ALABAMA – President Joe Biden’s sweeping plan to tackle poverty nationwide includes measures that aim to help Alabama teachers, parents and children.
The federal government already has directed billions of dollars of aid to Alabama schools, businesses and health care systems over the past year; the Biden administration says, though, that much more work is needed as the country recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic and addresses long-standing inequities in education, the workforce and health care.
The $1.8 trillion American Families Plan proposes $109 billion to go toward two years of free community college for students across the country and $39 billion for two years of tuition at minority-serving colleges for students with a household income of less than $125,000.
According to an analysis from the White House, Alabama students eligible for Pell Grants — currently about 100,000 — could see their awards increase by about $1,400. During the 2021-22 school year, the maximum Pell Grant award was $6,345.
Nationally, about one-third of undergraduate learning happens at public, two-year colleges. Many community college students qualify for Pell Grants, meaning many already study essentially for free. Research on the benefits of free community college is mixed — according to recent studies focused on some states that have experimented with efforts, more students earn associate degrees, but fewer complete bachelor’s degrees — but educators agree that more people overall seek post-secondary education through such programs.
The plan also proposes free, high-quality pre-school to all 3- and 4-year-olds in the state.
“This is the long-term solution that we feel like we need for child care,” said Katie Hamm, acting deputy assistant secretary for early childhood and development at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, of the child care and early child education portion of the package.
Alabama currently has a nationally-renowned pre-school program that reaches about 37% of 4-year-olds in the state — but the plan proposes expanding funding in order to help other children in the state access a program and pay a $15 minimum wage to child care workers.
The plan proposes a $9 billion investment in teacher workforce development. Such an investment might help address Alabama’s shortages in content areas such as special education, which new state-funded incentives proposed in the current education budget do not address.
Affordable child care is a barrier for many working parents in the state; the White House cites an average cost of $7,600 annually for Alabama families.
The plan proposes that low- and middle-income families pay no more than 7% of their annual income to child care. The plan would also continue child care tax credits approved in pandemic relief bills that helped people earning up to $400,000 a year.
“Child care is actually one of the worst-paid jobs in America,” said Caitlin McLean, of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of Southern California at Berkeley. “Only 2% of all occupations in the United States earn less than childcare workers, who earned $11.65 an hour on average in 2019. As a society, we have been asking early childhood educators to put so much on themselves into this work for wages that are not even livable in most states. And it’s been even worse during this pandemic.”
Before Biden’s current proposal, Congress passed the largest-ever investment in childcare, with $39 billion toward child care and $1 billion toward Headstart programs through the American Rescue Plan. Alabama received $282.2 million in expanded child care assistance and $451.3 million in child care stabilization funds.
The American Families Plan also aims to expand access to paid family leave and paid school meals, efforts the administration says will help keep more women in the workforce and improve maternal, infant and child health and wellness.
A 2019 investigation by AL.com uncovered staggering inequities in care for mothers and children and high maternal mortality rates, particularly for Black women.
To pay for measures, Biden has proposed an increase in the marginal income tax rate for the top 1% of American income earners and increases in capital gains and dividend tax rates for those who earn more than $1 million a year.
Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville has called the plan a Democratic “partisan wishlist,” saying that, for one, he does not think a paid community college degree will help more students get a job after graduation.
Sen. Richard Shelby similarly has said the proposals’s expanded definition of “infrastructure” is too broad.
The Columbia University Center on Poverty & Social Policy has estimated that the child tax credits, earned income tax credits, meal money and community college aid included in the proposal, if passed, would reduce the national poverty rate in 2022 by 23% and the child poverty rate by 47.4%.
