While the national workforce has long since recovered from the pandemic, the child care industry has lagged behind, experiencing a slow recovery that continues to this day.
In the three years since the arrival of COVID-19, families have struggled to find high-quality, affordable child care for their children. Child care providers have been hard-pressed to find qualified workers to fill their open positions, often because employers in the retail and service industries have become higher-paying competitors. And early childhood educators who remain in the field have done so despite low wages, rising inflation, and high-stress working conditions.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been monitoring the situation, especially with an eye toward the early care and education workforce, says Katie Hamm, Assistant Secretary Early Childhood Development Associate in the department’s Administration for Children and Families (ACF).
Since 2020, HHS has been monitoring data from the field, including data showing a strained workforce. “It seemed like the time was right for the federal government to have an explicit focus on this, and one that was cross-cutting,” Hamm tells EdSurge.
Earlier this month, ACF Announced the launch of the National Early Care and Education Workforce Center (ECE Workforce Center for short) to support research and technical assistance for states, communities, territories, and tribal nations. With an investment of $30 million over five years, the center aims to improve conditions for the early care and education workforce, making it a more attractive field to enter, stay, and advance.
The center’s two main goals are to increase compensation, including salaries and benefits, and to build a diverse and qualified pipeline of future educators.
These two goals are equally important and inextricably linked, says Elena Montoya, a senior research and policy associate at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California, Berkeley.
“They go hand in hand,” Montoya says. “To hire and retain educators, you need to address compensation. It’s hard to untangle them.”
Hamm elaborates on the interconnectedness of these two critical challenges facing the field.
“We have had chronic problems with the early childhood workforce, due to historically low wages leading to high turnover. Historically, it’s not a profession that has provided a channel that you can get into, move up, have more responsibilities and make more money over time,” Hamm explains. “A lot of times what we find in early childhood is that when people get degrees or credentials, they don’t stay in the field. They go to K-12 or other education systems that will pay them a fair wage and provide benefits.”
She adds: “This has been a long-standing problem. But the pandemic really disrupted the precariousness of the early childhood workforce.”
ACF has taken advantage children’s trends, a nonprofit research organization focused on children and families, to lead the ECE Workforce Center, in partnership with various organizations committed to improving early childhood education, including the BUILD Initiative; he CSCCE at Berkeley; ZERO TO THREE; the University of Delaware; and the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Chrishana Lloyd, a Child Trends Research Fellow, will lead the research efforts of the ECE Workforce Center. Tonya Coston of the BUILD Initiative will lead the technical assistance work. Montoya, from the CSCCE, will serve as a bridge between the two.
All three women point out that ECE’s National Workforce Center will take an equity-focused, strengths-based approach to the work ahead. Lloyd says the equity perspective is about acknowledging the fact that the early childhood workforce is overwhelmingly female and disproportionately female of color and immigrants. For the strengths-based element, she says it means showing up with a “can do” attitude.
“The issues are well established at this point,” Montoya says. “I think the focus on solutions is really exciting for everyone.”
Lloyd adds: “We hear a lot of pessimism: there aren’t enough people in the workforce. They are not paid enough. There are challenges. But our approach is to try to think about these things in a creative, strengths-based way.”
What it looks like in practice, they say, remains to be seen. But Lloyd has some ideas about where to start, such as “drawing and digging into places that are doing great, innovative work,” he adds.
Recent victories in Washington, DC and New Mexico come to mind for Lloyd. she notices that DC Pay Equity Fund improving pay for early childhood educators in the district has been widely viewed as a success. So has the recent decision by New Mexico voters to guarantee the right to early childhood education in the state constitution. In both cases, nothing changed overnight. The results were the result of many years of effort, advocacy and coalition building, Lloyd notes. That’s the kind of inspiration this field needs: “it’s not an overnight fix, it’s not a magic wand.”
Direct input from early childhood educators is also part of the approach. The center is developing an “early childhood educator leadership board,” which will provide a channel for educators to provide input on the center’s activities. And a policy and research grant program will also incorporate the voice of the educator. Both are efforts to ensure that the center’s work “remains educator-focused,” Montoya explains.
With $30 million in funding and five years, the new center is unlikely to find a cure for all of the course’s problems. But by learning from states, communities, territories, and tribes, and looking for ways to restructure budgets and redirect funds, those involved expect to see incremental but significant results.
“This is not a problem that was created overnight or that we are going to solve overnight,” says Hamm. “But our goal is really to take the resources, financial and otherwise, that we have and really focus them on this problem to find solutions.”
Plus, the creation of the center is itself a victory for the early childhood workforce, says CSCCE’s Montoya.
“It’s really exciting that HHS is investing in the center, because it means that leadership is recognizing the impossible conditions for early childhood educators,” she says. “The fact that the center has been proposed and exists is exciting.”
Hamm echoes the sentiment, noting that this center is the first of its kind for the US government.
“When I think about the early childhood workforce and all they’ve done during the pandemic, really serving on the front lines, but not getting the attention they deserved, I’m excited that we’re able to do…this thing that will hopefully improve their lives. better.”
