"So blatantly are you punishing someone who doesn't have money. The more money you have, the better care you will receive. And forget it, the rest of you, you can have the lowest possible care." --Alice Price, Education Coordinator, Children's Village

I studied Philadelphia's child care system as a case study for the nation's child care policy. What I found was a system that created scarcity through its structure and implementation, cheating the children of the poor out of quality care. In Philadelphia I interviewed four groups of people: welfare mothers, Department of Welfare representatives, child care providers and child care advocates.

From my analysis I concluded that there were many accessible child care facilities, but there were not enough good quality facilities; the poor often had restricted access to the quality care facilites that did exist. A major reason for this imposed scarcity of quality child care lies in the provisions of the Welfare Reform Act, passed as House Resolution 4 in March of 1997. This act forced many mothers to enter the workforce without providing adequate facilites for the care of children. One child care advocate pointed out that Pennsylvania spends more money on building prisions each year than it does funding public education, sending the message that the state does not care for preventative measures such as early childhood education.

All of these problems mean that poor parents often place their children in unregulated, "underground" facilities. Thus, the child care system constructs scarcity by refusing to facilitate the care of the nation's poorest children. Such measures reveal the nation's prejudice against the poor and show the non-poor's refusal to shoulder the burden of caring for the nation's children.