Silicon Valley comes to home-based child care
And a black cop is convicted for killing a white woman
Last week I published a story in The Hechinger Report, a national education news site, about the rise of new tech startups that seek to make it easier for people to run childcare businesses in their homes. Think “airBnb for childcare business owners.” These companies have attracted millions of dollars in investment from venture capitalists over the last few years. They all also have vast nationwide growth ambitions, aiming to launch hundreds of thousands of new childcare businesses across the U.S. over the next decade. The idea is to help providers with their bookkeeping, licensing, marketing and curriculum offerings, in exchange for a 10 percent cut of the revenue.
I actually got to travel in February to San Francisco to report out this story, meeting two women who started home-childcare businesses with the support of one of these startups. I also had the chance to talk to a local childcare provider who has been running her own home-based business since the early 1990s. She thinks the new companies are predatory and a bad call for workers. For others, the startups represent long overdue innovation in the childcare industry, and supporters say they can make things a win-win for everyone.
I did my best to investigate some of the companies’ claims. For example, one of the startups, Wonderschool, advertises that its providers can earn up to $120,000 per year. Yet when I asked their CEO what their average child care provider actually earns, they declined to share the data. “It’s just like, private information,” they said.
You can read the story here.
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The other piece I have to share is about Mohamed Noor, a former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted last week of killing a woman, Justine Damond, in 2017. Noor is a black Muslim man, and was the first on-duty police officer to be convicted for an officer-involved shooting in the state in decades. His victim was a white Australian woman, and her death at the time generated international news coverage.
I happened to be in Minneapolis last week when the verdict came down, and was able to attend a rally organized by neighbors of Justine. At the event other relatives of victims of police violence were able to speak and wrestle with the implications and complexities of the decision. I also talked to racial justice leaders about how the landscape has changed over the last few years in the Twin Cities in the wake of other high-profile police killings that did not end with the officers going to jail. You can read about that in The Intercept.
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