New Report Highlights the Early Care and Education Workforce Data Deficit

The early care and education workforce is crucial to providing quality education to our youngest learners. Currently, there is a lot of attention focused on how to strengthen and support this workforce. But in order to make effective policies that benefit the workforce, officials need to be able to answer questions, like: What are the the demographics of the workforce? What level of education do early educators have? How does pay for early educators vary across roles, settings, and programs? But unfortunately, there is not comprehensive data out there to answer these seemingly simple questions.

A new report, The Workforce Data Deficit: Who it Harms How it Can be Overcome, from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California Berkeley, highlights how a lack of data on the early care and education workforce hinders the creation of effective policy solutions. Data for early educators is either non-existent or only exists for a portion of the workforce. The report warns that the absence of well-rounded data in policymaking can perpetuate inequities in “access to highly qualified, well-supported early educators for children” and  “access to professional development and better working conditions for early educators.”

Nationally, early education lacks a federally supported workforce survey like the School Staffing Survey for the K-12 grades. Instead, there are three sources for national data that include the early education workforce: the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES), the Current Population Survey (CPS), and the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE). OES and CPS capture data across all occupations and rely on federal classifications of the early care and education workforce, which are “childcare workers,” “preschool teachers,” and “education administrators: preschool/childcare center.” These broad classifications do not accurately capture variations between roles and settings. The NSECE is a far more detailed national source of data on the early care and education workforce, but it is not as timely. There was a 22-year gap between Profile of Child Care Settings conducted in 1990 and the latest NSECE (Revised Profile of Child Care Settings) conducted in 2012.

Many states also aren’t going far enough to collect comprehensive workforce data. Two years ago only 50 percent of states tried to collect data that encompassed all licensed early education settings. Most states rely on early care and education workforce registries or surveys to collect data. Registries are typically intended as a tool to verify training and education, but they are also a good source of data on the early care and education workforce. In some cases, registries have the potential to connect data to a program’s licensure and QRIS.

A pitfall of registries, however, is that they do not capture information for the entire workforce as participation in a state’s registry is often voluntary or required only for specific program types, like publicly funded programs. Conducting surveys presents a similar challenge if a representative sample is not achieved through the survey. Surveys also need to be regularly conducted, like they are in North Carolina, which can place an extra demand on the already busy schedules of early educators. CSCCE suggests that until state registries can capture information across the entire early care and education workforce, routine surveys can be used to compare registry data to and to collect other necessary data.

Ideally, according to CSCCE, “data on the size and key characteristics of the entire early care and education workforce (across settings) would be collected regularly, be comparable across regions, states, and localities, and would have the capacity to be linked to data at the program level as well as the child and family levels.” This would require a universally agreed upon definition of who is included under the term “early care and education.” Here at New America, we define early care and education as spanning from birth to third grade (birth to age eight). However, some other organizations define early care and education as spanning from birth to age five or even from birth to age three. CSCCE recommends regular data collection not only because it is good practice but also because there have been a lot of changes in the early care and education field and their effects need to be better documented. Additionally, the high amount of turnover in the field warrants regular data collection to track and compare rates across roles, settings, and programs.

With limited resources, data collection and systems may not be seen as a top priority. But the CSCCE argues that more robust data can lead to the creation of effective, equitable solutions. We would agree: understanding the full nature of the challenges facing the early care and education workforce through data is a necessary first step in formulating policies that benefit the entire workforce.