When you visit practically any private daycare facility in this nation, you’ll notice something about the turnover that isn’t immediately apparent in the classroom. At the door, a different face. The cubby tags have a new name. By February, a teacher who had been there in September had left. Even though they are unable to explain why they are uneasy, the kids also notice.
This is the everyday reality of early care and education in the US, a system that is subtly collapsing due to decades of disregard. And at its core are the educators themselves, who were virtually always absent from policy discussions until very recently.
It’s difficult to ignore the stark numbers once you’ve seen them. The average annual salary for a childcare worker is approximately $29,570. In contrast, the average salary of a public school teacher is $63,645, which is more than twice as much and typically includes benefits like health insurance and a retirement plan. A system that has long viewed early childhood education as something more akin to babysitting than the skilled, cognitively demanding profession it truly is has allowed this gap to exist for years.
What the research actually reveals about the work of early educators is what makes this especially unsettling. These individuals are not in charge of nap time. They are monitoring developmental trajectories, constructing conceptual frameworks in young minds, and pushing language development through sophisticated questioning techniques—work that calls for precisely the kind of skill and judgment that the profession is rarely recognized for. It is difficult to defend the notion that this work merits about half the salary of a high school math teacher after giving it some serious consideration.
Due to a combination of the workforce crisis and accumulated research, the movement advocating for pay parity between early childhood educators and K–12 teachers has been quietly gaining traction. The sector’s annual turnover rate ranges from 26 to 40 percent, which is at least twice as high as that of K–12 schools and significantly higher in some states. According to administrative data, almost 40% of Virginia’s child care workers quit their jobs annually. Similar numbers were observed in Louisiana. Children experience quantifiable developmental consequences when teachers depart in the middle of the school year. Families no longer have access to reliable, high-quality care. The harm accumulates.
Money helps, at least according to some evidence. A $1,500 bonus reduced eight-month turnover rates among childcare teachers by half, according to a randomized experiment conducted in Virginia. Increases in the minimum wage that raised ECE pay also decreased departures. Although no study has specifically looked at whether full pay parity with K–12 would result in equivalent stability, the directional signal appears to be fairly consistent. People stay longer when you pay them more.
However, the issue of professional status goes beyond pay. The majority of states have no educational requirements at all for childcare providers who work from home or in centers. In center-based settings, between 30 and 35 percent of teachers have a bachelor’s degree. That percentage is 97% in grades K–12. Although it is genuinely debatable whether requiring higher credentials would improve outcomes (correlational evidence is conflicting, and it’s challenging to separate what credentials do from who tends to hold them), the credential gap itself reflects something larger about how the nation values this work.
The fact that no one has a clear understanding of the workforce in the first place contributes to the difficulty of reform. The early childhood sector operates with an almost perplexing data deficit, in contrast to K–12, where extensive national surveys and statewide data systems track educators over time. The majority of states don’t systematically gather data on teachers in all ECE settings. Creating policies for a workforce that you cannot fully see is challenging.
As this movement develops, it seems as though the nation is gradually moving toward a reckoning it has been putting off for decades. The appreciation that comes without a commensurate salary is insufficient for the educators who dedicate their days to creating the neural underpinnings of the next generation. It is difficult to dispute the case at this point, but whether the political will follows is a different matter.
