Building a Stronger Early Childhood Workforce

When we surveyed the Early Care and Education Implementation Working Group about what topics felt most relevant and timely to them, the early educator workforce was the number one issue. As early childhood leaders consider expanding access to early learning opportunities and supporting high-quality learning environments, challenges in recruiting, retaining, and sustaining the workforce are one of the biggest constraints.

At its December 2024 meeting, the Working Group heard from a panel of experts in higher education programs who are supporting the early childhood workforce. It’s an important meeting of minds. Early childhood program administrators and higher education program leaders both work to support the ECE workforce, but from different vantage points. As one speaker aptly put it, "leaders in higher education and early childhood talk a lot about each other, but not necessarily to each other." Leaders in one space might have ideas, opinions, and even misconceptions about what is and should be happening in other spaces. This is true across many sectors where multiple organizations are interacting within a complex system. But system problems need systems thinking, avoiding either/or solutions that ignore the full scope of an issue.

Conversations about strengthening the workforce can feel circular and intractable given the systemic nature of the challenge: it can be challenging (and feel inequitable) to recruit new educators into a field with such low and uneven pay, and it can be challenging to compel policymakers to invest in early childhood educators’ wages when they continue to undervalue the skills and competencies required to do this work well. It is important to talk about increasing both compensation and competencies, but making wholesale changes to both at once can feel out of reach in current policy environments. However, incremental fixes working in tandem can do a lot to smooth the experience of both prospective and current early childhood educators, particularly when they are driven by the expressed needs of those educators. Fortunately there is a lot of good work happening in higher education programs building up the workforce all across the country, where Early Childhood program leaders are responding directly to provider needs, which in turn helps them respond directly to the needs of children and families in the community. This is complemented by examples of states and municipalities that have invested in early educator wages and are gathering compelling evidence that makes a clear case for why these investments matter. Elevating positive examples can inspire replicable innovations elsewhere, and broaden the evidence base for bigger policy changes in early education programs- a foundational approach in the New Practice Lab.

This meeting was an opportunity to bring some of the higher ed folks who are preparing early childhood educators into conversation with folks who are doing the work of designing and implementing early childhood programs. In this blog post, we first explain why workforce is such a pressing and timely topic in early education. Then, we highlight some of the lessons shared at the December 2024 meeting, particularly focusing on efforts to boost pay and support training in the early education workforce.

The challenges in recruiting, retaining, and sustaining the early childhood workforce are well-documented, including in various publications by New America. Here, we highlight some of the most relevant themes.

Early childhood educators are paid less than most other workers in the United States. Across roles and settings, the early childhood workforce earned an average hourly salary of $13.07 in 2022. Comparatively, the average worker in the U.S. across all occupations earned $22.92 hourly. Early childhood workers also face gaps in benefits, including access to health insurance, retirement funds, and paid time off. (There are multiple approaches to analyzing early educator wages. This blog post primarily cites data from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment’s 2024 Early Childhood Workforce Index.)

Within early childhood education, workers face a wage gap by settings. Early childhood educators work in a mix of public and privately funded programs, in center and home based settings. Though all early care and education work is low pay in light of the skill and responsibility, there are pay gaps within the field based on setting. Those who work in home-based or community settings earn less than those in public school preschool programs, and those who work with the youngest children are paid the least. Those gaps exist even among those who hold the same certifications.

Pay gaps are concentrated among early educators of color. This perpetuates widespread and longstanding exploitative labor practices all too typical across the spectrum of care workers. Early educators more directly reflect the diversity of the children they serve than K-12 educators, who are mostly White. About 40 percent of early childhood educators in center-based settings are people of color. Just over half of home-based care providers are people of color. People of color are more likely to be in assistant teaching roles and to work with younger children – roles that pay lower wages.

There are an insufficient number of people in the early childhood workforce. While there has always been some gap in the necessary supply for child care workers, the pandemic worsened this issue with many leaving the field due to health concerns, high stress, and low pay. Educators lost their jobs as child care programs closed. All told, a third of child care sector jobs – 370,000 in total – were lost between February and April 2020. The sector was slower to recover than other parts of the economy, and even today, there were 40,000 fewer people working in child care at the end of 2023 compared to before the pandemic. Based on pre-pandemic growth projections for the sector, there are actually more than 150,000 people “missing” from the child care workforce. Without federal and state interventions during the pandemic, the gap could be even wider.

Early educators are aging – especially in home-based care – which underscores the need to build the field. Nationally, more than half of the educators in licensed home-based care programs are over the age of 50. In center-based care, about a quarter of educators are over 50. Though there are meaningful numbers of younger educators in center-based care especially (33 percent under age 30), many educators find it challenging to sustain careers in early education as they start their own families given the stress and low wages of the work.

Workforce shortages directly impact how many children can be served. Over a one-year period of data collection by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, two-thirds of all child care providers nationwide reported at least one staff vacancy – a meaningfully higher rate than other types of businesses. This directly impacts children; in New York State, for example, staffing gaps drive classroom closures that mean 28,000 slots in licensed child care programs are unavailable to families.

A growing number of states have invested in boosting early educator pay, recognizing that public funds are needed to close this wage gap. This includes efforts to create pay parity within and across publicly-administered preschool initiatives along with investments to boost pay for the private child care workforce more broadly.

Alabama set the starting wages for all teachers in the state pre-K program to the same level, regardless of whether they teach in public or private settings. As a result, more teachers expressed interest in joining the ECE workforce and teacher satisfaction rose.

In New York City, municipal leaders worked alongside advocates and organized labor to define new compensation scales that would bring teachers in community settings into greater parity with public school teachers. While full parity has still not been reached, thousands of educators saw their wages increase by 30 to 40 percent.

In Washington, DC, the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund augments child care worker pay by $5K-$14K annually, depending on their role. Early findings have been quite positive: employment in the child care sector increased by 7 percent, with 219 more new employees above expected growth rates and two-thirds of DC educators saying they would continue working in early education longer than previously expected.

Minnesota's Great Start Compensation Support Payment Program similarly provides a monthly payment to child care centers to pass on to their employees in the form of increased wages and benefits. The program is just over a year old and was launched in part to support child care providers with hiring and retaining quality staff.

Even seemingly small investments can make a difference. A program funded by Virginia’s Preschool Development Grant gave randomly selected early educators in Virginia a one-time $1500 incentive distributed over 8 months. Teacher turnover in preschool classrooms dropped by 11 percentage points with incentives, and teacher turnover in child care settings dropped by half.

Kentucky made waves as the first state to guarantee child care workers access to child care subsidies, regardless of household income - a policy that has now been adopted and adapted by more than a dozen additional states and communities. New research shows a positive benefit on child care access statewide as more educators stayed in the workforce or were incentivized to enter it. This may be a useful example to look at for jurisdictions exploring other benefits and supports beyond raising wages.

Some newer early childhood initiatives have taken steps to bake educator pay boosts into their program design from the start. Multnomah County’s Preschool for All program includes explicit investments in wages, designed to ensure parity among preschool teachers and boost opportunities for infant and toddler teachers. The newly passed early childhood initiative in Travis County, Texas includes specific funds for child care workers.

These efforts are all encouraging, and sharing evidence from them may further inspire other policymakers to make similar investments. But while boosting compensation for early educators is an important first step, it is not enough. The fact remains that many other sectors offer competitive wages with fewer qualifications, and all too often the field loses experienced teachers to retail, food service, and other sectors. Children deserve high quality care, and that hinges on providers and teachers who are well prepared to provide it, through formal education and on the job experience. Training early childhood providers takes time and money, and on-the-job training doesn’t happen overnight- but there are ways to minimize the friction, moving more qualified and supported educators into the workforce more quickly. Connecting early childhood programs and the higher education programs that prepare the workforce can help ease the strain.

Building up the early childhood workforce is complex – across the country, there are a patchwork of different requirements for certification prior to employment and a hodge-podge of approaches to on-the-job training. Even within states or municipalities, there may be different certification or degree requirements based on the children’s age or learning environment. Some roles require a Child Development Associate (CDA); others require a Bachelor’s degree; and others require only a high school diploma and some basic health and safety training.

There has not always been agreement among even the experts about the right level of education for early educators or what the ideal pathway should look like. Recently, there has been a national push for more consistency in early educator training, including through the Commission on Professional Excellence in Early Childhood Education, a new group established to promote the Unifying Framework for the Early Childhood Profession. This framework speaks to a single vision for career pathways and professional standards in early education, and grew out of an effort known as “Power to the Profession” – a collaborative effort led by the early childhood education field and over a dozen national early childhood education organizations. This kind of effort is intended to elevate early childhood educators and create the kind of career pathways that will enable them to be treated as the professionals they are.

Still, this conversation can feel abstract and unapproachable without tangible examples. What does a framework look like in action? How do prospective teachers experience an improved career pathway on the ground? To that end, the ECE Implementation Working Group was joined by four experts at its December meeting.

Toshiba L. Adams, Ph.D., Instructor, Child Development, Milwaukee Area Technical College, and Adjunct Professor, Educational Policy, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Pamela Evanshen, EdD, Professor and Department Chair of Early Childhood Education and Co-Coordinator of the Early Childhood PhD Program, East Tennessee State University

Ninderjit Gill, Full-Time Faculty, North Seattle College

Ana De Hoyos O'Connor, Professor of Early Childhood Studies, San Antonio College

Facilitated in conversation by Lauren Hogan, Strategic Advisor and Content Writer at NAEYC, these experts shared lessons from their work building and supporting the early educator workforce in their communities. Each of these innovative leaders is delivering pre-service training to early childhood educators in new ways, to new populations, and with new partners. Lessons from their work may be relevant to the higher education programs that train early educators and to the leaders of municipal and state early childhood programs looking for partners to bolster the workforce.

• Listen to what students need. Milwaukee Area Technical College offers programs that were informed directly by input from students about their needs and the kinds of flexible learning options that would work for them. This includes dual enrollment pathways that start in high school, and articulation pathways into four-year universities in Wisconsin–including a new master’s program focused on early childhood education advocacy and policy.
• Meet students where they are. North Seattle College in particular has invested in pathways for diverse educators, including language-specific cohorts in Spanish, Arabic, Somali, and Mandarin. Multiple of these programs have waitlists, which Ninderjit pointed to as evidence that the ECE workforce may not actually be shrinking in aggregate, but it is diversifying. Within these language-specific cohorts, North Seattle offers stackable credentials – certifications that build upon each other – as a strategy to offer students a range of different options. Students can complete courses supporting entry level certification, allowing them to start working in the field and earn additional, relevant credentials as their careers progress.
  
  New America’s Early and Elementary Education Policy team has written several reports on workforce with practical tips and application that touch on this same theme of meeting students where they are, including: Earning While Learning with Early Educator Apprenticeship Programs and Developing a Bilingual Associate Degree Program for Spanish-Speaking Early Childhood Educators
• Evolve the institutions as the field changes. At San Antonio College, Early Childhood Studies is moving out of the college’s Career and Technical Education department to merge with the Education department in 2025, representing the full continuum of opportunities for students. San Antonio College has also moved toward a program with more stackable credentials, gathering information on the impact on students, and granting credit for prior work experience in new ways.
• Make higher education more inclusive. All four panelists demonstrated that higher education can better meet the needs of students and can be tailored to different populations. Embracing prior experience for credit, granting stackable credentials as achievements in their own right or on the pathway to a formal degree, and offering flexible, accessible, and multilingual coursework are promising practices that serve students as well as the families and children that they will ultimately support in communities.
• Treat educators like the professionals they are. If we ask the workforce to do more – to show up to training, to earn credentials, to put in the work – we need to recognize it. The team from Denver Preschool Program shared that they pay stipends to any teacher that participates in professional development. Policies like this can help communicate that we value educators and their time.
• Push for broader change. We also talked about the power of connecting educators with legislators directly and giving them the tools to tell their own stories. Data is necessary too, but the personal stories bring real power. This is where the commitment to broader advocacy work – and supporting educators to engage in advocacy work directly – can come in, alongside the work to create more sustaining professional pathways. For example, PathWaves in Washington is building a pathway for BIPOC educators to enter public policy, bringing the lived experience into decision making conversations that will impact them.
• Start making connections and just try something new. So many of the innovative programs highlighted on this call started because one or two people asked, Why not? partnered together, engaged a funder, and initiated a pilot. For program leaders who want to make new connections with their local community college or technical college, the best advice is to just reach out. Listen to what the workforce says they need, and then work together to test new solutions to meet those needs.

This was not the first time that the working group focused on the workforce, and it certainly will not be the last. The group plans to check in on workforce challenges – and new pilots and bright spots – every 6 months or so, though workforce is a theme in nearly every other topic discussed. Without early childhood educators, there is no early childhood education. There is no single silver bullet to address workforce challenges, and the question is not whether to address compensation or workforce training and support, it’s understanding and working to meet the full landscape of provider needs. Policymakers need to look at the interconnected levers of building the pipeline, and creating long-term career pathways. Keeping an eye to all these topics in tandem will be important as we try to build a sustainable workforce for the future.

The authors extend enormous gratitude to Lauren Hogan, Strategic Advisor and Content Writer at NAEYC, who has served as a friend and advisor to the ECE Implementation Working Group since its inception and who facilitated the conversation that inspired this blog post. Thanks as well to the four experts whose work is cited throughout this piece – Toshiba L. Adams, Pamela Evanshen, Ninderjit Gill, and Ana De Hoyos O'Connor.