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Article
September 2025
Early educators and public school teachers: a comparison of labor market outcomes
In this article, we focus on the childcare sector from the worker’s perspective, analyzing prepandemic (2014–18) Current Population Survey data to compare privately employed early educators and public K–8 teachers with bachelor’s degrees along several dimensions of job quality. Consistent with other research, we show that, compared with public K–8 teachers with bachelor’s degrees, private early educators with similar work patterns and educational attainment earned less and lacked critical employer-sponsored benefits such as health insurance and retirement accounts.
As the COVID-19 pandemic starkly illuminated, parents’ ability to work often depends on access to affordable, high-quality childcare. Indeed, some research conducted 2 years into the pandemic suggests that access to childcare may partially explain why women’s labor force participation had not yet fully recovered by that point.1 Previous analyses have also uncovered a labor shortage within the childcare sector—a shortage that continues to constrain the supply of available childcare options for parents.2 Less well appreciated is the fact that the short supply of childcare workers (also known as early educators3) long predated the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the steady increase of mothers entering the workforce from 1975 to the onset of the pandemic,4 the early educator workforce has experienced persistent instability, which is an obstacle to meeting the demand for childcare.5
Some evidence suggests that the pandemic may have exacerbated this trend, possibly causing the closure of up to 10 percent of childcare centers and home-based, family childcare providers across the country.6 Often referred to as the “workforce behind the workforce,” workers in the childcare sector are essential to parents’ labor force participation and the national economy more broadly.7 Our analysis supplements a larger body of work on the demand side of early education—work that suggests that parents’ ability to secure care may be affected by supply-side factors (e.g., job quality of early educators) with implications for our nation’s ability to realize full and equitable employment.8
On average, early educators in the United States earn low wages and have few employer-provided benefits.9 Inadequate compensation may deter people from entering the field and may contribute to high turnover,10 possibly exacerbating the supply shortage. Scholars and other stakeholders have suggested that improving job quality for these workers is essential to creating a workforce that meets demand for high-quality childcare.11 A key constraint to making this change is the fact that childcare providers operate in a mostly private market. For the most part, parents are expected to pay out of pocket for early education, although limited public funding exists to support early education for income-eligible families through vouchers and contracted slots.12 The payment rates for these subsidized slots further condition firm revenue and, in turn, worker wages and benefits.13 The private childcare market stands in contrast to our public K–12 education system. While parents bear the responsibility for procuring early education for their children, K–12 education is provided as an entitlement to all children. This difference in orientation has important consequences for working conditions in the two sectors.
Focusing on the 2013–17 period leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, our analysis compares wages and working conditions of private early educators (i.e., those who are self-employed or employed in private sector firms) holding bachelor’s degrees with similarly credentialed K–8 public school teachers. We build on previous work that compares early educators with all other workers, other caregivers, and teachers. Earlier studies have found that non-White women are overrepresented in early education and other caring occupations relative to their share of the overall labor force.14 Compared with other workers, early educators earn as little as $0.50–$0.60 on the dollar, have less access to job-based health insurance and retirement benefits, and are more likely to be in poverty.15 Studies drawing comparisons with similar occupations find that early educators earn slightly less than home care workers and workers at long-term care facilities—occupations with comparable educational requirements and a high concentration of non-White women—and just over one-third as much as kindergarten teachers.16
The comparison of private early educators with public K–8 teachers is particularly apt because these occupations share an overlapping skill set. Yet, wage differentials could reflect that teaching, like many other occupations, requires a bachelor’s degree, whereas early educators face less stringent educational requirements.17 For this reason, our analysis directly compares early educators holding bachelor’s degrees with similarly educated public K–8 teachers to account for differences in educational attainment across the two occupations. We also consider wages alongside access to job-based health insurance and retirement benefits, introducing a combined “good jobs” measure for a more comprehensive analysis of compensation. Our analysis examines whether previously reported compensation differentials between early educators and teachers (and other workers) hold for highly educated early educators. Our results underscore the challenge of attracting and retaining highly educated early educators.18
We find that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, about two-thirds of full-time workers with college degrees in the two sectors were non-Hispanic White women—about twice the share of non-Hispanic White women in the overall workforce. Among the remaining third, non-White women dominated the ranks of early educators, whereas non-White women and non-Hispanic White men each accounted for a substantial share of K–8 public school teachers. When looking at job quality, we find that only 3.7 percent of private early educators with bachelor’s degrees had a good job (one with a decent wage,19 employment-based health insurance, and retirement benefits), whereas over half (50.9 percent) of public K–8 teachers enjoyed good jobs. This sizable share of public K–8 teachers with good jobs is greater even than the share (35.3 percent) of all other workers with such jobs. We do, however, caution against holding public school teaching as the standard for good jobs, as public school teachers’ pay has fallen relative to that of other occupations in recent decades, while stagnating wages have been cited as one reason for a shrinking supply of teachers.20
Background
In the 1960s and 1970s, three concurrent developments catalyzed an expansion of the paid childcare sector. First, non-Hispanic White women entered the workforce in record numbers, while changes in immigration policy invited a supply of domestic workers from abroad.21 Sociologist Mignon Duffy points out that this new source of domestic labor allowed White women to have careers while maintaining their assumed responsibilities as nurturers of their children.22 Second, newly emergent and compelling brain science on early childhood development suggested that preschool, or some form of group care supervised by trained and credentialed staff, could improve child outcomes.23 These findings pushed states to enhance their licensing requirements and to require both significant education and training for early caregivers, as well as continuing education for those seeking to maintain their licensing.24 Third, Great Society programs released new funding to subsidize early education for children from income-eligible families, significantly widening access to such education.25 This last development also increased quality standards for childcare.26
Because of these developments, the field of paid early education saw a turn toward professionalization,27 including a new emphasis on postsecondary credential and degree requirements for early educators.28 Some argued that professionalization could finally increase wages for the field’s workforce, as it had in other fields.29 However, since the 1960s and 1970s, wages and job quality have not kept pace with the increased skill requirements for early educators.30
One force that may be holding back wages for early educators is occupational segregation. The current early education workforce is still heavily female dominated. Analyzing the composition of occupations with U.S. Census Bureau data, David A. Cotter, Joan M. Hermsen, and Reeve Vanneman found that despite similarities in skills, qualifications, and job characteristics, women in female-dominated occupations face a wage penalty relative to their peers in occupations with lower concentrations of women.31 Among early educators, Black women incur the highest wage penalties, and Black and Hispanic women are disproportionately concentrated in supporting or infant care roles, which offer lower wages, and are underrepresented in preschool and leadership roles.32
The United States lacks a coordinated childcare sector. However, the professionalization of the workforce, along with an increase in public funding for early education, means that the sector is now heavily regulated, presenting the challenge of distributing a heavily regulated public good through a private system. Some experts suggest that this paradox constitutes a market failure.33 If the early education market were completely unregulated, the equilibrium market price would not provide enough revenue to support care that meets the standards for care reflected in current regulations (e.g., staffing ratios and safety measures). Although regulations are in place to protect the safety of our children,34 compliance with them can raise operating costs, making prices prohibitively high for many families.35 High operating costs also drive down wages and job quality and lead to low retention rates and higher turnover.36 These issues became even more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic, when health concerns, on top of poor working conditions, pushed many workers out of the field altogether,37 often to jobs with higher wages or better working conditions.38
Data
Using data from the 2014–18 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC),39 a survey collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, our analysis compares private, self-employed early educators with K–8 public school teachers, highlighting group differences in (1) workforce composition and (2) job-quality characteristics. We limit our sample to private early educators in order to reflect the historical origins of the field, which is still heavily dominated by private workers. Similarly, we include only public K–8 teachers because teacher pay is structured by the public education sector. We conceptualize job quality in terms of both wages and access to workplace health insurance and retirement benefits.40 Because the CPS ASEC asks respondents about their employment during the previous calendar year, the actual study period corresponds to 2013–17.
Identifying early educators and K–8 teachers
Researchers have not consistently identified early educators in U.S. Census Bureau data, with some using industry or occupation codes and others a combination of both. Some researchers have selected workers in the child daycare services industry,41 but this group includes administrators and other workers who are not directly involved in the education or care of children. Other researchers have identified early educators by using solely the census occupation of childcare workers.42 Still others have combined that occupation with the occupation of preschool and kindergarten teachers.43 The latter approach is consistent with a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services white paper advising that the artificial distinction between the occupation codes for childcare workers and preschool and kindergarten teachers “does not reliably reflect teaching and caregiving duties, level or responsibility, or level of professional preparation.”44
In this article, we identify early educators by using both occupation and industry codes. (See appendix table A-1). We use the occupation codes for childcare workers and preschool and kindergarten teachers because these jobs involve working directly with infants and young children. We also include teacher assistants, an occupation typically performed at childcare centers and entailing the review of educational material with children while also ensuring they abide by school rules and proper behavior.45 We attempt to exclude kindergarten teachers by limiting the analysis to people employed in the child daycare services and private households industries. Notably, this approach excludes the elementary and secondary schools industry, as well as jobs that may not represent the regular, structured care environment we seek to examine.46 Public K–8 teachers are identified by using the occupation codes for elementary and middle school teachers, preschool and kindergarten teachers, teacher assistants, and childcare workers. To prevent overlap with our category for early educators, the category of K–8 teachers is limited to those working in the elementary and secondary schools industry.
Defining the analytic sample
We limit our analytic sample to workers with at least a bachelor’s degree who worked full time (35 or more hours per week) and full year (50 or more weeks) the previous year and who were ages 22 to 64. We focus on highly educated early educators and primary school teachers in order to underscore how current wages and benefits are out of step with calls for a more highly educated and more skilled early education workforce.47 Further, because we want to differentiate between the largely private childcare sector and the primarily public K–8 school system, we restrict early educators to those who were self-employed or worked in the private sector, and we restrict K–8 teachers to those who worked in the public sector. (See appendix table A-2.) Although this restricted sample is a narrow slice of the early education workforce (see appendix table B-1), it offers a reasonable comparison between the two groups. Moreover, we would expect this highly educated, full-time segment of early educators to have the best chance of securing good wages and benefits, representing the best-case scenario for job quality in the childcare sector.
During the 2013–17 study period, there were approximately 1.7 million early educators and 4.9 million K–8 public school teachers.48 (See appendix table B-1.) Consistent with what we know about the two sectors, the vast majority (94.5 percent) of all early educators (i.e., those in the private and public sectors combined) worked in the private market (72.6 percent) or were self-employed (21.9 percent), and three-quarters (77.7 percent) of all K–8 teachers (i.e., those in private and public schools combined) were public sector workers.49 In terms of education, just under a quarter (22.8 percent) of all early educators held at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with over three-quarters (76.7 percent) of all K–8 teachers. Finally, a large share, 80.6 percent, of public K–8 teachers worked full time, compared with 60.3 percent of early educators who did.
Our restricted sample represents 12.7 percent of all early educators and 51.3 percent of all K–8 teachers (early educators and K–8 teachers made up about 4 percent of the total workforce during the study period). Appendix table B-1 presents more descriptive statistics on the analytic sample, as well as the full universe of early educators and K–8 teachers working in any sector (private, public, or self-employed), with any level of education, and for any number of hours.
Limitations
Our study exhibits several important limitations. First, the CPS ASEC occupation and industry coding limited our ability to make an exact comparison between early educators and K–8 teachers. Ideally, we would have preferred to split the occupation of preschool and kindergarten teachers into two separate occupations. We approximated this division by (1) only including preschool and kindergarten teachers employed in the child daycare services industry for the early educator category and (2) only including preschool and kindergarten teachers employed in the elementary and secondary schools industry for the K–8 teachers category. As a result, the category of public K–8 teachers could include some preschool teachers. However, this inclusion is unlikely to substantially affect our results. In 2019, preschool teachers accounted for just 3.5 percent of all preschool, kindergarten, and elementary public school teachers combined.50 Furthermore, the average annual wage for public preschool teachers ($53,560) was more closely aligned with pay levels for public kindergarten teachers ($62,880) and elementary school teachers ($66,240) than with the average annual wage for early educators ($25,510).51
Second, because the sample sizes for our main analysis are relatively small, we could not provide results by region or for specific racial or ethnic groups. Throughout this article, we refer to two broad groups: non-Hispanic Whites and non-Whites (Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, multiracial, and other-race respondents). Although this aggregation is necessary for the main analysis, it also obscures heterogeneity in historical experiences and present-day workplace outcomes.
Finally, we identify three commonly used measures of job quality: wages, workplace health insurance, and workplace retirement benefits. As other researchers have noted, job quality is multifaceted and includes many less tangible characteristics (e.g., autonomy and job satisfaction) that are not captured in the CPS or other large-scale surveys.52 For example, early educators may derive a sense of satisfaction from their work that outweighs monetary concerns. Likewise, early educator jobs may be desirable when they are not the primary source of household income, as may be the case for people with high-earning spouses or partners. Nonetheless, our three quantifiable measures are broadly considered to be the major indicators of job quality and serve as a useful baseline for comparing quality across job types.53
Results
This section reports the main results from our comparison of early educators and public K–8 teachers, presenting descriptive statistics and job-quality measures for the two groups.
Who are private early educators and public K–8 teachers?
Both early educators and public K–8 teachers are essential to maximizing employment opportunities for parents. Although the job responsibilities and skills necessary to succeed in these occupations overlap, we find that the composition of these two workforces differs in important ways. Our analysis shows that during the 2013–17 study period, full-time private and self-employed early educators with bachelor’s degrees were almost all women (97.1 percent). (See chart 1.) Moreover, even in this highly educated group, non-White women were overrepresented:54 more than 1 in 4 (27.7 percent) of these early educators were non-White women,55 compared with 1 in 7 (14.4 percent) of all workers. Full-time public K–8 teachers were also disproportionately women (4 in 5, or 81.1 percent), with most (77.4 percent) of these female workers being non-Hispanic Whites. Among male teachers, most (about three-quarters) were non-Hispanic White men. In other words, White people are overrepresented among public K–8 teachers.
| Respondent category | Non-White women | Non-Hispanic White women | Non-White men | Non-Hispanic White men |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early educators | 27.7 | 69.4 | 0.8 | 2.1 |
| K–8 teachers | 18.3 | 62.7 | 4.2 | 14.8 |
| All workers | 14.4 | 33.5 | 14.5 | 37.7 |
| Note: Sample restricted to full-time workers (35+ hours per week) ages 22–64 with at least a bachelor's degree. Chi-squared test for independence significant at p < .001. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysis of 2014–18 IPUMS CPS ASEC data (Flood et al., 2022). | ||||
Job quality among private early educators and K–8 public school teachers
In this section, we turn to the job characteristics of private early educators and public K–8 teachers, focusing on full-time workers ages 22 to 64 with bachelor’s degrees. We are interested in comparing the quality of these jobs in terms of wages and employment-based health insurance and retirement benefits, taking into account a growing literature arguing that job quality is a function of many dimensions and is essential to the well-being of individuals, communities, and nations.56 As noted earlier, other factors, such as autonomy and derived satisfaction, may also be important for job quality, but these factors are difficult to measure.57 Likewise, characteristics such as work-hours flexibility and remote work may be elements of job quality for many, but these flexibilities are generally unavailable to workers in early education or public schools because of the nature of work in those settings.
Wages
We estimate median hourly wages for full-time private early educators, public K–8 teachers, and all other workers, focusing on workers ages 22 to 64 with bachelor’s degrees.58 We compare median hourly wages with two benchmarks—poverty wages and decent wages, as defined by David R. Howell and Arne L. Kalleberg.59 Using wage data for the 2013–17 period, we set the poverty-wage threshold ($13.14) at two-thirds of the median wage of full-time wage and salary workers, and the decent-wage threshold ($17.05) at two-thirds of the mean wage of prime-age, full-time wage and salary workers.60 Although any benchmark is necessarily arbitrary, the poverty-wage threshold is just above the cutoff for several public benefit programs, while the decent-wage threshold is just above the basic-needs budget for a single adult living in most U.S. cities.61
We find that while both groups of workers had median wages lower than the median wage for the rest of the working-age workforce, private early educators made considerably less than public K–8 teachers—a disparity consistent with the past and present narratives surrounding these jobs. The median hourly wage for full-time private early educators with bachelor’s degrees was $12.67, short of the poverty-wage threshold and only about three-quarters of the decent-wage threshold (or about $4.38 less). (See chart 2.) In contrast, the median public K–8 teacher earned comfortably above the decent-wage threshold. Within both groups, wages varied little across racial or ethnic groups.
| Respondent category | Earnings (in dollars) | 95-percent confidence interval, Low (in dollars) | 95-percent confidence interval, High (in dollars) | Decent-wage (in dollars) | Poverty-wage (in dollars) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Early educators, Non-White | 12.67 | 10.98 | 14.36 | 17.05 | 13.14 |
Early educators, Non-Hispanic White | 12.71 | 11.62 | 13.79 | 17.05 | 13.14 |
Early educators, Total | 12.67 | 11.75 | 13.59 | 17.05 | 13.14 |
K–8 teachers, Non-White | 23.32 | 22.72 | 23.93 | 17.05 | 13.14 |
K–8 teachers, Non-Hispanic White | 24.04 | 23.58 | 24.50 | 17.05 | 13.14 |
K–8 teachers, Total | 23.92 | 23.56 | 24.28 | 17.05 | 13.14 |
All other workers, Non-White | 28.43 | 27.96 | 28.89 | 17.05 | 13.14 |
All other workers, Non-Hispanic White | 30.89 | 30.59 | 31.20 | 17.05 | 13.14 |
All other workers, Total | 29.98 | 29.76 | 30.21 | 17.05 | 13.14 |
Note: Sample restricted to full-time workers (35+ hours per week) ages 22-64 with at least a bachelor's degree. Error bars reflect 95-percent confidence intervals. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysis of 2014–18 IPUMS CPS ASEC data (Flood et al., 2022). | |||||
Employment-based health insurance
Next, we examine access to employment-based health insurance among full-time private early educators, public K–8 teachers, and all other workers, again focusing on those ages 22 to 64 with bachelor’s degrees. (See chart 3.) In the United States, about three-quarters (73 percent) of civilian workers have access to health insurance through their employers,62 and work is the primary source of coverage for many, although senior citizens and families below a certain wage threshold can instead access public options (Medicare and Medicaid, respectively). We consider employment-based health insurance because experts view it as a “core dimension” of job quality,63 although we recognize that offering this benefit may not be practical for many employers, particularly in a sector such as childcare, which is dominated by small firms.
We consider individuals to have employment-based health insurance coverage if their employer or union covered at least part of their insurance premium.64 As chart 3 illustrates, during the 2013–17 study period, nearly three-quarters of public K–8 teachers and about two-thirds of all other workers had some form of employment-based coverage. In contrast, only a quarter (27.4 percent) of full-time early educators with bachelor’s degrees had health insurance coverage through work. The gap in coverage between our two groups of educators is nearly 50 percentage points. We find little variation in coverage within each workforce by race or ethnicity.
| Respondent category | Percent | 95-percent confidence interval, Low (in percent) | 95-percent confidence interval, High (in percent) |
|---|---|---|---|
Early educators, Non-White | 25.4 | 19.1 | 33.0 |
Early educators, Non-Hispanic White | 28.2 | 23.4 | 33.5 |
Early educators, Total | 27.4 | 23.5 | 31.6 |
K–8 teachers, Non-White | 72.4 | 69.7 | 74.9 |
K–8 teachers, Non-Hispanic White | 75.2 | 73.8 | 76.5 |
K–8 teachers, Total | 74.5 | 73.4 | 75.7 |
All other workers, Non-White | 65.0 | 64.4 | 65.7 |
All other workers, Non-Hispanic White | 66.6 | 66.2 | 67.0 |
All other workers, Total | 66.2 | 65.8 | 66.5 |
Note: Sample restricted to full-time workers (35+ hours per week) ages 22–64 with at least a bachelor's degree. Error bars reflect 95-percent confidence intervals. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysis of 2014–18 IPUMS CPS ASEC data (Flood et al., 2022). | |||
Employment-based retirement benefits
In chart 4, we show the third component of our job-quality measure—the percentage of full-time workers with bachelor’s degrees who were included in a workplace pension or retirement plan. As was true for employment-based health insurance, about three-quarters (76.1 percent) of public K–8 teachers were included in a retirement benefit plan at work, compared with about half (49.9 percent) of all other workers and only about one-eighth (16.6 percent) of early educators.
| Respondent category | Percent | 95-percent confidence interval, Low (in percent) | 95-percent confidence interval, High (in percent) |
|---|---|---|---|
Early educators, Non-White | 14.5 | 9.7 | 21.1 |
Early educators, Non-Hispanic White | 17.4 | 13.6 | 22.0 |
Early educators, Total | 16.6 | 13.5 | 20.1 |
K–8 teachers, Non-White | 70.3 | 67.3 | 73.1 |
K–8 teachers, Non-Hispanic White | 77.8 | 76.4 | 79.1 |
K–8 teachers, Total | 76.1 | 74.9 | 77.2 |
All other workers, Non-White | 45.7 | 45.0 | 46.4 |
All other workers, Non-Hispanic White | 51.6 | 51.2 | 52.0 |
All other workers, Total | 49.9 | 49.5 | 50.3 |
Note: Sample restricted to full-time workers (35+ hours per week) ages 22–64 with at least a bachelor's degree. Error bars reflect 95-percent confidence intervals. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysis of 2014–18 IPUMS CPS ASEC data (Flood et al., 2022). | |||
Prevalence of good jobs
In our final analysis, we construct a summary measure of good jobs and identify the share of full-time workers with at least a bachelor’s degree who were employed in such jobs. Following earlier research,65 we define a good job as one that pays a decent wage ($17.05 an hour) and offers health insurance and retirement benefits. Chart 5 shows that, based on this measure, only 3.7 percent of private early educators were employed in a good job. In comparison, about half (50.9 percent) of public K–8 teachers and just over one-third (35.3 percent) of other workers had a good job. Although public K–8 teachers earned less than other workers (see chart 2), access to employment-based health insurance and retirement benefits buoyed their job quality.
| Respondent category | Percent | 95-percent confidence interval, Low (in percent) | 95-percent confidence interval, High (in percent) |
|---|---|---|---|
Early educators, Non-White | 2.8 | 1.1 | 7.0 |
Early educators, Non-Hispanic White | 4.1 | 2.4 | 6.8 |
Early educators, Total | 3.7 | 2.4 | 5.6 |
K–8 teachers, Non-White | 46.2 | 43.2 | 49.2 |
K–8 teachers, Non-Hispanic White | 52.3 | 50.7 | 53.9 |
K–8 teachers, Total | 50.9 | 49.5 | 52.3 |
All other workers, Non-White | 31.5 | 30.9 | 32.1 |
All other workers, Non-Hispanic White | 36.9 | 36.5 | 37.3 |
All other workers, Total | 35.3 | 35.0 | 35.7 |
Note: Sample restricted to full-time workers (35+ hours per week) ages 22–64 with at least a bachelor's degree. Error bars reflect 95-percent confidence intervals. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysis of 2014–18 IPUMS CPS ASEC data (Flood et al., 2022). | |||
Discussion
Overall, our analysis indicates that, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, full-time college-educated private early educators and public K–8 teachers were overwhelmingly women, with non-White women being overrepresented among early educators relative to the rest of the workforce. Even the most professionally advantaged early educators—those holding at least a bachelor’s degree and working full time (a group representing just under 13 percent of all early educators in our data)—earned low wages and had little access to workplace benefits. The combination of low wages and inadequate benefits explains why so few early educators were employed in good jobs. Although public K–8 teachers, like private early educators, were disproportionately women, they were much more likely to hold a good job, reflecting better access to decent wages and health and retirement benefits. While we did not identify differences in labor market outcomes across racial or ethnic groups, our ability to detect such differences was constrained by the small sample underlying our analysis.
The profession of private early educators is subject to critical health and safety regulations that protect children’s well-being, as well as professional credential and licensure requirements that reflect higher demand for qualified early educators with professional knowledge about child development. These requirements increase operational costs, which are then passed onto parents. Attempts to make high-quality childcare affordable for parents could unintentionally constrain compensation for early educators. As a consequence, many early educators and would-be educators may find that the job requirements are not well aligned with the pay and benefits that are typical for the sector. In contrast, children’s education starting at around age 5 or 6 has long been accepted as a public good that requires regulation, workforce professional development, and public investment.
It is worth noting that even if early education were universal and treated as a public good, not all parents would use it. Unlike public K–12 education, early education is not mandatory, and parent preferences and options for care vary. However, the COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the fact that although not all parents use childcare, a weak childcare sector can have widespread economic implications.
Conclusion
The COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread attention to a decades-old problem: a lack of affordable and accessible high-quality childcare in the United States prevents parents, particularly mothers, from maximizing their employment potential. In this article, we have compared similarly credentialled full-time workers in private early education and public K–8 teaching to underscore substantial differences in their demographic composition and job quality.
Among the highly educated, full-time workers in our analytic sample, women accounted for 97.1 percent of early educators and 81.1 percent of K–8 teachers. In both occupations, non-White women were overrepresented relative to their share of the overall labor force (14.4 percent), accounting for 18.3 percent of teachers and an even larger 27.7 percent of early educators. Even among similarly educated full-time workers, we observed large differences in pay and benefits between these female-dominated occupations. Early educators earned just over half as much as K–8 teachers ($12.67 versus $23.92 per hour) and were far less likely to have employment-based health insurance (27.4 percent versus 74.5 percent) and retirement benefits (16.6 percent versus 76.1 percent). Because of these differences in pay and benefits, only 3.7 percent of early educators met our criteria for having a good job compared to 50.9 percent of K–8 teachers. We suggest that the large differences in the job quality of highly educated private early educators and public K–8 teachers may be partly due to the private versus public distinction separating these two professions.
Appendix A: Sample breakdown by occupation, industry, and class of worker
We use data from the 2014–18 CPS ASEC to compare the workforce composition and job quality of private, self-employed early educators and public K–8 teachers. As described earlier, these job types are identified by using both occupation and industry codes. Our sample is restricted to full-time workers ages 22 to 64 with bachelor’s degrees. The U.S. Census Bureau administers the CPS ASEC every March to gather detailed information on topics such as income and employment for the previous calendar year.66 To ensure adequate sample sizes, we combine 5 years of survey data corresponding to calendar years 2013–17. This period was chosen because it predated both the COVID-19 pandemic and a change in the CPS ASEC health insurance questions. All analyses are weighted with the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) CPS ASEC sampling weights and account for the CPS ASEC’s complex survey design.67 Hourly wages are estimated by dividing total calendar-year wage and salary and business income by the number of hours worked in the previous year (i.e., usual hours worked per week multiplied by the number of weeks worked). Wages are adjusted to 2017 dollars with the Consumer Price Index research series using current methods (CPI-U-RS).
Table A-1 illustrates the intersecting occupations and industries for early educators and K–8 teachers for the main analytic sample. Table A-2 shows the breakdown of all early educators and K–8 teachers across worker classes (self-employed workers, private wage and salary workers, and public sector workers).
| Occupation | Child day care services | Private households | Elementary and secondary schools | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early educators: Preschool and kindergarten teachers | 298 | 0 | 0 | 298 |
| Early educators: Teacher assistants | 27 | 0 | 0 | 27 |
| Early educators: Childcare workers | 255 | 78 | 0 | 333 |
| Total early educators | 580 | 78 | 0 | 658 |
| K–8 teachers: Preschool and kindergarten teachers | 0 | 0 | 410 | 410 |
| K–8 teachers: Elementary and middle school teachers | 0 | 0 | 6,759 | 6,759 |
| K–8 teachers: Teacher assistants | 0 | 0 | 390 | 390 |
| K–8 teachers: Childcare workers | 0 | 0 | 11 | 11 |
| Total K–8 teachers | 0 | 0 | 7,570 | 7,570 |
| Note: Restricted to full-time workers ages 22 to 64 with at least a bachelor's degree. Early educators were restricted to the self-employed and private sectors, and K–8 teachers were restricted to the public sector. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysis of the IPUMS 2014–18 CPS ASEC data (Flood et al., 2022). | ||||
| Class of worker | Early educators | K–8 teachers |
|---|---|---|
| Self-employed, not incorporated | 142 | 0 |
| Self-employed, incorporated | 15 | 0 |
| Wage and salary, private | 501 | 0 |
| Federal government | 0 | 60 |
| State government | 0 | 2,367 |
| Local government | 0 | 5,143 |
| Total | 658 | 7,570 |
| Note: Restricted to full-time workers ages 22 to 64 with at least a bachelor's degree. Early educators were restricted to the self-employed and private sectors, and K–8 teachers were restricted to the public sector. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysis of the IPUMS 2014–18 CPS ASEC data (Flood et al., 2022). | ||
Appendix B: Worker and job characteristics
Table B-1 presents descriptive statistics on the demographic, socioeconomic, and job characteristics of early educators and K–8 teachers, both for the overall labor force (no sample restrictions) and for our analytic sample. Although the two groups of educators are composed mostly of women, fewer than 1 in 20 early educators are men, compared with 1 in 5 K–8 teachers. In addition, non-Hispanic Whites are overrepresented among K–8 teachers. In the overall labor force, close to three-quarters (73.9 percent) of K–8 teachers are non-Hispanic White, compared with under two-thirds (64.5 percent) of all workers and 61.6 percent of early educators. Moreover, the share of early educators who are foreign born (18.6 percent) is twice that of K–8 teachers (9.4 percent) and slightly higher than that of all workers (18.1 percent).
| Category | A. No sample restrictions: Early educators (n=5,305) | A. No sample restrictions: K–8 teachers (n=14,684) | A. No sample restrictions: All workers (n=472,270) | B. Analytic sample: Early educators (n=658) | B. Analytic sample: K–8 teachers (n=7,570) | B. Analytic sample: All workers (n=132,931) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Employment | 1,716,130 | 4,891,721 | 162,659,573 | 217,945 | 2,507,938 | 46,379,586 |
| Female (in percent) | 96.2 | 83.5 | 47.2 | 97.1 | 81.1 | 47.9 |
| Age | 37.3 | 44.3 | 42.2 | 38.1 | 42.3 | 42.2 |
| Age 22–64 (in percent) | 79.4 | 91.6 | 86.1 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
| Race: Black (in percent) | 13.6 | 10.7 | 11.2 | 7.5 | 9.6 | 8.9 |
| Race: Hispanic (in percent) | 17.8 | 10.9 | 16.3 | 14.2 | 9.1 | 8.2 |
| Race: White (in percent) | 61.6 | 73.9 | 64.5 | 71.6 | 77.5 | 71.2 |
| Race: Asian or Pacific Islander (in percent) | 4.3 | 3.0 | 6.1 | 5.4 | 2.5 | 10.2 |
| Race: Other (in percent) | 2.7 | 1.6 | 2.0 | 1.4 | 1.3 | 1.6 |
| Foreign born (in percent) | 18.6 | 9.4 | 18.1 | 20.1 | 7.6 | 18.1 |
| Education: Less than high school diploma (in percent) | 10.9 | 1.0 | 9.1 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Education: High school diploma (in percent) | 28.0 | 8.0 | 26.3 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Education: Some college (in percent) | 38.3 | 14.3 | 29.3 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Education: Bachelor's degree or higher (in percent) | 22.8 | 76.7 | 35.3 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
| Class of worker: Self-employed (in percent) | 21.9 | 0.1 | 9.3 | 20.0 | 0.0 | 7.9 |
| Class of worker: Private sector (in percent) | 72.6 | 22.3 | 76.4 | 80.0 | 0.0 | 70.0 |
| Class of worker: Government (in percent) | 5.5 | 77.7 | 14.4 | 0.0 | 100.0 | 22.1 |
| Full-time employment (35+ hours) (in percent) | 60.3 | 80.6 | 79.6 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
| Full-year employment (50+ weeks) (in percent) | 62.7 | 65.6 | 78.9 | 78.3 | 75.2 | 88.7 |
| Note: The table illustrates the distribution of sociodemographic characteristics by occupation for the overall labor force (columns A) and for the analytic sample (columns B) restricted to full-time workers (35+ hours per week) ages 22–64 with at least a bachelor's degree. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's analysis of the IPUMS 2014–18 CPS ASEC (Flood et al., 2022). | ||||||
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve System, or the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Suggested citation:
Michael Evangelist, Catherine Tonsberg, Marybeth J. Mattingly, Sarah Savage, and Sara Chaganti, "Early educators and public school teachers: a comparison of labor market outcomes," Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2025, https://doi.org/10.21916/mlr.2025.18
Notes
1 Ryan Nunn and Katherine Lim, “A COVID-19 labor force legacy: the drop in dual-worker families” (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, September 8, 2022), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-covid-19-labor-force-legacy-the-drop-in-dual-worker-families/; and Katherine Lim and Mike Zabek, “Women’s labor force exits during COVID-19: differences by motherhood, race, and ethnicity” (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2021), https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2021067r1pap.pdf.
2 “Child care sector jobs: BLS analysis” (Berkeley, CA: Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley, August 7, 2024), https://cscce.berkeley.edu/publications/brief/child-care-sector-jobs-bls-analysis/; Lydia DePillis, Jeanna Smialek, and Ben Casselman, “Jobs aplenty, but a shortage of care keeps many women from benefitting,” The New York Times, July 7, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/business/economy/women-labor-caregiving.html; and Alicia Wallace, “Child care worker shortage strands half a million families,” CNN Business, March 1, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/01/economy/child-care-wells-fargo-labor-force/index.html.
3 We use the term “early educators” in reference to workers in the childcare sector, that is, those who care for children ages 0 to 5 either in congregate settings or in private homes.
4 “Women’s labor force participation rates by age of youngest child since 1975” (U.S. Department of Labor, accessed December 13, 2022), https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/mothers-families/Laborforceparticipationrates-women-ageyoungestchild.
5 Kyle D. Fee, “Using Worker Flows to Assess the Stability of the Early Childcare and Education Workforce, 2010-2022,” Community Development Reports (Cleveland, OH: Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, January 2024), https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/cd-reports/2024/20240119-childcare-and-education-workforce.
6 Demanding Change: Repairing Our Child Care System (Arlington, VA: Child Care Aware of America, 2022), https://www.childcareaware.org/demanding-change-repairing-our-child-care-system/.
7 For more information on the impact of increases in labor supply on women’s labor force participation, see Jonathan Borowsky, Jessica H. Brown, Elizabeth E. Davis, Chloe Gibbs, Chris M. Herbst, Aaron Sojourner, Erdal Tekin, and Matthew J. Wiswall, “An equilibrium model of the impact of increased public investment in early childhood education,” Working Paper 30140 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2022), https://www.nber.org/papers/w30140.
8 For example, see Marija Bingulac, Sarah Ann Savage, and Julia Wilson, “Understanding appetites for addressing the early child care access problem: results from a stakeholder survey in New England,” Issue Brief 2020-2 (Boston, MA: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, May 2020), https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/community-development-issue-briefs/2020/understanding-appetites-for-addressing-the-early-child-care-access-problem.aspx; “Season 2: a private crisis,” Six Hundred Atlantic podcast (Boston, MA: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 2021), https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/six-hundred-atlantic/season/two.aspx; Sarah Ann Savage, “High-quality early child care: a critical piece of the workforce infrastructure,” framing paper (Boston, MA: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, May 2019), https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/one-time-pubs/high-quality-early-child-care.aspx; and Sarah Ann Savage and Wendy Robeson, “Child care tradeoffs among Massachusetts mothers,” Issue Brief 2022-3 (Boston, MA: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, July 2022), https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/community-development-issue-briefs/2022/child-care-tradeoffs-among-massachusetts-mothers.aspx.
9 “Early childhood workforce index 2020: the early childhood educator workforce” (Berkeley, CA: Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley, 2020), https://cscce.berkeley.edu/workforce-index-2020/the-early-educator-workforce/early-educator-pay-economic-insecurity-across-the-states/; Anne Calef and Luc Schuster, Care Work in Massachusetts: A Call for Racial and Economic Justice for a Neglected Sector (Boston, MA: Boston Indicators and SkillWorks, September 2022), https://www.bostonindicators.org/-/media/indicators/boston-indicators-reports/report-files/care_report_083122.pdf; Elise Gould, “Child care workers aren’t paid enough to make ends meet,” Issue Brief 405 (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, November 5, 2015), https://files.epi.org/2015/child-care-workers-final.pdf; and Asha Banerjee, Elise Gould, and Marokey Sawo, “Setting higher wages for child care and home health care workers is long overdue” (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, November 18, 2021), https://www.epi.org/publication/higher-wages-for-child-care-and-home-health-care-workers/.
10 “Progress and peril: child care at a crossroads” (Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children, July 2021), https://www.naeyc.org/sites/default/files/globally-shared/downloads/PDFs/resources/blog/naeyc_july_2021_survey_progressperil_final.pdf; and Meg Caven, Noman Khanani, Xinxin Zhang, and Caroline E. Parker, Center- and Program-Level Factors Associated with Turnover in the Early Childhood Education Workforce, REL 2021-069 (U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, 2021), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED611677.pdf.
11 For example, see Calef and Schuster, Care Work in Massachusetts; Maureen Coffey and Rose Khattar, “The child care sector will continue to struggle hiring staff unless it creates good jobs” (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, September 2, 2022), https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-child-care-sector-will-continue-to-struggle-hiring-staff-unless-it-creates-good-jobs/; and Dana Goldstein, “Why you can’t find child care: 100,000 workers are missing,” The New York Times, October 13, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/us/child-care-worker-shortage.html.
12 The bulk of this public funding comes from federal block grants, including the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG). The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), authorized by the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG), operates as a block grant, allocating funds that states use to increase access to their private early educators. See “Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) Program,” Federal Register, vol. 81, no. 190 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, September 30, 2016), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2016-09-30/pdf/2016-22986.pdf. It is worth noting that funding for Head Start, which provides public early education, exceeds funding for the CCDF, although the CCDF serves more children. See “History of federal funding for child care and early learning” (Washington, DC: Bipartisan Policy Center, October 2019), https://bipartisanpolicy.org/download/?file=/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/WEB_BPC_ECH-History-Brief_R01.pdf.
13 Chris M. Herbst, “Child care in the United States: markets, policy, and evidence,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, vol. 42, no. 1, winter 2023, pp. 255–304, https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22436.
14 Gould, “Child care workers aren’t paid enough to make ends meet.”
15 Banerjee et al., “Setting higher wages for child care and home health care workers is long overdue”; and Gould, “Child care workers aren’t paid enough to make ends meet.” It is difficult to compare wage rates across studies because researchers use different data sources, definitions of early education (or childcare), and methods for measuring wage rates (e.g., means versus medians). Methodological differences aside, studies consistently find that early educators earn substantially less than other workers.
16 Calef and Schuster, Care Work in Massachusetts; Banerjee et al., “Setting higher wages for child care and home health care workers is long overdue”; Gould, “Child care workers aren’t paid enough to make ends meet”; and “Early childhood workforce index 2020: the early childhood educator workforce.”
17 Debra J. Ackerman, “The costs of being a child care teacher: revisiting the problem of low wages,” Educational Policy, vol. 20, no. 1, January 2006, pp. 85–112, https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904805285283; and “Early childhood workforce index 2020: the early childhood educator workforce.”
18 See Ackerman, “The costs of being a child care teacher.”
19 In this article, we define a decent wage as two-thirds of the mean wage for prime-age workers. See David R. Howell and Arne L. Kalleberg, “Declining job quality in the United States: explanations and evidence,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, vol. 5, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1–53, https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/rsfjss/5/4/1.full.pdf.
20 Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Mishel, "Teacher pay penalty dips but persists in 2019," (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, September 17, 2020), https://www.epi.org/publication/teacher-pay-penalty-dips-but-persists-in-2019-public-school-teachers-earn-about-20-less-in-weekly-wages-than-nonteacher-college-graduates/; Cory Turner and Nicole Cohen, “Six things to know about U.S. teacher shortages and how to solve them,” NPR, March 23, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1164800932/teacher-shortages-schools-explainer.
21 Mignon Duffy, Making care count: a century of gender, race, and paid care work (Rutgers University Press, 2011).
22 Ibid.
23 Cahan, Past Caring; William Ade, “Professionalization and its implications for the field of early childhood education,” Young Children, vol. 37, no. 3, March 1982, pp. 25–32, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42724208; and Andrew Lochhead, “Reflecting on professionalization in child and youth care,” Child and Youth Care Forum, vol. 30, no. 2, 2001, pp. 73–82, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011677117810.
24 Debra J. Ackerman, “States’ efforts in improving the qualifications of early care and education teachers,” Educational Policy, vol. 18, no. 2, May 2004, pp. 311–337, https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904803262145.
25 Sonya Michel, Children’s interests/mothers’ rights: the shaping of America’s child care policy (Yale University Press, 1999).
26 Deborah Phillips, Lea J. E. Austin, and Marcy Whitebook, “The early care and education workforce,” The Future of Children, vol. 26, no. 2, fall 2016, pp. 139–158, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43940585.
27 Jerome Beker, “Development of a professional identity for the child care worker,” Child Welfare, vol. 54, no. 6, June 1975, pp. 421–431, https://www.jstor.org/stable/45392326.
28 Ackerman, “States’ efforts in improving the qualifications of early care and education teachers”; Beker, “Development of a professional identity for the child care worker”; and Marisa Bueno, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Danielle Gonzales, A Matter of Degrees: Preparing Teachers for the Pre-K Classroom (Washington, DC: The Pew Center on the States, March 2010), https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/reports/pre-k_education/pkneducationreformseriesfinalpdf.pdf.
29 Ade, “Professionalization and its implications for the field of early childhood education.”
30 Ackerman, “The costs of being a child care teacher.”
31 David A. Cotter, Joan M. Hermsen, and Reeve Vanneman, “The effects of occupational gender segregation across race,” The Sociological Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 1, winter 2003, pp. 17–36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4120756.
32 Lea J. E. Austin, Bethany Edwards, and Marcy Whitebook, “Racial wage gaps in early education employment” (Berkeley, CA: Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley, December 19, 2019), https://cscce.berkeley.edu/publications/brief/racial-wage-gaps-in-early-education-employment/.
33 Meredith Johnson Harbach, "Childcare market failure," Utah Law Review, vol. 2015, no. 3, 2015, pp. 659–-719, 2015, https://dc.law.utah.edu/ulr/vol2015/iss3/3/; Claire Suddath, “As child care costs soar, providers are barely getting by. Is there any fix?,” Fresh Air, interview by Terry Gross (National Public Radio, December 16, 2021), https://www.npr.org/2021/12/16/1064794349/child-care-costs-biden-plan; and Claire Suddath, “How child care became the most broken business in America,” Bloomberg, November 18, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-18/biden-s-build-back-better-wants-to-save-america-s-child-care-business#xj4y7vzkg.
34 For example, see “How is child care regulated to ensure children’s health and safety?,” ChildCare.gov (Administration for Children and Families, accessed January 18, 2023), https://childcare.gov/consumer-education/how-is-child-care-regulated.
35 Suddath, “As child care costs soar, providers are barely getting by”; and Simon Workman, “The true cost of high-quality child care across the United States” (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, June 28, 2021), https://www.americanprogress.org/article/true-cost-high-quality-child-care-across-united-states/.
36 “Progress and peril: child care at a crossroads”; and Caven et al., Center- and Program-Level Factors Associated with Turnover in the Early Childhood Education Workforce.
37 Fernanda Q. Campbell, Pratima A. Patil, Kristin McSwain, and Ashley White, “Boston’s child-care supply crisis” (Boston, MA: The Boston Opportunity Agenda, July 2021), https://www.bostonopportunityagenda.org/reports/2021/jul/child-care-supply-crisis-brief; and “Am I next? Sacrificing to stay open, child care providers face a bleak future without relief” (Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children, December 2020), https://www.naeyc.org/sites/default/files/globally-shared/downloads/PDFs/our-work/public-policy-advocacy/naeyc_policy_crisis_coronavirus_december_survey_data.pdf.
38 For example, see Rob Grunewald, Ryan Nunn, and Ryan Palmer, “Examining teacher turnover in early care and education” (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, April 29, 2022), https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2022/examining-teacher-turnover-in-early-care-and-education; and Elizabeth D. Steiner and Ashley Woo, Job-Related Stress Threatens the Teacher Supply: Key Findings from the 2021 State of the U.S. Teacher Survey (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, June 15, 2021), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-1.html.
39 Sarah Flood, Miriam King, Renae Rodgers, Steven Ruggles, J. Robert Warren, and Michael Westberry, “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: version 10.0 [dataset]” (Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2022), https://doi.org/10.18128/D030.V10.0.
40 Gould, “Child care workers aren’t paid enough to make ends meet”; Banerjee et al., “Setting higher wages for child care and home health care workers is long overdue”; John Schmitt and Janelle Jones, “Where have all the good jobs gone?” (Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, July 2012), https://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/good-jobs-2012-07.pdf; Arne L. Kalleberg, Barbara F. Reskin, and Ken Hudson, “Bad jobs in America: standard and nonstandard employment relations and job quality in the United States,” American Sociological Review, vol. 65, no. 2, April 2000, pp. 256–278, https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240006500206; and Heidi Shierholz, “Low wages and scant benefits leave many in-home workers unable to make ends meet,” Briefing Paper 369 (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, November 26, 2013), https://www.epi.org/publication/in-home-workers/.
41 Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, “Child care sector jobs: BLS analysis.”
42 Banerjee et al., “Setting higher wages for child care and home health care workers is long overdue.”
43 Gould, “Child care workers aren’t paid enough to make ends meet.” The authors combined the childcare workers and preschool and kindergarten occupations but attempted to retain only preschool teachers in the latter occupation by eliminating preschool and kindergarten teachers in the elementary and secondary school industry.
44 Richard Brandon, Margaret Burchinal, Fran Kipnis, Roberta Weber, Marcy Whitebook, and Martha Zaslow, “Proposed revisions to the definitions for the early childhood workforce in the Standard Occupational Classification,” OPRE Research Brief 2016-45 (Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, May 2016), https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/opre/soc_white_paper_june_2014_518_508.pdf.
45 “Teacher assistants,” Occupational Outlook Handbook (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, last modified August 29, 2024), https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/teacher-assistants.htm.
46 For example, some childcare workers were employed in industries such as bus service and urban transit and residential care facilities.
47 For example, see Marcy Whitebook, Building a Skilled Teacher Workforce: Shared and Divergent Challenges in Early Care and Education and in Grades K–12 (Berkeley, CA: Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley, September 2014), https://cscce.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/publications/Building-a-Skilled-Teacher-Workforce_September-2014_9-25.pdf.
48 These totals may vary from other published estimates because of differences in the criteria used to identify early educators and teachers.
49 The remaining 5.5 percent of early educators were public employees. Among the remaining teachers (22.3 percent), almost all were private employees, and only 0.1 percent were self-employed.
50 See “Table 211.70. Employment in and average annual wage of all occupations and selected teaching occupations in elementary and secondary education industry, by ownership: 2016, 2019, and 2022,” Digest of Education Statistics (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022), https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_211.70.asp. We calculated the preschool share based on the sum of the 2019 number of preschool (49,230), kindergarten (108,450), and elementary (1,249,010) teachers.
51 For the average annual wage of preschool, kindergarten, and elementary public school teachers, see ibid. For the average annual wage of early educators (i.e., childcare workers), see “Occupational employment and wages, May 2019: 39-9011 childcare workers,” Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, last modified July 6, 2020), https://www.bls.gov/oes/2019/may/oes399011.htm. For a similar comparison between the wages of public school preschool teachers and nonpublic school preschool teachers, see Alex Kilander, Karin Garver, and W. Steven Barnett, “Unworthy wages: state-funded preschool teacher salaries and benefits” (New Brunswick, NJ: The National Institute for Early Education Research, May 2, 2022), https://nieer.org/sites/default/files/2023-08/Unworthy_Wages_State-Funded_Preschool_Teacher_Salaries_and_Benefits_052722.pdf.
52 Howell and Kalleberg, “Declining job quality in the United States.”
53 Kalleberg et al., “Bad jobs in America.”
54 Because our sample restrictions greatly reduce sample sizes, we show results for two racial or ethnic categories: non-White (Black, Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islander, Native American, multiracial, and some other race) and non-Hispanic White respondents. The inability to investigate the heterogeneity within the broader group of non-White workers is due to relatively small sample sizes.
55 Non-Whites make up an even greater share (38.4 percent) of all early educators, that is, those representing all worker classes and levels of education. (See appendix table B-1.)
56 Patricia Findlay, Arne L. Kalleberg, and Chris Warhurst, “The challenge of job quality,” Human Relations, vol. 66, no. 4, April 2013, pp. 441–451, https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726713481070; Arne L. Kalleberg, Good jobs, bad Jobs: the rise of polarized and precarious employment systems in the United States, 1970s–2000s (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011); Erin Graves, “Job quality toward an inclusive economy: a critical review and reassessment,” framing paper (Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, May 2023), https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/one-time-pubs/job-quality-toward-an-inclusive-economy-a-critical-review-and-reassessment.aspx.
57 Howell and Kalleberg, “Declining job quality in the United States”; and Kalleberg et al., “Bad jobs in America.”
58 We generate these estimates by dividing inflation-adjusted wage and business income by the total number of hours worked during the previous year (i.e., usual hours worked per week times number of weeks worked). The user-written Stata package -epctile- allowed us to estimate median wages and standard errors while accounting for the complex survey design of the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) by using Stata’s -svy- functionality.
59 Howell and Kalleberg, “Declining job quality in the United States.”
60 The Howell and Kalleberg (see ibid.) wage benchmarks—$13.33 for poverty wages and $17.50 for decent wages—are based on 2017 data. We use the same approach. However, because our analysis combines multiple years of data, we estimate means and medians by using the 2013–17 Center for Economic and Policy Research CPS Outgoing Rotation Group (CEPR CPS ORG) data after converting the wage data to 2017 dollars with the Consumer Price Index research series using current methods (CPI-U-RS).
61 Howell and Kalleberg, “Declining job quality in the United States.”
62 “National Compensation Survey: employee benefits in the United States, March 2022” (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2022, last modified April 13, 2023), https://www.bls.gov/ebs/publications/september-2022-landing-page-employee-benefits-in-the-united-states-march-2022.htm.
63 Howell and Kalleberg, “Declining job quality in the United States.”
64 More specifically, under our definition, an employee has employment-based health insurance coverage if (1) the employee was the policyholder for employment-based insurance last year and (2) the employer paid for all or part of the plan. These criteria refer to any part of the year, even if the employee was not covered by the insurance policy for the full year. It is worth noting that some workers with access to employment-based insurance could opt not to use it and instead go on a parent’s or spouse’s plan. The small share of early educators with employment-based health insurance (relative to teachers and other workers) suggests that coverage at work is either unavailable or not competitive with available alternatives.
65 Schmitt and Jones, “Where have all the good jobs gone?”
66 For instance, the 2018 CPS ASEC includes detailed information on occupation and industry, earnings, hours worked, weeks worked, health insurance, and pensions for calendar year 2017. The regular monthly CPS also gathers detailed employment information, but for current jobs.
67 See the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) documentation (https://cps.ipums.org/cps/repwt.shtml) for advice on how to estimate standard errors with Stata.