Seeing this sign in North Philadelphia reminded me that poor parents want the same thing as richer parents: To know that their children are safe while they are away from them.
After all, isn’t this web cam more or less the same thing as a nanny cam? The difference in this case is that the employees know that the parents may be watching.
Of course, monitoring is a fairly crude way to try to ensure high-quality care (and potentially prone to backfiring). The more sophisticated ways tend to require investments of time, money, professional development, and so on.
Which brings me to an interesting development on the horizon. The World Class Greater Philadelphia initiative recently announced a major new effort in Philadelphia to develop an assessment of kindergarten readiness. The effort is funded via a $200,000 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to the United Way.
From the announcement (emphasis is mine):
[H]igh-quality preschool education is the exception, not the rule, in Greater Philadelphia. In a region with 250,000 children under five, only 11 percent of registered childcare providers earned a Keystone STARS 3 or 4 rating [in Pennsylvania’s voluntary child-care rating system], generally considered to be the standard of “high quality.”
[…] Getting standardized kindergarten readiness assessments in place could have a particularly strong impact in the low-income communities where quality preschool education is needed most, empowering parents to “vote with their feet” and demand high-quality early learning options.
My bias is that poor families don’t really need help demanding high-quality early learning options. They already want them. Rather, they may need help discerning which of the options open to them is the best.*
But that’s a quibble. All in all, I was glad to hear about the RWJ grant and hope that the project comes to fruition as anticipated.
*Of course, it would also be nice if the childcare subsidies that poor families are eligible for were better tied to quality of care. But that’s a topic for another post.
BetterPHL 
What do you think?