Over the past two years, there have been more and more stories arising about the role of investors, especially private equity firms, in child care. Given Early Learning Nation’s mission to illuminate “journalism from, and for, the early learning field,” we eagerly agreed when Elliot Haspel approached us about doing a long-form look at investor-backed child care chains.

Elliot is a well-known child care policy expert and author, as well as a freelance journalist and opinion writer who has published stories with The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post (among others), and a longtime ELN contributor and columnist. For this story, he employed investigative journalism techniques to provide a deep look into the workings and implications of growing investor and private equity influence.