Early childhood workforce supports

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure it addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute and Mathematica have developed indicator frameworks to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in high-quality programs. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

• Effectiveness of public education: Average per-grade change in English Language Arts achievement between the third and eighth grades. These data are available from Stanford University’s Education Data Archive.

• Access to preschool: Share of children enrolled in nursery school or preschool. These data are available through the Census Bureau’s Public Use Microdata Sample.

Mathematica's Education-to-Workforce (E-W) Indicator Framework helps local leaders identify the data that matter most in helping students and young adults succeed. Local leaders can use the E-W framework to better understand education and workforce conditions in their communities and to identify strategies that can improve outcomes in these areas.

Several indicators in the E-W Framework may be improved with investments in high-quality programs. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

• Teacher credentials: Percentage of courses taught by teachers certified to teach the given subject or grade level.
  
• Teacher experience: Percentage of teachers with less than one year, one to five years, and more than five years of experience.
• Educator retention: Percentage of teachers who return to teaching in the same school from year to year or percentage of school leaders who have served in their current positions for less than two years, two to three years, and four or more years.
• Representational racial and ethnic diversity of educators: Educational staff composition by race and ethnicity (%) compared to student composition by race and ethnicity (%).
• Classroom observations of instructional practice: Scores on measures of teacher–child interactions, such as the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) Interactions subscale, or the Assessing Classroom Sociocultural Equity Scale (ACSES) (which assesses equitable classroom interactions).

• Fair and competitive compensation: The most significant barrier to hiring and retaining a strong early childhood workforce is inadequate compensation. Local leaders should therefore prioritize funding for directly compensating early childhood workers at rates that reflect similarly qualified roles. This should also include a robust effort to secure supplemental wages that may be available through state programs. Considerations should be given to whether educator pay is a living wage, as well as the gap between salaries of early childhood educators compared with K-12 educators. Funding commitments around worker pay need to be sustained over time, as experts note that one-off compensation investments made following the COVID-19 pandemic led to workforce challenges once that funding ran out.

• Supportive working environments: Experts note the importance of creating good working conditions and benefits beyond wages, such as retirement benefits, health insurance, and flexible schedules for educators (for instance, making accommodations around the working day if practitioners have children themselves). State-level regulations related to staff to child ratios are important for the wellbeing of the workforce as well as the health and safety of children. One expert suggested creating substitute pools so that workers who attend professional development programs do not break ratios.

• Developmentally appropriate training delivered intensively and consistently over time: Professional development opportunities should provide practitioners with specific content knowledge around evidence-based curricula. Research suggests that professional development programs are most effective when delivered over a sustained period of time, with ongoing coaching and opportunities for practitioners to put into practice what they are learning. Effective dosage levels will vary depending on context, but expert practitioners noted that they deliver professional development weekly or biweekly.

• Mixed delivery pre-K system: It is important to support the range of practitioners that operate in the 0-5 workforce through workforce development initiatives. Families want choice; high quality early education does not have to take place in a school setting, and local leaders should ensure that professional development is accessible for staff at child care centers and home-based programs. There is less evidence available around best practice in supporting home-based practitioners, so these initiatives present an important opportunity for learning.

• Practitioner voice: Program leaders should ensure that workforce development programs give participants and practitioners a voice, especially in those programs that target practitioners who are not well represented in the workforce, such as people of color. This could include bringing participants onboard into the recruitment strategy or creating an advisory board with community leaders and practitioners. Ensuring mechanisms for practitioner voice increases the likelihood of reaching recruitment and retention targets.

• Understand demographic characteristics of the early educator workforce: Regularly collect data about the representativeness of the early education workforce and assess the extent to which the composition of your workforce aligns with the children that they serve. Expert practitioners emphasize that a representative workforce should be considered required, not merely a “nice to have”. Research suggests that a more representative education workforce also leads to positive student learning outcomes. Studies have also found that Black and Latina early childhood educators earn lower wages than White educators, partly due to overrepresentation in lower-paying roles.

• Ensure policies are inclusive of languages other than English: Many home-based programs in particular are delivered in a language other than English, and policies or guidance should reflect this. This should include ensuring licensing regulations are available in multiple languages, and that a range of languages are spoken by staff tasked with monitoring child care settings. Grant applications relating to child care and early education should also be available in multiple languages so that all practitioners are able to access funding opportunities provided by government.

• Create multiple pathways for credentials: Practitioners will bring a diverse range of experiences to the early education workforce and benefit from different credentialing pathways. For instance, it will be important to enable a system that allows practitioners to get credentials while they are working. This includes designing strong Articulation and Transfer policies that allows practitioners to get credit for prior experience from other states or institutions.

• Ensure that professional development is accessible and inclusive: Studies often note attrition in professional development initiatives are rooted in competing demands on practitioner time. Scholarships and loan forgiveness opportunities are options for practitioners who are investing in their own education. Coursework should also be available in languages other than English. One expert practitioner highlighted the importance in their program of training around trauma-informed care that helped support a more diverse workforce. This is complemented by having flexibility in coaching to meet the needs of practitioners, for instance around the timing of trainings.

• Consider the whole early education workforce: Black and Latina women are disproportionately represented in child care and home-based programs in particular. Research suggests that school-based pre-K educators are more likely to access professional development. Programs should ensure that policies around early childhood workforce are inclusive of all setting types.

• Early childhood education providers: School-based pre-K, family child care (home-based programs), child care centers and Head Start grantees are at the heart of delivering effective early childhood education. It is important to engage educators across the range of education age-bands and settings in new workforce initiatives.

• Public school systems and teachers: Public school partners often administer early childhood workforce support programs (especially if they already deliver education for 3-4 year olds), but should also be engaged in wider workforce programs to enable smooth transitions into kindergarten for children.

• Local established early learning centers: These settings can act as anchor institutions to help spread best practice around early childhood education. Local early education organizations will also often have a good understanding of the wider education landscape.

• Workforce pipeline organizations: Given the need for focus on recruitment, organizations that educate and train the future early education workforce are paramount. For apprenticeship programs, local leaders should engage with high schools, social workers, parents (e.g. through Parent Teacher Associations), community colleges and college advisors. It is important to connect the dots between community college faculty/deans and early childhood in particular, so that community colleges understand their role in promoting the early education workforce.

• Parents and caregivers: Engaging families is crucial in the design and ongoing implementation of programs, particularly when thinking about settings to target and future workforce demand. This makes sure the structures around early childhood workforce suits parents and caregivers and helps local leaders to target the settings that parents and caregivers hope to access for their children.

• State and Local Regulators: Given early education is a tightly regulated sector, regulatory authorities play an important role in setting standards and best practice. This extends most naturally to authorities responsible for licensing and monitoring regulations, such as a state’s department that oversees child care, but it also includes a city’s zoning regulators - for instance allowing family-based programs to expand capacity through building extensions.

• Implement data strategy to understand impact of workforce development: Data systems are often less sophisticated for the early education workforce than the K-12 workforce. An effective data system should try to understand the socio-economic characteristics of participants receiving training, the number and characteristics of participants who drop out early and the number that go on to stay in the workforce. An effective data strategy will be a key plank of a continuous quality improvement effort to understand what is working for practitioners.

• Build recruiting pipelines: To address the early childhood educator workforce shortage, local leaders should launch formal recruiting pipelines in addition to expanding traditional recruiting efforts. This may include partnering with community groups or high schools to identify candidates; working with community colleges to provide training; and child care centers and/or preschools partnering with non-profits to provide paid in-classroom residency-style experiences for new practitioners.

• Invest in continuous improvement: To recruit and retain early career educators while maintaining workforce quality, program leaders should embed significant growth and leadership opportunities into the hiring and training process. Some professional development opportunities might include onsite mentoring and coaching providing incentives or subsidies to pursue specialized degrees or credentials.

• Consider promising, innovative strategies: The early childhood workforce space is rapidly evolving as jurisdictions seek new solutions to addressing staff shortages. When evaluating options, consider piloting new approaches in addition to traditional methods. These can include scaling up apprenticeship, fellowship, and residency programs; accepting alternative credentials (such as an associate’s degree paired with professional early childhood experience); offering various one-time incentives, like signing or retention bonuses; and increasing staff wellness supports, like mental health consultations and daily breaks. As with any experimental approach, these initiatives should be paired with high quality evaluations to determine if they are effective.

• Retention rates: Rates of retention and turnover are an important indicator of the effectiveness of early workforce support. These measures need to be consistently defined and regularly measured. For instance, the State of Colorado has set a goal of 80% retention after a year of its 2024 pilot early childhood workforce program. Local leaders should measure the range of retention rates across settings as well as averages to understand dynamics across a locality. Measures should allow local leaders to consider retention and turnover within the wider early childhood education field as well as within specific centers.

• Workforce wellbeing: Surveys can be used to understand the wellbeing and job satisfaction of early educators. Employee perspective on working conditions is an important leading indicator for retention outcomes. For interventions targeting the pipeline of future educators, it is also instructive to measure how many practitioners remain in the profession and how many seek further education or qualifications in the early childhood space.

• Child outcomes: Depending on the intervention, early childhood workforce supports should have a long-term impact on child development outcomes. This can be measured through a range of practitioner assessments, kindergarten and school readiness metrics. The outcomes measured should be tailored to the intervention, such as literacy or numeracy developmental goals.

• Supply of early childhood programs: In the longer-term, better supported employees should lead to a growing workforce. Investments in the workforce should therefore lead to a higher supply of high-quality early childhood programs with more classrooms opened, expanded capacity, and more children served.