You can’t have high-quality early education without high-quality early educators, and you can’t recruit and retain high-quality educators without providing professional pay and opportunities for professional growth.
Every May in the United States, we celebrate teachers with Teacher Appreciation Week. Families and administrators provide gift cards, bake cookies, serve lunch and buy up all the apple-laden coffee mugs they can find. While these gestures are undoubtedly heartfelt, well-intentioned and appreciated, they often fail to address the deeper, systemic issues that many educators face, particularly those in early childhood education.
Since 1619, Black women have been the backbone of early childhood education. Black enslaved women served as both midwives and mammies for their enslavers, and white children’s first teachers. Because Black women were forbidden from learning to read and seen as subhuman, the education they provided to their young enslavers was not valued as skilled. The continued devaluation of early childhood educators, who are predominantly Black and Latina women, has led to a crisis-level shortage of these essential members of our workforce.
The latest Head Start reauthorization bill and President Biden’s 2025 fiscal budget include much-needed funding increases to raise educator wages. However, these gains are fragile, as evidenced by a recent Washington, D.C., budget proposal that would eliminate the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, a program created in 2021 to achieve pay parity between early childhood educators and their K-12 counterparts. As at-large Councilmember Christina Henderson pointed out, “It feels like we’re balancing the budget on the backs of Black and brown women in the childcare sector.”
Even with post-pandemic pay increases for early educators, Americans pay dog walkers about the same as the teachers we entrust with the early learning and development of our future leaders.
Even with post-pandemic pay increases for early educators, Americans pay dog walkers about the same as the teachers we entrust with the early learning and development of our future leaders. When the Head Start program began in 1965, our government cemented a practice and mindset that early childhood education should remain low-paid work.
Today, early childhood educators—a workforce that is 40 percent people of color and 98 percent women—earn a median hourly wage of just $14.60, while Black and Latino early educators on average earn $4400 less per year than their white peers in the same role. You can’t have high-quality early education without high-quality early educators, and you can’t recruit and retain high-quality educators without providing professional pay and opportunities for professional growth.
The science is clear—90 percent of brain development happens before age five. High-quality early education has tremendous benefits, including higher academic achievement, lower rates of grade repetition and special education placement, and increased high school graduation and college attendance rates. The positive impacts are greatest for children from low-income families and those at risk for academic failure. With nearly 62.3 percent of Black children and 53 percent of Latino children under 6 living in low-income families, investment in quality early education is critical for advancing educational equity and opportunity.
Having teachers who share their students’ racial, cultural and linguistic background is beneficial for young children’s development, promoting positive identity formation, social and emotional well-being, and academic success, research shows.
Of course, not all early childhood programs are currently equipped to provide the level of quality and teacher support needed to fully realize the potential benefits for children. That is precisely why we must invest in the workforce—to ensure that all programs have the skilled and supported educators required to provide the high-quality early learning experiences young children deserve and need. This includes ensuring a diverse and culturally representative educator workforce.
The Effects of Unfair Compensation
On average, kindergarten teachers in public schools earn over $30,000 more per year than early childhood educators working in private preschool settings. Faced with poverty wages, many early childhood educators cannot afford to pursue the higher education that would best enable them to deliver the highest quality early learning experiences. Early childhood educators often find themselves saddled with student loan debt they cannot repay on their meager salaries, forcing them to choose between their own financial stability and the education that would benefit the children they serve. Without access to affordable, high-quality teacher preparation programs, we risk losing a generation of skilled early educators to K-12 programs with better salaries, benefits and access to ongoing professional development.
Early childhood educators often find themselves saddled with student loan debt they cannot repay on their meager salaries, forcing them to choose between their own financial stability and the education that would benefit the children they serve.
To make matters worse, early childhood educators are ineligible for federal loan forgiveness programs unless they work for a non-profit employer—excluding the many educators working in small, community-based for-profit programs. Over half of children receiving childcare subsidies are served in small family childcare homes and for-profit community-based programs that operate on thin margins. The average annual profit is less than $20,000 for a family childcare home and under $50,000 for a small community-based center. Yet because of their business structure, their teachers don’t qualify for loan forgiveness, despite serving high-need families and receiving government funding.
Expanding loan forgiveness eligibility to employees of for-profit early childhood programs may raise concerns about the appropriate use of taxpayer dollars. To be sure, some may argue that this would amount to an unnecessary subsidy for these businesses’ workforces, failing to recognize the high levels of turnover and mobility within the sector.
Loan forgiveness would not simply benefit individual for-profit employers, but would strengthen the entire early education system by making it more attractive and viable for educators to stay and grow in the profession. What matters most is not a program’s tax status, but the valuable service it provides in caring for and educating children from low-income families. With strong accountability measures in place, we can ensure that loan forgiveness benefits all educators working in high-need communities, regardless of setting type.
Wage and benefit standards for the early childhood field must be on par with similarly skilled K-12 roles. Scholarship programs and loan forgiveness should make early educator preparation programs affordable and accessible, regardless of program type. We need to invest in pipelines to support the preparation and ongoing development of Black and Latino early educators—who currently make up just 25 percent of lead teachers, despite children of color comprising 50 percent of enrollment in publicly-funded preschool.
We must fully recognize the skilled and valuable work of teaching and caring for our youngest and most vulnerable citizens. It’s time to honor the contributions of the Black and Latina women—who continue to be the backbone of our country’s early education system—and adequately invest in their learning, development and livelihood. We can’t rewrite the past, but we can commit today to make critical investments in Black and Latino early childhood educators. Our future depends on it.
Ms. Classroom wants to hear from educators and students being impacted by legislation attacking public education, higher education, gender, race and sexuality studies, activism and social justice in education, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs for our series, ‘Banned! Voices from the Classroom.’ Submit pitches and/or op-eds and reflections (between 500-800 words) to Ms. contributing editor Aviva Dove-Viebahn at adove-viebahn@msmagazine.com. Posts will be accepted on a rolling basis.
Up next:
U.S. democracy is at a dangerous inflection point—from the demise of abortion rights, to a lack of pay equity and parental leave, to skyrocketing maternal mortality, and attacks on trans health. Left unchecked, these crises will lead to wider gaps in political participation and representation. For 50 years, Ms. has been forging feminist journalism—reporting, rebelling and truth-telling from the front-lines, championing the Equal Rights Amendment, and centering the stories of those most impacted. With all that’s at stake for equality, we are redoubling our commitment for the next 50 years. In turn, we need your help, Support Ms. today with a donation—any amount that is meaningful to you. For as little as $5 each month, you’ll receive the print magazine along with our e-newsletters, action alerts, and invitations to Ms. Studios events and podcasts. We are grateful for your loyalty and ferocity.
