Michigan’s Tri-Share program recently reached a key milestone: serving more than 1,000 children in the state.
By splitting the costs of child care equally among working families, their employers and the state, the program provides substantial relief for what can often be a family’s biggest monthly expense.
But for those not benefiting from the program — be they just above Tri-Share’s income eligibility threshold, or working for an employer who does not participate, or a resident outside of Michigan, or an onlooker invested in the program’s success — it might seem like Tri-Share is struggling to scale. After all, the pilot launched almost five years ago, and the state has expressed what now seems like an ambitious goal of reaching 7,500 children across 5,000 households in Michigan by 2028.
Still, Tri-Share’s modest growth in Michigan has not deterred other states from adopting and adapting the model.
By the end of 2023, several states, including Kentucky, New York and North Carolina, were either developing or piloting a version of Tri-Share. Two years later, it’s still catching on; Ohio, West Virginia, Connecticut, North Dakota, Indiana and Missouri have introduced replica models. The program is an attractive option for leveraging child care to spur workforce participation and economic growth in states that lean red and purple politically, where the more comprehensive — and therefore more costly in terms of tax dollars — child care programs gaining traction in blue states seem unlikely to take root.
Leaders in Michigan point out that Tri-Share is just one among several efforts there designed to boost child care and early childhood development. Yet as Tri-Share proliferates in other states that have different political realities and less robust early care and education investments, not everyone thinks the replication efforts are such a good idea.
A recent report from The Century Foundation, a left-learning think tank, posits that states would be better off — because early childhood educators, families and children would be better off — investing those dollars elsewhere.
“I totally get why this program is interesting to states. They’re trying to get the most bang for their buck, to lower prices for families,” says Lea Woods, senior policy associate at The Century Foundation and author of the report. But, she adds, “it’s probably not the best way to make child care more affordable for families.”
Woods sees four key problems with Tri-Share.
First, she says, it does nothing to increase the child care supply. The program works to improve child care affordability, not access. But then some families end up eligible for the workplace benefit and unable to use it, because they can’t find adequate care that fits their needs.
Second is low uptake. Due to limited funds and tight eligibility bands, many families aren’t able to benefit, and among those who are eligible, only some participate. (Awareness of Tri-Share tends to be a challenge, especially in Michigan.)
Third is the opportunity cost. Michigan is investing $3.4 million a year in Tri-Share. In Kentucky, it’s $2 million annually. Ohio has set aside $10 million for its pilot. States could put that money toward public investment in the field, argues Woods, who believes their dollars could do more for early care and education if used more strategically. In her report, Woods elevates examples from Iowa and Travis County, Texas, both of which have created general child care funds to pool money for increasing access and affordability, as better ways forward.
And finally, Woods worries that tying child care benefits to employment — as health care is treated in this country — is wrongheaded.
In interviews, state advocates and administrators of Tri-Share acknowledged the validity of some of Woods’ points. Yet they are quick to defend their programs’ merits.
“It’s been a mixed bag up to this point,” says Charles Aull, vice president of policy at the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, “but we still think this program has a whole lot of promise and a whole lot of potential.”
Aull agrees that the insufficient child care supply is a challenge for many families using his state’s version of Tri-Share. (He told EdSurge so back in 2023, too.)
But the goal of Tri-Share is to improve affordability, not increase access. So he doesn’t view that as a flaw of the program but instead believes there should be a “parallel program” in his state to target supply building.
“You could do the inverse of this: What’s the point of increasing access if you can’t afford it?” he says. “You’ve gotta do both at once.”
Aull, as well as Tri-Share proponents in Indiana, made clear in interviews that broad public investments in early care and education, such as the free universal child care program that recently debuted in New Mexico or the operational grants for early childhood programs available in Massachusetts, are nonstarters in their conservative states.
Yet Tri-Share is a concept conservative and libertarian lawmakers can get behind, Aull says, because it involves the private sector and still requires employees to contribute to the cost of care. In other words, it’s not a handout. “Everyone can rally around it,” he says. But a tax on the wealthy, like that which funds child care in Vermont? Not so much.
Allie Sutherland, executive director of the Northeast Indiana Early Childhood Coalition (NEIECC), says that she faces similar challenges of political feasibility in Indiana.
“National early childhood people always talk about ‘braiding and blending’ funding. In Indiana, we have one strand: subsidies,” Sutherland says. “What are we braiding?”
She adds: “Different states have to approach it differently.”
NEIECC launched Tri-Share+ earlier this year for 11 counties in northeast Indiana, following a pilot program in one of those counties.
Tri-Share+ began enrolling employers in April, with about 40 families participating now. Sutherland expects that number to double by the end of the year, as it’s bringing on the largest employer in the region, a network of hospitals. By next spring, she hopes to have 150 to 200 families participating.
Tri-Share and related state-matching programs limit eligibility to low- and middle-income employees. To broaden benefits to more families, NEIECC is operating a complementary program called Co-Share. Instead of splitting child care costs three ways, Co-Share eliminates the state’s portion and splits costs between employer and employee.
Michigan is soft-launching a similar concept right now, calling it Care Share. For employees whose household income exceeds 400 percent of the poverty level (about $128,000 for a family of four) — which is the level at which the state’s Tri-Share contribution stops kicking in — employers can still chip in one-third of the cost and employees will cover the remaining two-thirds.
Leaders in Michigan hope that Care Share will allow more families to benefit from the cost-sharing model, says Emily Laidlaw, deputy director for early education at the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential. “That’s coming really soon,” Laidlaw says. “Employers want to do more, and they’re becoming more and more comfortable with the Tri-Share structure.”
Seemingly no one involved in Tri-Share views it as the answer to the child care crisis. Quite the opposite.
Kristina Bajtka, director of Tri-Share for United Way of Northwest Michigan, which acts as the statewide administrative partner for Michigan’s Tri-Share, is quick to remind that Tri-Share was designed to be a workforce development program, removing a key barrier to economic growth.
“Was it created to fix child care? No. It’s not the easy button,” Bajtka says. “Is Tri-Share alone going to solve the child care crisis? Absolutely not, and Michigan never said it would.”
It’s true, she said, that states need to beef up their other investments in early care and education alongside Tri-Share. She feels Michigan is doing that, with initiatives like PreK for All and an early childhood educator wage pilot.
“We are targeting it from many different facets,” Bajtka says, “but the only thing that gets attention is Tri-Share. No one is looking at Michigan as a whole.”
Bajtka, Aull and Sutherland, along with others interviewed for this story, all describe Tri-Share as “a piece of the puzzle,” not the complete jigsaw.
“This is not the be-all, end-all to help address child care,” says Aull of Kentucky. “But absent some major expansion of the federal child care program, or major investments at the state level, this is a really targeted intervention that can help families.”
