Child care and early education (CCEE) educators typically have low levels of compensation; limited opportunities for education, training, and professional development; inconsistent working conditions; and high levels of stress and burnout. There are also high rates of job turnover, which can strain remaining educators and decrease the quality of…

This fact sheet shares 2023 survey and focus group findings from early educators eligible for from the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund in the District of Columbia. Findings describe the perceived of the payments on the child care field. Early educators share that the Pay Equity Fund helps advance fair pay that reflects their credentials…

The quality of the early environment children experience influences their human capital development. We investigate retention and compensation in the Early Care and Education workforce by merging datasets from three different government agencies in Texas. We employ non-structural methods to compare turnover and pay in Early Care and Education with…

Background: Early childhood teachers play a key role in creating positive teacher-child relationships, which are shown to promote child outcomes. However, turnover rates of early childhood teachers are strikingly high, which may compromise the quality of teacher-child relationships. Lack of early childhood education program policies (i.e., wage,…

Shifting realities across the world have emphasized the need to change early childhood systems thinking. Specifically, a quality early childhood workforce was in high demand before the COVID-19 pandemic and will continue to be in demand until sustainable recruitment and retention efforts are achieved. Encouraging more professionals to enter and…

Early childhood educators play an essential role in providing child care for families and learning and development supports for young children, yet they have long faced challenges due to low wages. Recognizing this, the District of Columbia (DC) introduced the Early Childhood Pay Equity Fund in 2022. This first-of-its-kind initiative aims to…

Despite the contributions of their work to the learning and development of young children, child care and early education (CCEE) educators are among the lowest paid workers in the United States and have high rates of turnover in their jobs. In a pioneering effort, Washington, DC has launched the nation's first large-scale, publicly funded program…

In June 2021, the Minnesota Legislature appropriated significant investments in child care, using $537 million in Child Care and Development Funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARP). Investments included: $304 million in direct payments to providers through Child Care Stabilization Grants; $22.5 million for Child Care Facility Grants…

This research brief draws on data from the 2021-2022 Study of Family and Staff Well-Being in Head Start FACES Programs (2021-2022 Study) to examine the strategies programs used to improve staff retention and well-being. Using data collected in spring 2022 after more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, this brief describes the types of…

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological qualitative study was to investigate how early childhood care (ECCE) professionals make sense of their lived experiences working in an ECCE Department of Defense (DoD) program in the Southern United States. In this study, I incorporated Herzberg's two-factor theory of motivation to explore the…

Al-Ahsa Governorate in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It also investigated the impact of job satisfaction on their professional commitment. To achieve the objectives of the study, quantitative and qualitative methods were used to verify the level of job satisfaction and its impact on professional commitment. To obtain relevant and sufficient data,…

For state-funded preschool programs the compensation of teachers is a critical issue for program quality and effectiveness. If preschool programs are to attract and retain teachers comparable to those in primary schools, preschool teachers must receive comparable pay and benefits. This brief assesses compensation parity between state-funded…

Work climate is a broad term that encompasses all facets of the work environment, other than training and education, that support or detract from employees' ability to succeed. In this brief, the authors use a sample of center-based child care classrooms in Georgia to examine how different aspects that affect work climate (e.g., wages, employee…

To date, 29 public pre-K programs in 23 states and one U.S. territory have established salary or compensation parity policies to address low and disparate levels of workforce compensation in the early care and education (ECE) field (Friedman-Krauss & Kasmin, 2018). These policies aim to raise the pay or compensation of ECE teachers to the…

In the past decade, various stakeholders in the public and private sectors in Hawai'i have sought to increase the state's investment in child care and early learning programs. A new Executive Office of Early Learning was established in June 2012 to build a statewide early childhood development and learning system. The state also established a…