A four-year legal battle over D.C.’s new requirements that many child care workers get a college degree has seemingly come to an end.

Last week the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. dismissed a long-running lawsuit challenging the education requirements, which were first adopted in 2016 and start taking effect later this year after a series of delays. Under the new rules, directors of child care centers will need a bachelor’s degree in early education, teachers will need an associate’s degree in early education, and assistant teachers and caregivers in home-based daycares will need a Child Development Associate’s credential.

D.C. officials have said the education requirements — which are among the first of their kind in the country — are meant to professionalize the child care industry as more research has emerged on the rapid development that occurs in infants and toddlers. But the Institute of Justice, a Virginia-based libertarian law firm, sued in 2018 on behalf of a D.C. parent, a caregiver, and a preschool teacher. They argued that the new rules would needlessly drive qualified and passionate caregivers out of the industry and drive up costs for families in a city where child care expenses already rank among the nation’s highest. (According to a 2019 report from Child Care Aware of America, parents of an infant in D.C. pay more than $24,000 a year for center-based care.)

Writing for the panel in last week’s ruling, Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan did not weigh in on whether D.C. should require child care workers to get college degrees, but said that the city could rationally require that they do so.

“Even assuming it is irrational to force a hair braider who never dyes hair to sit through a week of training on how to safely use hair dye, an associate’s degree in early-childhood education is self evidently (and rationally) connected to the work of caring for young children,” he wrote in the 23-page decision sustaining a lower court’s ruling in favor of the city. “Although we are sensitive to the burdens that [D.C.’s] regulations impose on daycare workers, our role is not to assess the wisdom of the agency’s policy choices. A conceivably rational justification for the college requirements is readily apparent, and, in this context, that is all due process requires.”

Renée Flaherty, the institute’s attorney who filed the lawsuit, lambasted the ruling. “[It] clears the way for D.C. officials to go forward with their initial plan to throw countless loving, experienced child care providers out of work because they don’t have the right piece of paper to change a child’s diapers,” she said in a statement.

Writing in Reason, a libertarian magazine, this week, George Mason University Law School professor Ilya Somin similarly criticized the court’s ruling, saying that child care workers don’t need college degrees or credentials to be good at their jobs.

“Any adult with experience in caring for small children knows that it’s perfectly possible to do the job well without having a college degree of any kind,” wrote Somin. “When I was in middle school and high school, I spent hundreds of hours working as a babysitter for toddlers, all without ever feeling the need to for any information that could only be learned in college (indeed, I didn’t even have a high school diploma at the time). Rare is the parent who, in choosing daycare facilities, cares whether the employees have college degrees or not.”

But Mary Harrill with the National Association for the Education of Young Children says that research now shows that additional educational requirements could help improve caregiving for young children and also professionalize the workforce.

“There’s a lot of questions on why does someone need a degree to work with children?” she said. “Part of that is because there is not a recognition of the research base and that there are these specific competencies, and if we want to be taken seriously, having those education credentials is an important part of professionalizing early childhood educators.”

In a Twitter thread on the issue of educational credentials, D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson (I-At Large) said the city’s decision to impose the new requirements on child care workers followed an earlier move to raise educational expectations for preschool teachers as D.C. adopted universal free pre-K for three- and four-year-olds. Additionally, she pointed out, federal law imposes education requirements for teachers in Head Start programs for low-income children.

“Zero-to-three is not just babysitting,” she wrote. “The science behind brain development and early learning cannot be ignored.”

Still, Henderson said the issue deserves a “fresh hearing” in the D.C. Council to determine how far along child care workers are to meeting the requirements.

According to the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which oversees and licenses child care centers and workers, 78% of directors of child care centers are now meeting their new educational requirement. The number is lower for teachers and assistant teachers, though, at 40% and 34% respectively, and around 50% for caregivers at home-based daycares. Still, an agency spokesman said everyone but directors have until Dec. 2023 to come into compliance, and that this year OSSE funded scholarships for 427 workers to get their Child Development Associate’s credential.

The D.C. requirements also allow for waivers to be granted for workers with more than 10 years experience before 2016, or those who can show that meeting the requirements would impose economic hardship. (One of Flaherty’s clients in the lawsuit did receive a waiver.)

Harrill says a key to supporting child care workers who are now subject to D.C.’s new education requirements is increasing their pay; child care workers in many cities and states make little more than minimum wage.

“While early childhood educators having education credentials is important, the reality is most of the workforce is working for minimum wage. So there is a moral quandary of saying ‘Hey we want you to have more education,’ but you’re still going to be paid minimum wage,” she said.

D.C. is taking a big step in that direction next month, when it will start giving child care workers one-time payments of up to $14,000 as part of a broader plan that takes effect next year to increase their pay using revenue from a tax increase on wealthy residents.