Report paints a grim economic picture for US early care and education workers

Last month, Rebecca Ullrich and her colleagues at the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report titled, “Still Underpaid and Unequal.” It utilizes childcare center workforce data collected in the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE), [United States], 2019 (ICPSR 37941), and it reveals the wage disparities and other inequities faced by early care and education (ECE) workers in the United States. Ullrich et al. point out that “despite the integral role that early childhood educators play, they are compensated with low to poverty wages for their work . . . frequently relying upon public income support programs.” Their report summarized statistics specifically pertaining to ECE workers’ demographics, qualifications, and compensation. For instance, 76 percent of early childhood teachers have some kind of professional credential. But a full-time early childhood teacher who holds at least a bachelor’s degree earns just 57 percent of what they could make as a kindergarten teacher, at $18.77 per hour versus $32.80 per hour. The average hourly wage of an ECE worker is about $14, which amounts to less than $30,000 annually, barely above the federal poverty line for a family of four. And real wages have actually dropped by 6.5 percent in the past seven years. Further, although early childhood educators are 97 percent women and are more racially diverse than the general population (38 percent are women of color), the wage gap between white and Black early childhood educators has widened by eight percent since 2012, when the previous NSECE was conducted.

Funded by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the 2019 NSECE public-use files were first distributed in late 2021 by the Child and Family Data Archive. The study consists of a set of four nationally-representative integrated surveys conducted in 2019. In addition to the workforce survey, they include a survey of households with children under age 13, a home-based ECE provider survey, and a center-based ECE provider survey. Together these four surveys characterize the supply of and demand for ECE in the United States and create a better understanding of how well families’ needs and preferences coordinate with providers’ offerings and constraints. The NSECE surveys make a particular effort to measure the experiences of low-income families, as these families are the focus of a significant component of ECE and school-age public policy. More publications making use of 2019 NSECE data are collected in the searchable ICPSR Bibliography and are available on the study home page.