Tony Wang11 min readA US Senator Is Now Investigating the Two Companies That Own Your Kid's Daycare
KinderCare and Learning Care Group, both named in a 2026 Senate PE investigation, run ~2,400 US childcare centers under 13 storefront names.
Every hidden-ownership story this series has found so far has been a business story — a franchise roll-up, a bank merger, a fast-food conglomerate nobody had heard of. This one is different: the two largest players in this category aren't just consolidating quietly, they're the current subject of a formal congressional inquiry.
The words that broke this dataset the worst
| Query | Raw match count | What it actually measures |
|---|---|---|
| q="School" (within category=day_care_center) | 2,854 | A huge share of the category — most childcare businesses use "School" somewhere in their name |
| q="The Goddard School" (within category=day_care_center) | 2,866 | Nearly identical to "School" alone — the collision, not the brand |
| q="Goddard" (bare, no "School") | 710 | Clean — close to Goddard's real ~600 US franchises |
| q="Academy" (within category=day_care_center) | 7,829 | Also a huge share of the category |
| q="Learning Care Group" (unscoped, no category) | 471,840 | "Learning," "Care," and "Group" are each independently common — this number means nothing |
The practical consequence: almost every brand name in this category needed to be re-tested with its generic word stripped out before its count could be trusted. Goddard's clean number only appeared once "School" was dropped from the query entirely.
KinderCare: one brand, one owner, under Senate scrutiny
KinderCare Learning Companies operates all of its centers under a single, consistent brand name — no hidden banners here. Its real-world footprint, per its own reporting cited in recent Senate correspondence, is roughly 1,500 US childcare centers across 40 states, owned by Partners Group, a Swiss private-equity and infrastructure investment firm. In this dataset, KinderCare's listings split across two Google Maps categories — 600 tagged day_care_center and 905 tagged preschool — a fragmentation pattern this series has now seen repeatedly (church denominations, cannabis-as-pharmacy in Utah, liquor stores) whenever a single real-world business spans more than one Google-defined category type.
Learning Care Group: one owner, 11 different faces
| Storefront brand | Dataset status |
|---|---|
| La Petite Academy | Collides with "Academy" contamination — not independently trustworthy here |
| Childtime | 264 listings, clean bare-word query |
| Tutor Time | 396 listings, clean bare-word query |
| The Children's Courtyard | Not independently verified in this post |
| Everbrook Academy | Collides with "Academy" contamination |
| Montessori Unlimited, AppleTree & Gilden Woods, U-GRO, Creative Kids Learning Center, Young School, Pathways Learning Academy | 6 smaller brands, not independently verified in this post |
Learning Care Group's structure is the more extreme version of the multi-banner pattern this series first documented with Kroger/Ralphs and later found again with FirstCash's pawn shop brands. But those cases still had one or two banner names to search for. Learning Care Group spreads its roughly 900 US schools across 11 separate brand names, several of which (Everbrook Academy, La Petite Academy, Pathways Learning Academy) themselves contain the word "Academy" — meaning even a parent who knows to look for common ownership still can't cleanly search this dataset for the company's full footprint without running into the same contamination problem documented above.
The brands that check out cleanly
| Brand | Dataset listings | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Primrose Schools | 470 | Franchise, privately held |
| The Goddard School | 710 | Franchise, privately held |
| Childtime | 264 | Learning Care Group / American Securities (PE) |
| Tutor Time | 396 | Learning Care Group / American Securities (PE) |
Density breaks the pattern: this is a demand story, not a desert story
Show the full per-capita childcare density ranking
| Rank | State | Listings | Per 1M residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Connecticut | 1,178 | 320.5 |
| 2 | District of Columbia | 220 | 313.3 |
| 3 | Massachusetts | 2,216 | 310.5 |
| 4 | New York | 6,041 | 304.1 |
| 5 | Nebraska | 594 | 296.2 |
| 6 | North Dakota | 234 | 293.8 |
| 7 | Maryland | 1,798 | 287.1 |
| 8 | Maine | 387 | 275.4 |
| 9 | Delaware | 284 | 270.0 |
| 10 | Montana | 297 | 261.2 |
| 41 | Idaho | 274 | 136.9 |
| 42 | New Mexico | 290 | 136.1 |
| 43 | Oregon | 577 | 135.1 |
| 44 | Alaska | 93 | 125.7 |
| 45 | Utah | 373 | 106.5 |
| 46 | Arizona | 561 | 74.0 |
| 47 | Nevada | 202 | 61.8 |
Every prior density ranking in this series — banks, pawn shops, dollar stores, storefront lenders, fast food, auto repair — has led with the rural South and trailed in dense coastal states. Childcare inverts that pattern almost completely: Connecticut, DC, Massachusetts, and New York lead, while Arizona, Nevada, and Utah trail. Nevada's rate (61.8 per 1M) is barely a fifth of Connecticut's (320.5). This tracks a genuinely different underlying driver — childcare demand correlates with dual-income-household prevalence and local cost of living, not with the presence or absence of a competing full-service alternative the way bank branches, grocery stores, or big-box retail do. It's this series' clearest example yet of a category where the regional story is about demand structure, not supply gaps.
How we did this, and the caveats
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Brand-specific counts | Direct q= search per brand, scoped to category=day_care_center or category=preschool, each brand's generic-word contamination risk checked with a bare-word query before trusting the total |
| Real-world center counts | KinderCare and Learning Care Group's own figures as cited in 2026 US Senate correspondence; Bright Horizons' own SEC filings; Primrose and Goddard's publicly reported franchise counts |
| Ownership structure | Public reporting on the Partners Group (KinderCare) and American Securities (Learning Care Group) private-equity acquisitions, and the 2026 Senate investigation naming both |
| Per-capita rankings | State facet counts for category=day_care_center divided by US Census Bureau Vintage 2024 state population estimates |
Caveats worth stating plainly: 9 of Learning Care Group's 11 storefront brands are not independently verified in this post — La Petite Academy and Everbrook Academy both collide with the "Academy" contamination documented above, and the remaining 6 brands were not queried individually given the same risk; the ~900-school company-wide total comes entirely from Learning Care Group's own public reporting, not from a dataset-derived sum. KinderCare's day_care_center (600) and preschool (905) counts may include some genuine overlap if any single center is tagged with both categories; this post reports them separately rather than assuming they sum cleanly to 1,505. The Bright Horizons discrepancy (~2.2x) is disclosed as unresolved, the same practice used for Jiffy Lube. And as with every study on this dataset: it's live-growing, so a re-pull as the Senate investigation develops may show different disclosure detail than is available today.
If you want to run your own consolidation or ownership checks on this data, that's exactly what Crawlora's Google Maps business API is for — the same structured-data approach behind our auto repair chain ownership, fast food chain ownership, and storefront lending studies.
Query 132M+ Google Maps business listings directly
Crawlora's Google Maps dataset turns business listings into structured, queryable JSON — filter and facet by category, country, state, county, city, rating, and website status. 2,000 free credits a month, no card.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns KinderCare?
KinderCare Learning Companies is owned by Partners Group, a Swiss private-equity and infrastructure investment firm, and operates roughly 1,500 US centers across 40 states, all under the KinderCare name.
Who owns Learning Care Group, and what brands does it operate?
Learning Care Group is owned by private-equity firm American Securities and operates roughly 900 US schools spread across 11 different storefront brands: La Petite Academy, Childtime, Tutor Time, The Children's Courtyard, Everbrook Academy, Montessori Unlimited, AppleTree & Gilden Woods, U-GRO, Creative Kids Learning Center, Young School, and Pathways Learning Academy. None of the storefront names include "Learning Care Group."
Why is a US Senator investigating childcare ownership?
In 2026, US Senator Jeff Merkley formally launched an investigation into private-equity ownership of child care centers, sending direct correspondence naming both KinderCare (and its owner Partners Group) and Learning Care Group (and its owner American Securities). Both companies are named directly in that inquiry.
Why can't you search this dataset directly for "Learning Care Group" or "The Goddard School"?
Because the words "School" and "Academy" are both extremely common within category=day_care_center, and "Learning," "Care," and "Group" are each independently common outside any category filter. q="Learning Care Group" unscoped returns 471,840 matches; q="The Goddard School" returns 966,915 unscoped and 2,866 even scoped to the correct category — both numbers dominated by the generic words, not the brand.
Which US states have the most childcare listings per capita?
Connecticut leads at 320.5 per 1M residents, followed by Washington DC, Massachusetts, New York, and Nebraska — high-income, high dual-income-household markets. This breaks the rural-density pattern found in nearly every other category in this series (banks, pawn shops, dollar stores, fast food); Arizona and Nevada trail at the bottom instead.