UC Berkeley Study Reveals Early Educators Still Among Lowest-Paid Workers

Early childhood educators still have one of the lowest-paying jobs in the nation despite unprecedented public funding to help programs that teach and care for young kids recover from the pandemic, according to a new study released Wednesday.

The low hourly pay puts these workers, who are disproportionately women of color, in the bottom three percent of occupations. Although their wages increased slightly from an average of $11.65 per hour in 2019 to $13.07 per hour in 2022, their wage growth lags behind fast food workers and retail workers, the study by UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment found.

In California, the median wage for early educators was slightly higher than the national average at $15.66 per hour, but the study’s authors say that’s still below the state’s living wage of $19.97 for a single adult.

Researchers said unprecedented public funding, particularly from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), helped keep the early education and child care system from collapsing, but didn’t do enough to sustain its workers long-term.

“The system has always been fragile even before COVID-19 brought it to its knees,” said Lea Austin, executive director of the center and co-author of the report.

Experts have long described child care as an example of a broken market because of a number of issues: child care costs more than what most families can afford, and yet child care programs, which operate on razor-thin margins, can’t afford to raise wages without raising tuition.

“The people who provide early care and education services have long subsidized the cost by the poverty-level wages that are paid to them,” Austin said.

Low wages lead to high staff turnover and shortages in the system, she said.

The study highlighted state and local programs designed to bolster their systems, including California’s first-in-the-nation retirement fund for home-based child care providers.

In San Francisco, a child care provider tapped into local funding to pay its early educators between $28 to $45 per hour, depending on their qualifications, and it used federal pandemic aid money to pay workers another $100 per day in hazard pay.

“We are seeing the benefits of these investments,” said Yohana Quiroz, director of the Felton Institute’s early care and education program.

“We’re seeing a significant retention rate that we have not seen in the past,” she said. She said that 30 out of 100 early educator jobs remain open at the start of each school year, but this fall, she only had four vacancies.

But local funding alone can’t support the high cost of providing child care in an expensive city like San Francisco, Quiroz said, adding that she relies on a combination of federal, state and local funds to run her program.

States like Utah and Mississippi used COVID-19 relief funds to boost early educators’ pay, but their support stopped when those funds dried up last month.

The programs helped stabilize the workforce in those states and showed that public investments to support them could lead to more abundant and affordable child care, said Caitlin McLean, the report’s lead author and director of the center’s multistate and international programs.

“This is a critical time for national, state and local leaders to step up, not back, for these skilled educators whose support is so crucial for children, families and the economy,” McLean said.