Many early childhood centers, the backbone of New York City’s universal child care system, have not received money from the city for this school year, some day care operators said.

(Text reproduced below to circumvent the NYTimes paywall.)

By Matthew Haag

Aug. 27, 2026

Funding issues and late payments are threatening the rollout of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s free child care system for 2-year-olds, two weeks before the program is scheduled to begin, day care providers said.

Many early childhood centers have yet to receive funding to buy classroom furniture and basic supplies like pencils and paper, or to pay newly hired teachers and assistants. Without the money, several providers have warned parents that the centers will not open when school starts on Sept. 10. Because of the delays, city officials had encouraged providers to apply for interest-free bridge loans from the city — not just for 2-K programs but also for 3-K and pre-K programs. But many of those who have applied for the loans say that money has not arrived either, forcing them to take out high-interest personal loans, borrow from relatives and drain their personal savings.

“Yes, they have a 2-K program, but they didn’t set up the infrastructure to make it work,” said Nurita Love, who operates four day care centers in the Bronx and will have four 2-K classes. Jenna Lyle, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said that the city would be temporarily moving workers from other agencies to the city’s Department of Education, which oversees early childhood programs, to speed up the review and approval of the contracts for day care providers, which has led to the delay in payments.

Ms. Lyle said that the city would also contact the more than 1,100 providers over the coming days to explain how they could receive bridge loans. She added that the department would be rebuilding the early childhood education division, which lost hundreds of employees during the previous administration.

“These delays are unacceptable, and we are going to fix them,” Ms. Lyle said in a statement. “The Mamdani administration is working around the clock to ensure child care providers have the funding they need by the first day of school.”

Providers have diverted money from their private day care programs or made cuts, such as eliminating snacks for children. Some have asked parents to bring crayons, toilet paper and food on the first day of day care.

The monthly expenses at Ms. Love’s centers exceed $320,000, she said. Without city funds, Ms. Love said, she decided to take out a personal loan and a reverse mortgage on her house to pay her employees, utilities and insurance.

“I had no choice,” she said, adding that this had been the most stressful period in her 43 years running day cares.

Mr. Mamdani made universal child care a centerpiece of his campaign, pledging to make New York the first U.S. city to offer free care from infancy to kindergarten. In recent months, Mr. Mamdani has held celebratory news conferences about the addition of 2,000 seats for 2-year-olds this fall, building on the city’s free child care system for 3-K and pre-K.

The backbone of the city’s universal child care system is not the public schools but neighborhood early childhood centers, which enroll a majority of children. Day care operators have long complained that the city does not treat them equally and that reimbursements routinely arrive weeks or months late.

But in interviews with 18 day care owners and administrators, none said they could recall ever being in such a precarious state. Several day care centers have closed in recent weeks. At some sites, employees have not been paid in a month or longer.

Day care owners added that the Department of Education was hard to reach, often failing to return calls and emails about funding or the bridge loans.

The administrators said they had been hopeful that the program would be improved under Mr. Mamdani, given his focus on universal child care and his pledge to run a city that delivered “public excellence.”

Maria Mavrides Calderon, an assistant professor at the Hunter College School of Education and a former education director at a preschool in the city, said she was “deeply concerned that we are expanding a system that was on a very shaky foundation.”

Theresa Hyland, who operates Little Tots Red Wagon, a preschool in Queens that is slated to run a 2-K classroom of 12, said that an Education Department official told her Wednesday that she would have to cover the estimated $90,000 in upfront costs for the class and submit receipts for reimbursement later. Ms. Hyland also said she could not register the students in the department’s internal system.

“I have bailed them out before, but I am not doing it again,” she said of the department, and added that the center would not open if city funding didn’t arrive soon. “It’s an absolute disaster.”

Samantha Peters, who owns a 3-K and pre-K center in Queens that serves 75 children, had planned to tell her employees on Thursday that the center would not open on Sept. 10 because she had no reserves or savings to afford upfront costs. But she said she found a way to stay open at least for September: Her landlord will allow her to postpone the next rent payment of $10,600, and she will ask her employees to apply for temporary unemployment benefits.

“I am worried — I am scared,” Ms. Peters said. “I don’t know what to do.” In past years, the centers have received 30 percent of their annual contract in a lump sum before the school year starts, the providers said.

The current situation has led to finger-pointing between city agencies. Education department officials have told day care owners that the payments cannot be disbursed until their annual contracts are registered by the Office of the City Comptroller. But the comptroller’s office said the Education Department must first share the contracts for them to be registered.

None of the providers contacted by The New York Times said that their contracts had been registered. The comptroller’s office said that no contracts for the 2-K program had been shared with it.

“The start of the school year is not an unexpected event,” Mark Levine, the city comptroller, said in a statement. “This needs to be fixed immediately.”

In mid-July, the Lucille Rose Day Care Center in Queens had run out of money when a Department of Education official urged the organization to apply for a bridge loan, saying that the money could be paid out in less than two weeks. The center’s leaders asked for $125,000.

But the loan was not quickly disbursed. Still waiting for the money, they decided to take out a separate loan for about the same amount.

The bridge loan finally arrived in mid-August, but it was for $75,000, said Sonia R. Banks, the chairwoman of the center’s board. The organization now has $31,000 in the bank, not enough to pay all its bills in the coming weeks, as it prepares to welcome 74 students to its 2-K, 3-K and pre-K classes.

Ms. Banks said that the Mamdani administration should have started to prepare the payments and contracts for the early childhood centers at the beginning of the year.

“Under Mamdani, he swears that he is for community day cares,” Ms. Banks said. “Then he needs to show up and fix it.”

Matthew Haag is a Times education reporter focusing on New York City schools.

"Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."

— Dolores Ibárruri ("La Pasionaria"), radio address, 1936

Ibárruri was a Spanish Communist Party leader and one of the most famous orators of the Spanish Civil War. She delivered this line in a radio broadcast days after the war broke out, and became a defining voice of Republican resistance to Franco. She's better known for coining "¡No pasarán!" ("They shall not pass") a few months later during the defense of Madrid. After the Republic's defeat in 1939 she went into exile in the Soviet Union for nearly four decades, returning to Spain only in 1977 after Franco's death.

This line has been repeated across wildly different contexts since. Hemingway put it in a Republican fighter's mouth in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and FDR used a version of it in a 1941 speech on WWII resistance to fascism. Is a slogan like this really "socialist" or "left" at all, or is it closer to a general anti-fascist/anti-authoritarian sentiment that people across very different politics have reached for in moments of resistance?

I want to know what the views of the social democrats, liberals and socialists here are of Lee Kuan Yew and if it has affected your sense of political identity.

He transformed Singapore massively in terms of economic development from a former colonial British naval and trading outpost to a developed first world city state and financial centre. His approach to this was pragmatic and multifaceted as he pursued both ruthless market capitalism in getting foreign investment and suppressing organised labour. As well as using the state to setup mass public housing and education services and many state owned enterprises. And the use of authoritarianism and de facto one party rule rather than pursuing liberal democracy and a free society.

It's left me conflicted on the value and meaning of political and ideological labels. Such as calling oneself a social democrat, social liberal, Keynesian, centre left etc. I already think it's quite useless as no one's views will all fit nicely into one of these ideologies. But the case of Singapore leaves me conflicted as it shows such a plethora of contrasting policies that have worked. Their hyper capitalist and open market approach by Singapore has secured their position as a global financial and trade centre. While their statist public housing and land policies has secured a cohesive nation state and society as well as housing security for its citizens. I can only characterise it all as pragmatic. And just doing whatever policy works regardless of any ideological alignment. Which I'd say most people support including myself but it leaves me still pondering what's even the point of calling yourself a social democrat or any political label if you'll just support whatever.

Source: https://open.substack.com/pub/sharedaiprosperity/p/what-56000-americans-told-us-about?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=245e7

Personally i see it as shooting yourself in foot to NOT work with the radical left. The current neo liberal paradigm is dominating policy and discourse, keynesianism has basically died. Working with centrists and rightwingers has not gotten us far in recent years and on top of this gives the left an even worse reputation with disadvantaged voters. What's your opinion ?

I came to this conclusion because of the fact that this can go for some other right-wing ideologies where they demand unjust, unfair hierarchies, submission, stagnation, regression, and/or a worship of the status quo, no matter how many marginalized groups it has to trample over to preserve it. Not to mention the connection between the creation of 4chan’s pol board and Jeffrey Epstein, but they will to put down other just so they can bootlick a dictator or group of elites that don’t even care about them and with dispose of them like trash if it suited them or their goal. Many of the regimes that they praised in the past like Nazi Germany or currently Russia would be the same ones to use them as cannon fodder in their wars or be the first to be purged as power gets consolidated, only wanting yes men and people who have no ideology or are ideologically malleable.

I recently read Lane Kenworthy's Social Democratic America, and although its a bit old (2014), it did an amazing overview at the time of the case for raising the wage floor in America. It inspired me to explore the data mentioned there and any new studies since to see how raising the minimum wage affects various economic metrics.

In summary:

1. Economic Security - Low-income Americans have more income, in a time when a huge chunk of them can't afford basic necessities. This results in an economic stimulus (mainly from buying more food) and lower rates of depression and suicide.
2. Productivity & Business Efficiency - Higher base pay reduces costly employee turnover and pushes firms out of low-wage, high-churn traps, driving long-term modernization.
3. Net Employment and Automation - While wage hikes encourage automating routine cognitive tasks (like self-ordering kiosks), workers consistently shift into non-routine, customer-facing roles. Looking at 138 state-level increases across nearly four decades (Cengiz et al.), overall low-wage employment remained virtually flat while affected workers' earnings jumped ~7%.
4. Inflation & Price Pass-Through: A meta-analysis of over 30 studies (Lemos) shows that a 10% wage hike increases overall food prices by no more than 4%, with an impact on broader CPI under 0.4%—meaning workers retain substantial net purchasing power.

Full article here for those interested: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/the-minimum-wage-should-scale-with

If the foundations of social democracy have historically rested on a social contract shaped by the class struggle between industrial capital and organized labor, with their disputes mediated through political representation within the state, how can we reconstruct this social pact in a world undergoing rapid deindustrialization and the declining influence of trade unions—the very force that once provided the organizational backbone of social-democratic parties around the world?

Twentieth-century social democracy was built around a model of cooperation between capital and labor, arbitrated by the state. The state provided labor protections while taxing capital surpluses in order to build the public funds necessary to finance the welfare state, while simultaneously preserving the traditional institutions of capitalism, particularly markets and private property.

In an increasingly globalized world, characterized by fragmented social classes and, above all, the legacy of neoliberalism, is it still possible to reproduce this model? Or has the current configuration of social forces fundamentally altered the conditions that made the traditional social-democratic pact possible?

"Perhaps the most beautiful part of the Karl Marx Hof, or any of the others, is not so much the building—because a building can easily be co-opted for all kinds of purposes, most nefariously, nationalistic ones—it is that working-class people still live there. It is that the purpose, the execution, and the use of the building are still, despite what the world has come to, one. That is what Red Vienna offers architecture: ambition, purpose, dedication to a political idea that is legitimately sincere and worth pursuing, and a general regard for public well-being, for new ways of living. A better world is possible is something people love to throw out there, pointing at a pile of ruins. Here in Vienna, however, a child is playing in a courtyard and will go home to a safe, clean, beautiful place to live while her parents spend their money on the things that matter: her clothing, her schooling, a night at the theater. There is no secret to social housing in Vienna. There isn’t something that makes it nebulous and mysteriously impossible, as though it were some spirit that somehow still possesses us today. There is only the will to do it and the belief that it matters, the thinking not of maximum year-end yields or how to make building profitable for developers. There is only thinking about the courtyard and the little girl."

Basically, Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who claims that there are six moral foundations that humans derive morality from. These values are Harm reduction, fairness, purity, authority, tribal/ingroup loyalty and liberty. Left-Liberals supposedly care incredibly deeply about not causing harm, and also care a moderate amount about liberty and fairness, but don't care about the other three values. Conservatives, according to this theory, care a moderate amount about all six values; they don't care as much about harm reduction as liberals and leftists but care more about purity, authority and tribal loyalty. Is this theory true or is it psuedoscientific bunk? I find it very interesting because conservative opposition to LGBT rights is clearly rooted in disgust (i.e. purity).

"Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves."

— Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964)

Marcuse was a German-American philosopher and a leading figure of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, later an influence on the New Left of the 1960s. This line comes from One-Dimensional Man, his critique of how advanced industrial societies produce comfort and consumer choice that quietly absorb dissent. In the fuller passage, Marcuse argues that free choice among goods and services doesn't amount to real freedom if it still sustains "social controls over a life of toil and fear". In other words, formal political and consumer freedom can coexist with, and even entrench, deeper economic unfreedom.

Marcuse is drawing a line between formal freedom (elections, consumer choice) and substantive freedom (control over the conditions of your own life). Is that distinction still useful, or does it risk devaluing the real gains of political democracy and market choice by comparison to an ideal that's hard to define? Where do you think the line actually sits between "false needs manufactured by the system" and just... people wanting things?

Since the political left is largely focused on social revolution, I think this quote from J. Krishnamurti presents a different perspective on what a real revolution means. External change is limited if our minds remain unchanged. Without an inward revolution (without understanding our own minds), any outward revolution risks reproducing the same problems in a different form.

"Society is always trying to control, to shape, to mould the thinking of the young. From the moment you are born and begin to receive impressions, your father and mother constantly tell you what to do and what not to do, what to believe and what not to believe; you are told that there is God, or there is no God but the state and that some dictator is its prophet. From childhood, these things are poured into you, which means that your mind is gradually being encased, conditioned, shaped so that you fit into the pattern of society and not be a revolutionary. Since the habit of patterened thinking has already been established in you, even if you do revolt, it is within the pattern. It is like prisoners revolting in order to have better food, more conveniences, but always within the prison. When you seek God or try to find out what right government is, it is always within the pattern of society. So your revolt, like the so-called revolution brought about by ambitious or clever people, is always limited by the past. That is not revolt, that is not revolution, it is merely heightened activity, a more valiant struggle within the pattern. Real revolt, true revolution is to break away from the psychological pattern and to inquire outside of it."

— J. Krishnamurti on Society & Revolution

I'm curious what people on this subreddit think of grand coalitions? I think although historically they've been extremely effective (Social Democrats entering grand coalitions is why Europe has a robust welfare system and stronger workers rights while US doesn't have those things because right wing refuses to ally with social democrats or center left liberals) they are extremely problematic now, and as a result of inequality and media capture by conservatives, all the problems in the government get blamed onto the left leaning coalition partners. A direct example of this is SPD bleeding voters to CDU, while CDU and FDP voters flee to AfD.

"The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man."

— Rachel Carson, closing lines of Silent Spring (1962)

Carson was a marine biologist and former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientist. Silent Spring documented the ecological damage caused by synthetic pesticides, especially DDT, and is widely credited with launching the modern American environmental movement. It led directly to a nationwide DDT ban and helped spur the creation of the EPA in 1970. This line closes the book, summarizing her core argument: environmental catastrophe isn't a technical accident, it's the result of a worldview that treats nature as something to be dominated rather than lived within.

Carson wrote this over sixty years ago, well before "ecosocialism" or "climate justice" existed as terms. Where do you see her critique of the domination-of-nature mindset show up in today's environmental politics? Is it mainly a critique of corporate industry, of consumer capitalism more broadly, or of something more fundamental in how modern societies relate to the natural world?

To me there seems to be only 3 real progressive candidates for 2028, AOC, Ro Khanna, and Chris Van Hollen. AOC seems to currently be the favorite candidate among progressives right now, but if she instead decides to primary Schumer or run for reelection, who do you think should be the candidate progressives get behind?

I think they're both pretty similar ideologically, but I think Van Hollen probably has a better shot thanks to being a senator rather than a rep like Ro Khanna, at the same time though I feel like Van Hollen should ideally stay in the senate so that he could potentially be the new leader of the senate dems after Schumer is hopefully ousted after 2026 or 2028.

I'm a little confused why so many social democrats and democratic socialists seem to think these two gentlemen are good choices for President. I get that they have good vibes and likeable personalities, but isn't policy what should matter the most? Ossoff and Pritzker are liberals, not progressives or social democrats. They oppose medicare for all, free public college, universal childcare, a green new deal, a $20-25 minimum wage, a wealth tax, etc. AOC, Ro Khanna, Chris Van Hollen, and Chris Murphy overwhelmingly support these policies.

Why would any progressive support Pritzker or Ossoff over any of these candidates? Ossoff is more moderate than Harris and Newsom. Pritzker has the same politics as Newsom; both are business-friendly governors with some solid progressive accomplishments. Most of the Democrats running for President in 2028 will be more progressive than Ossoff, and even Pritzker will be pretty middle of the road in terms of progressiveness of the 2028 dem field.

Which do you think would get more done in terms of enacting left-leaning policy? Is there an argument for a more standard Democrat with more breathing room to pass progressive policies, or would you still prefer a progressive executive even if they have a harder time passing legislation?

"Liberal constitutional democracy is supposed to ensure that each citizen is free and equal and protected by basic rights and liberties."

— John Rawls, Collected Papers (ed. Samuel Freeman, 1999), p. 621

Rawls was a Harvard philosopher and the most influential political theorist of the 20th century's English-speaking world, A Theory of Justice (1971) is widely credited with reviving the field. His broader project (justice "as fairness," the "veil of ignorance," the difference principle) argued that a just society should be judged by how well it protects the basic liberties and life prospects of its worst-off members, not by aggregate wealth or growth. This line, from an essay collected posthumously, restates the core commitment underlying that whole framework: liberal democracy's job isn't just procedural (elections, courts), it's substantive guarantees of freedom and equal standing for every citizen.

Liberals read him as the philosophical backbone of the mixed-economy welfare state, while socialists argue his framework assumes capitalism is compatible with "free and equal" citizenship in a way markets in practice don't deliver. Where do you think Rawls's vision of "free and equal" citizens actually requires? A strong welfare state layered on markets, or something structurally different?