Excerpts from the report:
"Parents can't afford to pay, teachers can't afford to stay, there's got to be a better way." This is a common sentiment held by professionals in early childhood education (ECE). This study shows that the ECE industry has, indeed, been unable to attract and hold onto qualified teachers over the past two decades.
There is growing concern across the United States about the increasing difficulty of recruiting and retaining experienced and educated workers in ECE. Despite this concern, no data have existed on how the educational qualifications of early childhood educators are changing over time. This study fills this vacuum by extracting data on the ECE workforce from the 1979-2004 Current Population Survey (CPS).
Educational levels of ECE teachers reached a peak during the early 1980s recession. But beginning in 1983, there was a fall in the educational attainment of the center-based ECE workforce that continued until 2001, when slow job growth made more educated workers available to ECE. This study also finds:
- The share of U.S. center-based teachers and administrators with at least a four-year college degree averaged 43% from 1983 to 1985, but only 30% in the last three years.
- Conversely, the share of ECE teachers and administrators with a high school education or less climbed from less than 25% in 1983 and 1984 to around 30% in recent years.
- The education levels of ECE teachers have fallen even further relative to the workforce as a whole, which has become better educated over time. From 1983 to 1985, the share of teachers and administrators with a college degree or more averaged 21 percentage points more than for all workers. Over the last three years, this gap vanished altogether.
- Education levels are lower in home-based ECE than center-based. Since 2000, only about one in nine home-based early childhood educators has a college degree. Less than half
have any education beyond high school.
- Consistently low wages and benefits from 1983 to 2004 help explain the low educational attainment of early childhood educators. The hourly earnings of teachers and administrators in center-based ECE were $10 in 2002-04 compared to $19.23 for all female college graduates.