Tag Archives: daycare

Increasing child care teacher pay doesn’t have to mean charging parents more

Originally published in Vox on October 28, 2024.
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Jacqueline Strickland was tired, but hopeful. The Washington, DC, early childhood educator had been teaching young children for nearly 40 years, and prayed that one day she would be fairly compensated for her experience and education. Strickland even went back to school, years into teaching, to upgrade her credentials, acquiring associate’s and bachelor’s degrees to better understand youth brain development. She watched as valued colleagues left for higher-paying pastures, teaching older children, driving school buses, working for the postal service.

Strickland kept with her career path though, partly out of passion for young kids, but also because she knew there was a local effort afoot to raise the wages of teachers like her. She began testifying at council hearings in support of the idea. Finally, two years ago, after years of waiting, Strickland’s salary was bumped. She’s gone from earning $57,000 a year to $75,000, and gained access to free health insurance.

“I’m a mother of two, both my daughters have gone to college and I had to pay for school, maintain my own household, I didn’t have money to put away for retirement,” she said. “That was the scary part for me. I will be 60 in November and I couldn’t save.”

Strickland’s raise came from the nation’s first program aimed at aligning the salaries of the city’s 4,000 day care teachers with their public school counterparts. Known as the Pay Equity Fund, this innovative program has paid more than $80 million over the last two years to augment the salaries of child care workers, and was funded by a new non-lapsing tax increase on DC’s wealthiest residents, approved by the local council in 2021.

In the program’s first year, lead teachers like Strickland received lump-sum payments of $14,000, assistant teachers $10,000, and part-time teachers $5,000. In its second year, the city began issuing wage increases through quarterly payments, eventually transitioning these boosts into newly established salary minimums.

While DC’s Pay Equity program stands out for its scale, its wage supplement effort reflects a broader national trend, as states try to stabilize child care sectors hit hard by the pandemic and address the chronic underpayment of the workforce. In 2022, the median hourly wage for child care workers was just $13.71, significantly less than comparable roles like preschool and kindergarten teachers. Child care is the 10th lowest-paid occupation out of roughly 750 occupations in the economy, per one industry analysis.

Out of recognition that families are already burdened by high costs and can’t afford to pay much more for child care, states like North Carolina, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Maine, and Tennessee have introduced wage supplement programs to boost child care teacher recruitment, retention, and quality. And on the federal level, several proposals aim to bolster child care workers’ salaries. One bipartisan bill introduced this summer by Sens. Katie Britt (R-AL) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) proposes new federal grants to state and local governments that supplement child care worker pay.

As politicians elevate child care on the campaign trail and polls suggest it’s a motivating concern for voters, the pressure to raise wages for one of America’s most underpaid professions has taken on new importance. DC’s Pay Equity Fund is proving the model can work — provided elected officials stay committed to funding it.

What we’ve learned from DC’s pay equity fund

Leading researchers have been analyzing the impact of DC’s wage supplement program on child care providers and the early education sector more broadly.

Data from the first two years of the program showed that the wage supplements had increased lead teachers’ pay by 37 percent and assistant teachers’ wages by 31 percent.

On a practical level, the increased pay has enabled child care teachers to pay off their debts, cover emergency expenses, and cover essentials like food, rent, and utilities. Some began looking to purchase homes, and nearly 70 percent said the fund allowed them to actually save money, some, like Strickland, for the first time in their careers.

On an emotional level, many educators reported in surveys that the extra pay made them feel genuinely appreciated and respected, and that reduced financial stress helped them focus more on the children they work with.

Researchers found that assistant teachers, in particular, reported significantly improved mental health. “Indeed, the Pay Equity Fund…appears to have contributed to educators’ beliefs that they are now being compensated fairly,” the Urban Institute concluded.

From a hiring perspective, research by the think tank Mathematica found that the first few years of the Pay Equity Fund boosted the number of early childhood educators working in DC. Mathematica estimated the program led to an increase of 100 new hires, representing a 3 percentage point increase over what would have been expected without the wage boosts. Many child-care center directors also told Urban Institute researchers that the wage supplements made it easier to attract qualified new teachers and easier to retain their best staff.

“What’s new about the pay equity program compared to other states is that they had a dedicated source of revenue,” said Erica Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who has been studying the program. “And that it was not just to stabilize the sector, but was really also about fairness.”

Can the idea spread further?

Taking a page out of DC’s playbook, Maine has similarly sought a dedicated funding stream to boost child care wages.

Maine’s child care wage supplement program began in September 2021 using American Rescue Plan relief funds. “Stability grants” provided nearly 7,000 child care staff with an additional $200 per month, according to Tara Williams, the associate director of early care and education in Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services. Maine officials solicited feedback on how best to distribute the dollars, and concluded that sending the money to program owners and directors, so they could put the funding directly into staff payroll, made the most sense.

Beginning in October 2022, Maine included the program in its state budget, continuing to fund it through general state revenues at a cost of $30 million annually.

It now exists as a three-tiered program, in which the lowest eligible tier of child care workers can earn an additional $275 per month, the second tier earns an additional $415 per month, and the highest-tier providers can earn an additional $625 a month.

“So that’s an over $3,000 a year bonus for the first tier,” Williams said proudly. “I’ve just been really excited to watch the expansion and implementation of this program.” Over 7,500 child care workers were receiving the Maine supplements as of June.

Williams has been sharing Maine’s experience with compensation reform with other states, including this past summer at a conference hosted by the North Carolina-based Hunt Institute.

In Pennsylvania, advocates have been organizing for their own child care wage supplement program, arguing that such investments are necessary to address the state’s worker shortage. They pointed to Republican-led states like Alaska and Georgia that have recently made new investments to support child care wages ($7.5 million and $23.6 million, respectively) and Democratic-led ones like New York and Minnesota that have done the same ($500 million and $316 million, respectively).

Some cities are also taking their own steps. This past June, a coalition of care advocacy organizations launched an 18-month pilot in New York City to provide $1,000 per month to licensed home-based child care providers.

“We have educators deciding every month what bills to pay, they are deciding every month whether to stay open,” said Jessica Sager, the CEO of All Our Kin, a national group that trains and supports home-based child care educators and is involved with the pilot. “When educators don’t have that stress they can focus wholly on the care.”

The policy will require sustained commitment

Wage supplements are not unique to child care, and governments have long used them to augment salaries of workers in fields like health care, home care, and agriculture.

Yet as promising as these wage supplements are, advocates are learning that even passing a dedicated funding stream is not enough to insulate the salary boosts from politics and annual budget fights.

Earlier this year, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed gutting the Pay Equity Fund entirely as a way to balance the city’s budget amid flat growth and declining revenue from vacant office buildings. Teachers and community allies rallied for months in protest and in the end the DC Council restored $70 million to the program, though that still represented a $17 million cut.

“We thought we were done with this kind of fighting — we had found a non-lapsing funding source for the program, there isn’t that much more security we can build in,” said Ruquiyyah Anbar-Shaheen, the director of early childhood at DC Action, a local advocacy group. “The challenge is just having the political will to keep the program in place.”

Jacqueline “Jackie” Strickland, 59, and her assistant teacher, Mone Greene, assist students on a walk.Rosem Morton for Vox

Strickland said if the city had gone forward with gutting the program, she would have had to look for an alternative job.

“I’ve been fighting this fight a long time, but this shouldn’t be a fight, it should be a given,” she told Vox. “It’s not a bonus, it’s what’s owed to early childhood educators. We put in a lot of time and we give children the foundation that supports them for future learning.”

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

Innovation in child care is coming from a surprising source: Police departments

Originally published in Vox on July 5, 2024.
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Earlier this year, a brand-new child care center opened up in San Diego, serving about 25 families.

The center charges parents 50 percent less than market rate, and child care workers are paid 15 percent above the going local average. Its hours of operation are flexible. It stays open from 5:30 am to 7 pm every day, longer than most child care centers, and can accommodate emergencies like unexpected work shifts. There’s only one catch: To send your child, you have to work for the San Diego Police Department.

San Diego’s law enforcement child care center, funded through both public and private money, is the first of its kind in the country, but plans for several others across the US are already underway. A bipartisan bill in Congress would expand the model further.

Supporters call law enforcement child care a win-win-win — a way to help diversify policing by making it more accessible to women, a recruiting tool at a time when police resignations and retirements are up, and applications are down. And, frankly, they hope that an innovative model for child care will give a PR boost to a profession that has taken severe blows to its reputation over the last decade.

But it also raises a basic question: Why just police? What about subsidizing other professions, including other first responders like firefighters and nurses?

“My response is those other professions haven’t been demonized like law enforcement has,” said Jim Mackay, a retired police detective and the founder of the National Law Enforcement Foundation, which has advocated for these child care centers and worked with police departments to build them. “My philosophy is if you have a healthy law enforcement then everything else kind of prospers out from that, and we have to treat the problems with law enforcement first.”

There’s no data yet on if this employer-centric model will pay off, but advocates argue that the child care investment is a smart bet. The estimated annual operating cost for each center is $2 million, while the average cost to recruit and train a single police officer is $200,000. In other words, if this helps keep even just ten officers in the ranks, it will have been worth it.

Tanya Meisenholder, the director of gender equity at the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, says child care is one of the job barriers she hears about most often from female cops and those considering entering the profession. Women make up only 12 percent of sworn officers and 3 percent of police leadership in the US, though there’s a national campaign underway to increase those numbers.

“Child care is the one thing that’s been brought up over and over not only as a barrier to entry but a barrier to promotion,” Meisenholder said. “Police child care would show the agencies value their employees and are listening to their concerns. It has the potential to be somewhat transformative.”

The idea is spreading quickly

Angelie Hoxie, a state police detective in Idaho, heard about the San Diego child care idea and wanted to see if she could build a similar model for Treasure Valley, which covers the greater Boise region.

Idaho police agencies have struggled with recruitment and retention, and many families are on year-long child care waitlists. The Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children said over 90 percent of child care facilities cite staffing as their top challenge.

In early 2022 Hoxie helped launch the Treasure Valley Law Enforcement Coalition and within a year they were lobbying state and federal officials and partnering with a local university and local philanthropy.

By winter 2023, Republican Gov. Brad Little was recommending funding for Idaho police child care programs in his workforce development budget, and by March, a bill to support the effort passed out of both chambers of the Idaho legislature. Republican Rep. Mike Simpson then successfully earmarked $2.65 million from the federal budget to help finance the new child care center. Construction is set to launch this summer with the program to be operational for police families by 2025.

St. Louis County in Missouri is another region set to open a law enforcement child care center next year, following the same model as San Diego: longer hours of service, subsidized rates for parents, and higher wages for workers. Their goal now is to care for up to 75 kids at a time, and by operating for 18 hours a day, upwards of 150 families could be served.

The push was prompted by a rank-and-file woman officer during the pandemic who struggled to find care for her 1-year-old while balancing her new 12-hour shifts. Twelve-hour shifts have since become the norm for the department, even after Covid-19.

“We’re absolutely hoping it helps with both recruitment and retention,” said Tracy Panus, a spokesperson for St. Louis County police.

Democratic Rep. Scott Peters, whose congressional district includes San Diego, introduced a police child care bill last year to authorize $24 million annually in funding under the federal Child Care Development Grant program. The bill would also allow Health and Human Services to provide grants of up to $3 million for new police child care centers. In December the Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus endorsed the legislation.

“There’s no question that [child care] is a priority—it has come up in every single focus group we’ve done,” said Kym Craven, the executive director of the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives.

Taking some cues from the US military

That police might take on leadership in child care is less surprising when one looks to the Department of Defense, which sponsors the nation’s only federally run universal child care program.

The military child care program, which serves roughly 200,000 children, is known for being affordable and high-quality, and its 23,000 child care workers are paid higher wages than their private sector counterparts. Members of Congress and former military leaders have been in discussions over the last few years about how to expand and improve upon this child care program to boost army recruitment even further.

Still, expanding public subsidies for police child care is not popular with everyone, including those who want less public money subsidizing police departments, and those who want to see public dollars prioritizing child care for low-income families.

Others have raised concerns with the idea of employer-sponsored child care more broadly. In one report published this past winter, Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It, argued that employer-sponsored child care “does nothing to address the fundamental challenges within the child care system, nor does it promote a pluralistic system of choice.”

He compared the model to painkillers for cancer. “They can ease the pain for a while, but the body gets sicker, and the temptation to overly rely on painkillers only grows,” he wrote.

Still, advocates for police child care say the public safety needs are too urgent, and the possible benefits to communities and agencies too great to pass up. They hope in five years they will have firmer data showing their investments have worked.

“In this new generation not too many people want to become law enforcement officers,” said Mackay. “We’re really trying to stem that tide.”

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.