Despite the historic funding that was funneled into the field in the wake of the pandemic, early care and education continues to be one of the most beleaguered occupations in the United States.
Early childhood educators earn, on average, $13.07 per hour, a wage that puts them in the bottom 3 percent of workers nationally. (Elementary and middle school teachers, by comparison, earn an average of $31.80 per hour, and U.S. workers, across occupations, earn about $23 an hour.)
That’s according to findings from the 2024 Early Childhood Workforce Index, a report that typically comes out every two years and is produced and authored by a team of researchers at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California, Berkeley.
The U.S. early care and education system was broken long before the pandemic, thanks to a dynamic where families can’t afford to pay more while providers can’t afford to charge less. Those costs are, in effect, subsidized by the paltry wages earned by early childhood educators — the teachers and staff in these programs, about 98 percent of whom are women and half of whom are women of color — even though they are entrusted with one of the most important jobs that exists, said Caitlin McLean, lead author of the report and director of multi-state programs at CSCCE.
“Our child care workforce — the majority of whom have some higher education — are building our children’s brains in the most critical period of their development,” McLean said during a press call last week. “[Yet] early educators are paid so little that many worry where their next meal will come from.”