask people to listen, I owe them more than just problems.

Here is what I believe needs to change.

Stabilize the system before expanding it. Stop adding new seats until the providers you already have are paid on time and treated fairly. You cannot build a sustainable early childhood system while the foundation is cracking. Every announcement of expansion plans is an insult to the providers who are struggling right now.

Make reimbursement timelines transparent and enforceable. Providers should know exactly where their invoices are in the queue and when they will be paid. Right now, it is opaque. You submit your paperwork and hope. If the DOE is late, there is no penalty for them, only for us, when we cannot make payroll. There should be a public dashboard showing payment timelines, and there should be consequences when the city fails to pay on time.

Return to a corrective inspection model. For non-safety issues, inspectors should work with providers to fix problems rather than immediately issuing citations. That is how it worked under ACS. You had a conversation. You had time to cure the issue. The assumption was that providers wanted to do the right thing. Bring that back. Save the punitive approach for situations where children are actually at risk.

Create an independent oversight structure. Right now, if a provider has a problem with how they are being treated, there is nowhere to go. You cannot appeal a funding decision. You cannot escalate a complaint without fear of retaliation. There needs to be an independent ombudsman, someone outside the DOE and DOHMH, who can hear concerns and intervene when the system fails.

Separate advocacy from regulation. Organizations that advocate for providers should not be financially dependent on the agencies they are supposed to hold accountable. Structural conflicts of interest undermine the ability to speak truth to power.

Publish the data. Let the public see what is happening. Cost-per-child by operator type. Payment timelines by provider. Inspection outcomes. Closure rates by neighborhood. Seat allocation decisions. Right now, all of this is hidden. Transparency will not fix everything, but it makes it harder to pretend the inequities do not exist.

Rebase contracts for inflation. COVID-era contracts cannot be the permanent baseline. Costs have increased. Rent has increased. Teacher salaries have increased, and providers are expected to absorb those increases without any adjustment to what we are paid. There must be a mechanism for market adjustment. Other city contracts have escalation clauses. Early childhood should too.

Consult providers before expanding into district schools. Follow the model used in other states: ask existing providers if they want seats before giving them to public schools. Give community-based organizations the first opportunity to expand before DOE takes those seats for itself.

Create a universal workforce clearance system. Right now, every time a teacher moves to a new program, they have to go through the full clearance process again. It takes weeks, sometimes months. If someone is already cleared to work with children in one program, that clearance should follow them. A universal fingerprint system would let qualified staff move between centers without starting over every time. And directors should be able to flag serious misconduct so bad actors cannot hop from program to program.

Invest in the workforce, not just the seats. You cannot fix early childhood education by adding more seats while the people staffing those seats are underpaid and exhausted. Community-based providers are expected to meet the same certification requirements as public schools, but our teachers earn less, work longer hours, and get fewer days off. According to a 2025 Day Care Council of New York workforce report, center-based programs would need close to $12,000 more annually for each infant and toddler just to pay staff a living wage. Compensation parity has to be part of the solution.

Align program hours with working families. DOE-funded programs run about six hours and twenty minutes. Most working parents need coverage from 8 am to 6 pm. That gap is by design. Extended day programs have separate eligibility requirements and limited slots. If the goal is to support working families, the hours have to match reality.

These are not radical ideas. Most providers I know would agree with every item on this list. The question is whether anyone with authority is willing to listen.

I am not naive. I know how bureaucracies work. I know that change is slow and politics are complicated and there are people whose jobs depend on keeping things exactly as they are.

But I also know that staying silent has not made things better. And I know that systems do not change themselves. People change them, by documenting what is broken and demanding something different.

Cornerstone Daycare Center has been standing in Bed-Stuy for nearly sixty years. My Great-Grandfather built the church and education center it calls home in 1968, when this neighborhood looked very different and the idea that the city would fund early childhood education was still decades away. It survived administrations, funding shifts, policy changes, and four eviction attempts in the last ten years alone.

It is still standing because people fought for it. My family. My staff. The parents who chose us. Me.

I am not writing this because it is safe. It is not safe. I know there may be consequences for putting my name on these words. I know how the system and the press respond to people who speak up. I have lived it.

Silence is what is hurting us. Not just me. All of us. Every provider who is scared to ask why their payment is late. Every director who accepts a citation she knows is disproportionate because fighting it would make things worse. Every woman running a daycare out of a church, using her own savings to make payroll because the city will not pay on time, telling herself that if she just keeps her head down, maybe things will get better.

They will not get better. Not until we say it out loud.

So I am saying it. And I will keep saying it, here in this publication, for as long as it takes.

If you are a provider who has experienced what I am describing, I want to hear from you. If you are a parent who depends on community-based care, I want you to understand what is at stake and I’d like to hear from you also. If you are a policymaker who believes the system can be better, I want to work with you.

You can find my book, Political Humanity, wherever books are sold.

Jasmine Ray is the Executive Director of Cornerstone Daycare Center in Brooklyn and the author of Political Humanity.