But now, in the wake of a new focus among Ohio lawmakers on supposed fraud in the state’s childcare system, they are on the verge of ditching the idea altogether. A under consideration would require providers to be paid based on attendance rather than enrollment as they are by parents who pay out of pocket.

In December, conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video claiming to uncover widespread fraud in Minnesota’s childcare program, particularly among daycare centers run by Somali American residents. The video went viral and reached federal officials, and the Trump administration cited it as motivation to pursue an and various efforts to restrict federal childcare funding. Despite the video offering no verified evidence of fraud — and the fact that the state was several cases of fraud in its childcare system — some states have responded by intensifying their focus on supposed fraud. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott agencies to launch investigations into childcare fraud, while Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare heightened reviews of funding. (The reviews found of providers guilty of any wrongdoing.)

Shirley’s video sparked an immediate reaction in Ohio, according to Tamara Lunan, a childcare organizer with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. The state has the Somali American population, just behind Minnesota. in Columbus, Ohio claimed centers were receiving public funding for nonexistent children even though evidence at least two of those claims. According to the at The Ohio State University, just 0.43% of all the providers who accept vouchers through the state’s publicly funded childcare program were found to be misusing funds in 2025. In a of 124 complaints sent to the state’s Department of Children and Youth last year, the agency found no evidence of fraud in 100 of them.

In January, Ohio lawmakers two proposals — House Bills 647 and 649 — they said were aimed at combatting fraud in the state’s publicly funded childcare system.  

Marquita McClendon, who has operated a childcare program in Cincinnati since 2023, acknowledged that fraud exists. “But I feel like the systems that we already have in place already do the job necessary,” she said. “We’re changing laws over an unsubstantiated claim. It’s just beyond me.”

The state made some changes ahead of implementing the new enrollment-based payment system that have led to sacrifices for providers. It a requirement for counties to use presumptive eligibility, which allows families to receive childcare vouchers if they already qualify for another program like food stamps, and allows parents to enroll immediately once they get a new job, rather than waiting weeks for their paperwork to be approved. Some providers accept children into their programs during that interim period anyway, Lunan said, but often aren’t paid for all of that time. The state also reimbursement rates for some types of in-home providers and increased the threshold for children to qualify as full time, which allows providers to be reimbursed at a higher rate. 

“There were things taken away from us,” McClendon pointed out. With those reductions, she’s making $10,000 less each month, she said. “We’re in the red.” The loss of revenue has meant she can’t buy new equipment for the children in her care or do field trips this summer as she normally would. “I can’t run an effective program,” she said.

If providers were paid based on enrollment, it would help them weather children’s absences for illness or snowstorms, “things that providers can’t possibly be able to plan for when they’re making their budgets,” Lunan said. It “would help to stabilize the programs.” Instead, “Providers are hemorrhaging income based on these changes,” she said. “It’s killing their bottom line.”

Reversing the decision to pay based on enrollment is just one of the changes included in the legislative proposals Ohio lawmakers have put forward in the name of fighting fraud this year. Some others have since been toned down or removed. initially that would have given the state’s Department of Children and Youth the power to cut off funding or suspend a license for any provider merely suspected of fraud, waste or misuse of dollars without a hearing. That language has since from the bill; now those actions can be taken if “evidence demonstrates” that a provider knowingly engaged in fraud or misuse of funds. But providers remain concerned about lawmakers giving the attorney general more power to prosecute perceived fraud, which in the bill. 

“We don’t want to see childcare providers get penalized because the state made an overpayment to them,” Lunan said. Both overpayments and underpayments are included when states calculate their payment error rates, and those can be due to the state government’s error, not providers acting with ill intent. Her organization is pushing for the state to create a committee made up of childcare providers that could distinguish between clerical errors and actual, intentional fraud. 

The original proposal for , introduced by Republican lawmaker Josh Williams, would have mandated the installation of cameras in all childcare programs that receive government funding to “allow visual inspections in real time,” . It would have given the Department of Children and Youth the ability to view the footage at any time. McClendon pointed out that she has diaper changing stations in her classrooms. “There’s no way to protect my children’s privacy,” she said, calling the idea “a bit extreme.”

While that idea has since been abandoned, lawmakers have adjusted the bill to facial recognition for children who attend programs that receive public funding. Such technology won’t work on young children, particularly infants, given how rapidly their faces are developing and changing, McClendon and Lunan pointed out. McClendon also noted the challenge of keeping kids still long enough to take a photograph. Lunan pointed out that there is already an existing mandate for programs to have an attendance system in place that takes pictures of parents when they sign children in.

An made to that bill the storing of photos of the children. But many parents are still opposed, Lunan said: a against mandating facial recognition has been signed by nearly 900 people. 

Lawmakers are also reducing the time given for allowing a child to be checked in retroactively, if their attendance was originally missed, from 30 days to seven. “That would be a tremendous hardship,” Lunan said, on both providers and the parents who are the ones who have to go into the system and fix the problem.  

The legislation calls for spending up to over two years on data analytics to detect patterns of fraud or abuse. The facial recognition proposal alone would be “expensive for the state and providers, diverting scarce public dollars and provider time away from care itself and toward unnecessary surveillance infrastructure,” said Ali Smith, senior project coordinator at Policy Matters Ohio, . Lunan agreed. “We don’t need funds to come out of childcare,” she said. What Ohio childcare providers need instead, she said, is more funding, not less. “Providers are not defrauding the system. They are barely breaking even — most providers are in the red,” she said. “The conversation really needs to shift from fraud to funding.”

The anti-fraud bills “would just destabilize childcare, or destabilize it further, because ����’s already unstable,” Lunan said. 

That began to change in 2022, when Kentucky became the first state in the country to roll out an initiative making most early childhood educators automatically eligible for childcare subsidies. 

Novel at the time, this program — which, in effect, provides free childcare to early childhood educators in licensed programs through an expansion of the state’s Child Care Assistance Program — caught the attention of leaders in dozens of other states and has been replicated widely in the years since. 

“It’s not just happening in one type of state,” said Diane Girouard, state policy director at the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a nonprofit that advocates for high-quality early learning experiences. “It’s happening in [states] big and small; blue, red and purple; rural and non-rural. States are just seeing that ����’s working. It’s unique. It’s a really good workplace benefit.”

The idea to make early educators automatically eligible for childcare assistance was conceived as a strategy to help recruit and retain early childhood educators in the wake of the pandemic. By 2022, many families needed childcare to return to a normal work schedule but often couldn’t find spots for their children because early care and education programs were so severely understaffed, leaving slots unfilled and entire classrooms vacant. 

The model was so successful in Kentucky that other states took notice and began to fund their own versions of an effort to provide childcare assistance to early childhood educators, primarily through pilot programs. More recently, some states have even moved to make the program permanent. 

Last month, both and enacted laws making most early childhood educators automatically eligible for childcare assistance. Iowa’s governor signed a bill on April 9, while Kentucky’s program was made permanent a few days later, on April 14. 

“We’re psyched,” said Sarah Vanover, director of policy and advocacy at Kentucky Youth Advocates and one of the champions of this program in the Bluegrass State. 

“We’re known for being frugal and conservative with money,” Vanover said of Kentucky’s legislature, which is overwhelmingly Republican. “And yet this is something we’re investing in. When you have that dialogue with [program] directors, they’ll tell you they have been able to open classrooms and keep staff.”

The reason states have continued to invest in this type of program, Vanover and other state leaders shared in interviews, is because it works. By delivering free or discounted childcare to early educators — many of whom have jobs with low wages and few, if any, benefits — several states have seen workers who are more willing to stay in their jobs. And some educators who had left the workforce to stay home with their young children are finding ����’s just enough of an edge to lure them back into their teaching positions, surveys and program directors have shared.

Since 2022, leaders from 38 other states have reached out to Vanover about the model, she said. Many of those leaders have gone on to pursue some form of the program. At least a dozen states, including , , , and , currently have at least a pilot program in place providing childcare assistance to early childhood educators. Two others, New Jersey and West Virginia, have introduced related bills. is the only state known to have initially offered and then ended this type of program, and in that case, it was the result of a severe budget deficit, Girouard said. 

While the model has spread, no two initiatives are exactly alike, Girouard added.  

Kentucky and Iowa, for example, make this benefit available to early childhood educators regardless of income, while most other states only have enough funding to increase the income threshold above what is available to all families in their states. In Rhode Island, for instance, the state’s childcare subsidy program is available to all families with an income less than 261% of the federal poverty level. For , that income cap increases slightly, to 300%. 

And Kentucky’s program includes any staff member working in a center-based early care and education program — from teachers to administrators, cooks to early intervention specialists. 

“You can’t run a childcare program without the assistant teachers, without the nutrition staff, without the administrators,” Vanover said. “If you’re looking at doing this without the other staff, you’re going to have teachers get shuffled around. It’s essential for the whole program to take advantage of it — every employee.”

Meanwhile, a in Maine — called the “childcare employment award” — has emerged as unique in a couple of ways. 

Maine’s program provides at least a 50% discount on childcare for early childhood educators, according to Heather Marden, co-executive director of the Maine Association for the Education of Young Children, a state affiliate of NAEYC. For staff who were already eligible for childcare subsidies before the pilot, the state also covers the cost of their co-pays, which can run anywhere from $3,000 to $8,000 a year, Marden said.

Importantly, Maine’s program is distinct in that it allows home-based childcare providers — a group often left out of this benefit — to participate. (The legislation that made Kentucky’s program permanent also allows home-based providers to use the benefit for the first time.)

A recent of Maine’s pilot program found that it has had a positive impact on workforce retention, noting that nearly every participant was considering leaving the field before receiving the award.

Moreover, the report found, many of those participants were weighing whether to leave the workforce altogether to stay home with their children, rather than looking for jobs in other fields. The discounted childcare has put enough money back into their pockets that they have been able to stay.

Marden noted that while that’s good for each individual teacher, ����’s also good for entire communities. 

“The impact of retaining one educator is pretty incredible,” she said, explaining that a single educator gained or retained opens up licensed classroom slots for four to 12 children. 

Maine’s childcare employment award program was serving 511 children from 313 families as of September 2025, with nearly as many children and educators on the waitlist. The state has funded the pilot at $2.5 million a year for the past two years, and it just hasn’t been enough to reach everyone, Marden explained.

While many early childhood leaders in Maine want to see the pilot program funded at a higher amount, the reality is that it will likely soon cease to exist altogether. During the recent legislative session, which ended in mid-April, policymakers did not fund the pilot for another year. As of now, the program is slated to end after June 30.

In Iowa, uptake has been strong. As of September 2025, more than 3,600 children from 2,153 families had taken advantage of the benefit, according to data from the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services. And a survey conducted by the state agency, the results of which were shared in January 2025, found that 87% of participants remain in their roles, and 12% began working in childcare as a result of the pilot. 

Hollie Allen, co-owner of Vine Street Child Care, a large center-based program in West Des Moines, Iowa, said that at least 13 of her teachers — out of about 60 people on staff — are enrolled in the program. They still owe co-pays between $35 and $100 per week, depending on factors like household income and number of children, she said, but that’s a big improvement over the full cost of a spot in her program.

“I don’t understand why they’re calling it free childcare. It’s not,” Allen said, but added that, compared to the $360 per week she charges for an infant slot, “paying $67 is awesome.”

The program has been a “double boon” for Allen, she said, because she was previously giving staff who weren’t eligible for other financial support a 50% discount on childcare at Vine Street — and losing money on those slots in the process. Now, with the state’s childcare assistance program covering the cost of early childhood educators’ childcare, Allen has been able to give every person on payroll a $2 per hour wage increase. 

“It was a big cashflow injection for our program,” Allen said. “Those across-the-board wage increases were critical.”

In other states, such as Rhode Island, where the pilot program has been extended through 2028, the impact on turnover in the field has been real but modest, said Lisa Hildebrand, executive director of the Rhode Island AEYC. 

“It’s still helpful,” she said. “The intent is there. It’s still retaining some educators. But it could be a lot better.”

Hildebrand added: “We just need way more money in the system. This is not going to solve all the problems. It’s a little bit of Band-Aids. You’re giving free childcare to educators because you’re not paying them enough that they can afford childcare on their own. You’re still not paying people enough, and that’s the problem.”

To a child in their care, their roles may be indistinguishable. Both teachers play with them, read to them, sing to them and guide them throughout the day. 

But each pair consists of a lead teacher — the senior professional in the classroom — and an assistant teacher, who may serve in more of a supporting role but, in many programs, acts as a co-teacher. 

Assistant teachers, despite their status as the junior educator, are “an integral part of the teaching team,” said GG Weisenfeld, associate director of technical assistance at the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). They are participating in children’s brain-building, actively contributing to their learning and development, she said. 

Yet in most early care and education settings, and in most states, the policies and pay for assistant teachers do not align with that reality. 

When it comes to teacher qualifications, NIEER recommends that, at minimum, assistant teachers hold a Child Development Association (CDA), a nationally recognized credential for entry-level early childhood educators, or have equivalent preparation from at least nine credits of coursework. This benchmark for teacher qualifications is accepted by other leading organizations in the field. 

Often the first credential in an early educator’s career, the CDA introduces teachers to foundational child development concepts, the conditions of a safe learning environment, how to establish healthy relationships with families and more. 

“Having that basis,” Weisenfeld said, “allows that person some comfort and knowledge to be able to” serve confidently in an early learning setting.

But only one-third of state-funded preschool programs have policies in place that require these minimum qualifications for assistant teachers, NIEER found in a . 

Weisenfeld, who authored the report on assistant teachers, said the findings were “troubling,” noting that having low or no qualifications can justify low wages and trap teachers in a cycle where they can’t afford the education needed to advance in their careers. 

It’s critical to have skilled teachers working with young children, Weisenfeld added. “If we want the child outcomes … they need to be qualified and then they need to be supported once in the classroom.”

The report also found that only 30% of state-funded preschool programs met NIEER’s minimum standard for professional development of at least 15 hours of in-service training for assistant teachers. 

In a field where low wages and scant benefits affect early childhood educators in every role, assistant teachers fare worst of all, earning an average of $11.88 per hour as of 2022, according to . 

That financial reality makes it difficult for states to set higher standards for assistant teachers. Instead, ����’s becoming increasingly common, Weisenfeld noted, for states to see that they aren’t filling open positions for early childhood educators and to respond by — allowing teenagers to fill teaching positions, instituting higher adult-to-child ratios and loosening training and licensing requirements.

“Cutting qualifications so you can justify inadequate salaries is not a good thing,” Weisenfeld said. 

She added: “To me, the strategy should be to help people raise their qualifications, help support people getting the qualifications, and ensure they are adequately compensated for their work.”

It’s not the norm, but a few states are pursuing that strategy. New Mexico is one of them. 

Assistant teachers in New Mexico’s state-funded pre-K classrooms are required to have an associate degree in early childhood education (or be actively enrolled in a program to earn one). If they have an associate degree in another field, they must earn 12 college credits in early childhood education, said Elizabeth Groginsky, the secretary of New Mexico’s Early Childhood Care and Education Department. 

To work in one of the state-funded pre-K classrooms, assistant teachers must also complete 44 hours of mandatory foundational training and an additional 24 hours of training annually. 

Lead teachers in these classrooms, in contrast, must hold a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education and complete additional hours of professional development. They also earn more money, as is typical for more seniority across professions. 

“The important thing,” Groginsky said, “is they are both considered teachers and are both bringing a full set of knowledge and skills to advance the education of young children.”

Across early care and education settings in New Mexico, assistant teachers must earn a minimum wage of $18 an hour (about $37,000 per year for a full-time teacher), the secretary shared. Assistant teachers in state-funded, community-based pre-K classrooms are also eligible for the , which ensures that teachers with an associate degree and up to three years of experience earn $45,000 and teachers with an associate degree and more than three years of experience earn $50,000.

“The idea is we’re moving up the compensation to reflect the level of education and the skills that both the lead teacher and the assistant teacher bring to the classroom,” Groginsky said. 

Alabama is another state that meets NIEER’s benchmarks for assistant teacher qualifications and professional development and that Weisenfeld praised for its “brilliant” approach to building a pipeline of assistant teachers in high school.

Assistant teachers in Alabama’s First Class Pre-K Program are required to have a CDA credential or equivalent coursework in child development, and complete at least 20 hours of professional development each year. 

A number of K-12 schools in Alabama offer a pathway for high school students to pursue and complete their CDA, qualifying them for assistant teaching positions in the state’s preschool program upon graduation, said Milanda Dean, director of workforce development at the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education. From there, teachers can participate in Alabama’s to earn their associate degree and even bachelor’s degree.

“We’re helping them earn their credentials,” Dean said, “and growing our workforce.”

Although the exact roles and responsibilities of assistant teachers do vary from program to program, it is important that these educators are recognized for the strengths and skills they bring to the classroom, said Ami Brooks, secretary of the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education. Assistant teachers are not there just to wipe the tables, walk kids to the bathroom or put the cots out for naptime, she said. 

“We want to honor the early childhood development knowledge he or she is coming in with,” said Brooks, “and use that to partner with the lead teacher so they can work together to help the children develop.”

“I love my job,” is one of the first things Ashley Ross says, as she sits down to talk about a looming pay cut that she might be facing. She’s worked at Gan HaYeled, an early childhood program in Northwest D.C., for almost 20 years, and was recently promoted to split her time between two roles: a pre-K classroom teacher and a teacher resource coordinator, who works with other educators to solve problems that arise in the classroom or at home. 

Throughout her career, Ross said she has seen a number of incremental pay bumps, including an increase after she earned an associate degree in 2021. That year, her salary was about $47,000. But the most significant change in her income came in 2022, she said, when Washington began implementing the D.C. Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund in an effort to boost wages in the child care sector. The initiative provided funds to make early educators’ salaries equivalent to K-12 public school educators. 

Ross received an additional $14,000 that year and her pay has continued to increase. Today, she makes around $67,000. The additional income has allowed her to buy a home and enroll her children in after school activities like boxing and gymnastics. 

The Pay Equity Fund — the first program of its kind in the United States — has been as a model for improving early educator retention, creating stability for a workforce largely made up of women, , in an industry with one of the in the country. 

But despite its popularity with educators and advocates, the fund has faced instability over the years and now ����’s on the chopping block. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Friday, April 10 that included a to the Pay Equity Fund, which would eliminate the wage supplements that provided the city’s early childhood teachers with higher salaries. 

Bowser that what she hears most from families is that they want more opportunities for child care and they want it to be less expensive. But the Pay Equity Fund is “not a child care affordability fund, it’s more of an income support fund for child care workers,” she said. “It does not respond to what people are saying.”

Ross is one of more than in D.C., who would be drastically impacted by this change. Without the extra dollars she receives through the program, her salary would drop precariously, to the point that making the commute to work in D.C. wouldn’t make much economic or logistical sense. She lives over an hour away by car, and with her experience, education and credentials, she could likely find a job in the public school system where she lives in neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland. A job like that would bring benefits and a stable salary, she said. 

“Yes, everyone loves the Gan,” she said, referring to the early childhood center where she works. “It’s a special place. But everyone has to live in the real world. They have to pick between the love for their job or their income. Without pay equity, it doesn’t make any sense,” Ross said. Her partner has encouraged her to think about the long term, but she said she’s having a hard time asking herself,“If they cut the money for me, what is the plan?”

The Struggle for Consistent Funding

Created through the District’s budget and administered by the , the Pay Equity Fund initially delivered direct payments to eligible educators. During its first year, early childhood teachers received a one-time payment of , depending on their role and employment status. In 2023, the fund offered teachers up to four quarterly payments of up to $3,500 each. Then , the model shifted: instead of educators applying individually and receiving direct payments, licensed child care programs that met the requirements could opt in and receive funding through a payroll formula. 

The voluntary program was designed to help providers recruit and retain staff by offering more competitive wages, and its reach has been substantial. was distributed to over 4,000 home- and center-based child care providers during the initiative’s first two years, and went to 365 child care facilities in 2024.

This isn’t the first time the program has faced instability. In April 2024, Bowser suggested fter a , the D.C. Council , but advocates warned that with the increase in participation, more money was needed. That same year, to make budget recommendations for the program, which led to the Early Childhood Educator Pay Scales Amendment Act of 2025, a measure that for early educators. 

Some centers in the city, including the Gan, absorbed the cuts so that the teachers’ paychecks would be unchanged, said Noah Hichenberg, director of Gan HaYeled. 

To be fully funded in fiscal year 2027, the Pay Equity Fund , said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. The program has grown more expensive because of its success, she noted. While the program had lower participation in its first few years, it has since grown in popularity. from Mathematica shows that after the first two years of implementation, there was an in D.C., about 7% higher than the estimated levels in the absence of the program. 

Gunderson said more teachers have enrolled in the program, stayed in their positions and gone back to school to pursue an associate or bachelor degree, with the goal of being able to earn a higher income upon graduation. 

“The fact that we’re able to increase utilization is a good thing,” said Gunderson. “Normally this would be something that would be celebrated.” Instead, it has resulted in a more expensive program, limiting the number of educators who are able to take part. 

LaVonda Butler-Means, an assistant teacher at Gan YaHeled, is one of the teachers who was motivated to pursue a higher level of education. The first year of Pay Equity her salary jumped from $43,000 to over $50,000. Encouraged, she enrolled in an accelerated program to get an associate degree, for which she estimated cost her around $26,000 out of pocket. Her goal was to become a lead teacher at the Gan after graduating in May, a move that would bring her a $10,000 raise. If the fund is eliminated and the increase doesn’t come through, she said she will have to look for another job.

“There is no way I can go back to make what I was making and sustain life,” Butler-Means said.  

One of the challenges of building a sustainable funding pathway for the Pay Equity Fund, explained Jamal Berry, president of Educare DC, an early learning program, is that it takes time to see the impact. that access to high-quality child care is a worthwhile investment, but the success of programs are often realized across a child’s education, which do not always translate into an immediate win. 

But leaders at programs participating in the Pay Equity Fund do report benefits, including lower staff turnover. 

Hichenberg credits the Pay Equity Fund with elevating the quality of care and stabilizing the workforce at his program. Of the 27 educators who work at the Gan, 23 have been there for more than three years since the Pay Equity Fund began. He anticipates it will be much harder to hire people at a lower salary level if the program gets cut. “Its’ not just a burden or headache, it’s a more volatile experience for our youngest learners,” he said.  

Staff turnover at Educare DC has also fallen since the Pay Equity Fund was implemented, and more staff are receiving additional education credentials, said Ronnell Nathaniel, the program’s vice president. Like at the Gan, her staff has benefited from the pay increase. Some teachers have shared that they’re purchasing their first home, she said, though the fact that the funding is in jeopardy has worked to undercut the staff’s sense of security and stability. “The inconsistency is every year,” she said. “You have to be concerned about that.”

Gunderson anticipates that the impact of gutting the Pay Equity Fund would be felt most keenly in programs serving infants and toddlers, which are the most expensive to maintain because of high staffing ratios. “They’re the first to go,” she said. Without a dedicated funding stream for the Pay Equity Fund, each budget cycle poses tough choices about which programs to fund and which to cut.  

“We’ve scored a touchdown and now we’re fumbling the ball,” said Berry. “States like New Mexico and New York are moving in this direction,” he gestured forward with his hands, “and we are moving backwards.”

Advocates Prepare to Push Back

Advocates are gearing up for a fight to save the program. Ahead of the budget release, educators and supporters turned out in protest at the John A. Wilson building in downtown D.C., where the local government is headquartered, as part of a . The national is slated for May 11, and advocates are encouraging child care providers to close or operate on a reduced schedule to show the impact of their services. 

But as compared to 2024, when the program first came under fire, ����’s been harder to galvanize support for saving the program. LaDon Love works at Spaces in Action, a grassroots advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. that played a significant role in the 2024 effort to save the Pay Equity Fund and is involved again this year. Love said that when she goes and speaks to early childhood educators, they think the major fight is behind them. “We won, right?” she said. Many do not realize their salaries are on the line again.  

When asked if the parents feel some outrage at the cuts and how it could impact the teachers who look after their children, Butler-Means shrugs. “Some take it really seriously,” she said. “Others it doesn’t matter to them as long as their kids have somewhere to go.” 

There are a few options that advocates and policymakers are exploring to keep the fund intact. One route involves creating a dedicated funding stream for it, similar to what has done in shoring up their own early childhood infrastructure. Another solution is to develop a new for Washington, D.C., which would increase revenue by adding a broad-based value-added tax to businesses. Experts believe this tax could raise as much as $500 million, and could be routed to social services programs that are on the chopping block, like the Pay Equity Fund. But, a tax like this would likely require a phase-in or implementation lag of a year, meaning that programs that could be funded by it would face a shortfall in the interim. An indefinite pay cut may loom too large for Ross and Butler-Means, pushing them out of their current roles, even with the possibility of a more stable funding source in the future. 

But there is something positive to have come from all of this, said Hichenberg, the Gan’s director. “The Pay Equity Fund has given all of us a gift of what is possible when pay is raised, and that has been beautiful to see,” he said. 

“It’s a stabilized workforce, more content teachers, more robust work-life balance and vacations,” he added. “It has allowed our core group of educators to stay stable for a number of years and allowed us to move forward as a school, improving quality in the classroom and smoother transitions for the parents. These have always been our goals. But the Pay Equity Fund has been the element of stability that has allowed for it.”

The evidence for underenrollment is myriad, with data points coming in from a range of sources. For instance, KinderCare, the nation’s largest private child care provider, stated on a that enrollment was down around 2% year-over-year. The Bank of America Institute, an economic think tank that provides insights from the bank’s data, in October 2025 that, among its customers, the share of households with more than one source of income making child care payments had dropped to slightly under 35.5%. That figure is down nearly 2% since 2021, with a more prominent decrease among low-income households. These findings suggest that fewer families are utilizing licensed child care programs, which may result in open slots. 

While these percentages aren’t massive, they are meaningful when applied across the board to the . These data also track with as they wrestle with high costs of living and declines in flexible work-from-home options. 

Child care programs are reporting the phenomenon as well. Over half of child care program administrators in early 2025 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) said they have fewer children enrolled than they would like.

Importantly, the sector’s declining enrollment doesn’t appear to be driven by some sudden drop of interest in licensed care among families, nor by declining birth rates as some nations are experiencing (there isn’t evidence that this is a significant factor in the U.S. yet. 

Instead, households are grappling with a lack of ability to afford their preferred care arrangement. Among underenrolled programs in the NAEYC survey, the top reason (given by 41% of respondents) was parents’ inability to afford a slot. A recent survey of New York City parents from Columbia’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy that 16% of respondents had cut back on child care hours or stopped using child care altogether due to cost; the number rose to 34% among single moms. (Other parents reported switching to what they considered “inadequate” care as a result of costs.)

Rising costs aren’t the only reason for underenrollment: A fierce scarcity of early educators is leaving many classrooms dark. In the NAEYC survey, the second and third most cited reasons for underenrollment related to not having — or being able to retain — enough staff. A recent by the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA) illustrates how this plays out in practice. The analysis found that in Wisconsin, most center-based programs are operating at around 75% of their licensed capacity, leaving over 33,000 seats unfilled — and filling those seats would require an estimated 4,000 educators. Low compensation is a primary driver behind these staffing shortages. The WECA analysis also revealed that one-quarter of the state’s early childhood workforce left the field permanently in 2024. That’s a crippling level of annual turnover, to say nothing of the negative impacts on children . And when programs have to pay their monthly bills with fewer paying families, they may be forced to raise rates, ending up in a vicious cycle that can lead to closure. 

The link between poor pay for early educators, staff shortages and underenrollment is not unique to Wisconsin. In 2024, a group of researchers led by the University of Virginia’s Daphna Bassok, the latest in a series of workforce studies on Louisiana, a state with a particularly strong early childhood data system. Bassok’s team looked at programs accepting public subsidy dollars that did or did not utilize pandemic-era grants to boost wages. Among programs with lead teacher pay of $8.50 an hour, 40% had at least one-quarter of their staffing positions vacant, over half had to close classrooms and 70% had to turn families away. Programs with better, but still low, pay of $15 an hour (about $31,000 a year) had reduced rates of vacancies, but 47% still closed classrooms and 59% still had to turn families away.

Underenrollment, then, is a multifaceted problem that calls for multifaceted response. 

For one, the trend adds more urgency to lower parent fees via direct public funding. The more states can follow the lead of exemplars like Vermont, New Mexico and in expanding who is eligible for free or low-cost care, the better. Underenrollment is also a symptom of how much families are struggling right now overall, suggesting the need to put more money in their pockets via mechanisms like expanded and refundable child tax credits.  

On the program side, getting money into providers’ hands so they can should be a priority. Here, states would do well to look at precedents like Massachusetts’ Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) grants, which provide monthly checks to over of the state’s licensed programs, and Washington’s which raises early educator pay through wage supplements by while moving them toward parity with elementary school teachers. While there is certainly reason to continue building out new supply in geographic areas that need it, a major priority in the present moment should be maximizing the system’s existing capacity.

Policy tends to move along lines of “path dependence” — the concept that we do what we’ve done because that’s what we’ve been doing — and it can be difficult to unlearn old narratives or change course even when there is a promising alternative. 

There are now two simultaneous truths about American child care: Families struggle to find child care, often facing long waitlists, while many child care centers sit partially empty. The slots aren’t vacant because families don’t need care. They’re vacant because families can’t afford care — and because providers lack the staff required to operate at full capacity. Policymakers need to adjust their strategies and solve for both problems at once. 

The good news is that there is a solution that addresses each challenge in turn: making child care a right backed up by strong, permanent public funding. While the child care story has evolved, the answer has never been clearer.

In 2024 alone, more than 6,000 early childhood educators in Wisconsin exited the field, representing about a quarter of the state’s overall child care workforce, according to a from the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA), a nonprofit advocacy organization that supports early childhood educators and the children they serve. 

Without qualified teachers to fill classrooms, most center-based programs are not able to enroll as many children as they can accommodate. As of October 2025, more than three-quarters of programs were under-enrolled, with the average program operating at only about 75% of their licensed capacity, according to the WECA study, which analyzed monthly data over the past five years that early education providers submitted to the state’s Department of Children and Families. 

That translates to more than 33,000 licensed but unfilled child care slots across the state. To make those seats available, the state would need an estimated 4,000 additional educators.

Wisconsin’s high staff turnover and worsening shortages have strained its child care capacity, leaving the state with the space — but not the teachers — to meet the needs of families.

There’s clear data proving that this paradox is playing out in Wisconsin. There’s also ����’s other states. It’s not surprising, in a nation where the average wage for early childhood educators around $15 per hour, employer-provided benefits are rare, and nearly half the field some sort of public assistance. 

“We have a precarious workforce,” acknowledged Anne Hedgepeth, senior vice president of policy and research at Child Care Aware of America, a national organization that promotes high-quality, affordable child care. 

In Wisconsin, where the last pandemic-era relief payments are due to this June, that has perhaps never been more true.

“Staffing has always been a challenge, but it continues to get worse,” said Paula Drew, director of early care and education policy and research at WECA. “This business model is not focused on what it costs to provide high-quality care to children. It’s based on what parents can afford to pay. [Providers have to cover] rent, liability insurance, food. What’s left is what goes to staff.”

In Wisconsin, early childhood educators earn an average of just over , while the statewide median wage across occupations is close to $23 an hour. The result is a workforce that can barely make ends meet. 

Across the country, fast food restaurants, gas stations and retail stores have since the pandemic. Early care and education programs, in many instances, are no longer trying to compete with their prices — they simply can’t afford to. They’re relying, instead, on people who love young children so much that they are willing to forego financial stability. 

Drew pointed out that in the K-12 education sector, pay is modest, but public school employees often get rewarded with great benefits. 

“There isn’t something like that in early childhood,” Drew said. 

She added: “It’s great to watch a lesson in circle time play out, to see children use a lesson you just taught them. But when you worry about how you’re going to pay for groceries or get to your second job, there really isn’t something that helps you stay.”

In interviews, several providers in Wisconsin shared that they have lost exceptional teachers to jobs in unrelated fields, strictly because of compensation. 

Virginia Maus, co-owner of Joyful Beginnings Academy in Hortonville, said her program lost 18 teachers in 2025, out of a staff of 38. 

Every single one of them left for higher pay, she said, and 80% of them left early education altogether. (Maus has a day job as a data scientist, so naturally, she collects and analyzes the center’s data on staff turnover.) 

“They all came to me and said, ‘I got this offer,’ and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t match that,’” she explained.

One went to McDonald’s. Another, who Maus said was a “really, really great teacher who really connected with the children,” left for a job at a factory. 

“It’s really saddening, when they’re really talented people and the children adore them — to think she’s now standing in front of a machine,” Maus said. 

Julia Wilridge, who runs Lov ‘N Care Academy, a child care center nearly 150 miles away, in Kenosha, has also seen many teachers leave the industry for better-paying jobs elsewhere. The cost of living has gone up, she pointed out. Pay for unskilled jobs has gone up. But wages for early childhood educators? They’ve remained stubbornly low — at least in her program. 

“Young kids are getting jobs at McDonald’s and Taco Bell, getting $16 to $18 an hour,” she said, “and we’re still offering $12 and $13 an hour.”

Wilridge is in the process of increasing her base pay to staff, out of necessity. Assistant teachers without experience would start at $13 an hour, instead of $12, while lead teachers would start at $15 an hour, up from $14. 

Part of the challenge in Wisconsin, providers shared, is that the state’s child care quality rating system, YoungStar, when more teachers have advanced certificates and degrees, but these programs aren’t making enough money to pay degree-holding teachers what they want.

Wilridge, for example, needs to hire a new teacher to lead her 4-year-old classroom, but that teacher has to have an undergraduate degree. 

“I already know I’m going to run into an issue,” she said, noting that the last time she was hiring for a similar role, candidates all wanted at least $20 an hour. “None of our staff make $20 an hour. I’m going to run into a problem getting people to accept a job paying $16 or $17. I don’t blame them, but I know that’s going to be an issue.” 

Annette Larson, director of Coulee Children’s Center in La Crosse, said her program closed the toddler classroom she was teaching in after she stepped into the director position there three years ago. They haven’t been able to find a teacher to help reopen it, since that person needs to have a degree. 

“You don’t find a lot of four-year-degree people who want to work in child care due to what you get paid in child care,” Larson said bluntly. “That’s a lot of the issue.”

Her center is licensed for 125 children but currently only serves 70, in part due to staffing, she said. 

Child care programs can hire people without experience and education, but then they have to ensure those teachers obtain the required coursework. Even assistant teachers are required to take one or two classes — depending on the age group they teach. That’s a financial investment and time commitment for programs, which are already just scraping by. 

Hedgepeth, at Child Care Aware, described teachers as the “linchpin” of early care and education programs. “It’s critical to figure out what we need to do [to keep them] in our programs and fill vacancies when we have them,” she said. 

Drew, who led the WECA study and plans to continue to track statewide staffing data, emphasized the importance of this issue. 

“Workforce is everything. That is child care supply, child development, child care quality,” she said. “One of the items on the list to do to improve child care infrastructure is shoring up our workforce.”

For years, Minnesota has been investigating the fraudulent use of state and federal dollars in child care and other social services programs, which and have led to prosecutions. But the allegations have now by the Trump administration and have drawn more attention after a viral video from a right-wing influencer who claimed, without evidence, to have found federally funded child care centers without children in them.

What exactly the Trump administration is changing is not yet completely clear. In a on Dec. 30, 2025 to the social platform X, Department of Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill wrote, “We have frozen all child care payments to the state of Minnesota” and in a video that the agency had “activated our Defend the Spend system for all ACF [Administration for Children and Families] child care payments across America,” and that it will “require a justification, receipt or photo evidence before we make a payment.”

Days later, the administration that it is also freezing access to funding for the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF), a key source of federal funding for child care subsidies, as well as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Social Services Block Grant money in five states — California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York — and Biden-era rules that urged states to pay child care providers more similarly to how parents pay out of pocket. On Jan. 8, the five states against the move, saying the administration failed to adequately justify it, and on Jan. 9, a temporary restraining order blocking implementation of the freeze by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

In response to a request for comment and clarification about the Defend the Spend changes to CCDF from ����Ӱ��, HHS spokesperson Emily Hillard wrote in an email, “The onus is on the state to provide additional verification, and until they do so, HHS will not allow the state to draw down their matching funds for the CCDF program.” The matching funds Hillard mentioned represent all remaining funds that Congress appropriated after states get their mandatory tranches, but sent last week to state agencies about the new requirements makes no mention of the additional verification applying only to matching funds, nor does it mention requiring receipts and photographs. Hillard said the additional justification required from states will not be as extensive as what ����’s requiring from the Minnesota centers it suspects of committing fraud. She did not respond to additional clarifying questions.

This is not the first time the Trump administration has imposed extra justifications on child care funding, but it could be a much heavier burden than it was before. In early 2025, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort imposed what it called “Defend the Spend” on both CCDF and . In April 2025, state agencies that disperse CCDF funds to child care providers were told they had to provide “justification,” including “a description of the award and what you plan to do with the funds,” through a website when requesting the grant money that Congress had already appropriated for the program. At the time, it led to delays in the funding flowing to states, and in at least one state the delay caused providers to lay off staff or pay staff late.

But Ruth Friedman, senior fellow at The Century Foundation who served as director of the Office of Child Care at ACF under former President Joe Biden, said that requiring receipts and photographs is much more than what states had to share in the spring. “It’s super concerning,” she said, because these appear to be materials “that states are not currently required to necessarily have on hand.” If that’s the case, and the new process “requires new burdensome mandates to states,” she said, “that will lead to significant delays in payments.” 

That would mean many child care programs could go without being reimbursed for services they’ve already provided, potentially leaving them unable to pay rent or make payroll. Friedman said she is aware of states that have already experienced delays in getting funds due to the new Defend the Spend requirements. “It’s an attack on families and ����’s an attack on child care,” Friedman said.

It’s also redundant, as Friedman laid out. There are a number of systems in place to detect fraud and vet spending in the CCDF system. States have to conduct annual audits of child care providers, she said, and they have to submit quarterly financial reports to HHS as well as improper payment reports every three years. Every three years, states also have to submit lengthy plans to the federal government laying out how they will follow its rules, which are reviewed by HHS before states can get any money. States with high levels of improper payments are put on a payment plan and subjected to more careful monitoring. States are also required to have systems to detect and investigate fraud, and to impose sanctions whenever ����’s found. The national improper payment rate — which could include fraud as well as mistakes like underpaying providers — for CCDF was in 2023.

In May 2025, the Defend the Spend requirement ended for CCDF, but it has stayed in place for Head Start programs. When a Head Start program administrator goes into the payment management system to draw down the money their program has already been awarded, requiring that they justify the money, although they haven’t had to submit receipts or photographs. 

Previously, dollars would typically show up in a Head Start program’s account 24 hours after the request was submitted. But with Defend the Spend in place, there have been reports of delays, said Katie Hamm, who served as deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development at ACF under Biden. “One thing that has been consistent is that every month there’s a couple of programs for whom it takes two weeks, and that really puts programs in a bind,” Hamm said.

Programs can’t hold onto the money for more than three days and must make requests for funds they need to use immediately, so any delays are difficult to absorb. Some have had to start shutdown procedures, alerting staff and parents that they might have to close imminently, Hamm said, although she didn’t know of any that have actually had to shut down. The extra steps, and the delays they have caused, come despite the fact that programs’ budgets must be approved before they receive the grants in the first place, and are audited annually.

On top of reinstituting Defend the Spend for CCDF and freezing child care payments to Minnesota, the Trump administration planned to freeze key federal funding for child care and family assistance in five states, before a court order prevented the freeze on Friday. 

In nearly identical letters ACF sent to California, Colorado, Illinois and New York on Jan. 6, shared with the 74, the administration claimed it is “concerned by the potential for extensive and systemic fraud” in the states’ CCDF programs and has reason to believe that the states are “illicitly providing illegal aliens with CCDF benefits intended for American citizens and lawful permanent residents.” ACF is therefore, the letters said, placing the states “on temporarily restricted drawdown of CCDF funds until additional fiscal accountability requirements are implemented and necessary information is provided.” Those requirements include submitting verified, non-identifiable attendance documentation for children who receive subsidies. 

States are not currently required to give attendance information to HHS, Friedman said, and the requested information may not even be something they already collect. “I don’t think they’re going to have it on hand, and I don’t think ����’s necessarily an easy lift or a quick lift to get it,” she said. 

If the freeze eventually goes into effect, and states struggle to send ACF what ����’s asking for and cannot draw down CCDF funding, they won’t be able to pay providers who accept subsidies, most of whom have already provided the care they’re getting paid for. “It may be as severe as making them close their doors, it may mean they lose staff,” Friedman said. If the system becomes destabilized, providers may reconsider accepting subsidies at all and only enroll families who can pay out of pocket. “The child care sector, which is already teetering on the edge of crisis, becomes even more unstable,” Friedman said.

All of those outcomes would mean fewer child care options for families who can’t afford the full cost. Without care, “They may not be going to work the next day, they may lose their jobs,” Friedman said. 

The administration also announced other steps in reaction to the fraud allegations in Minnesota that are likely to financially hurt child care providers. In 2023, the Biden administration new rules to pay child care providers who accept federal vouchers more similarly to how parents pay out of pocket. It required that providers be paid based on enrollment so that they could count on steady payment even if children called out sick or skipped a day, and that they be paid upfront, rather than at the end of a month, so that the money better covered costs like rent and supplies. 

Without those changes, providers have to “eat the costs,” said Friedman, who worked on the rules, and get reimbursed after having already provided the services. Instead, the changes had state agencies eat that cost, which gave providers more stability and made the program resemble private pay practices. “These were really, really important reforms,” Friedman said. “If you have a $12 billion program, that program shouldn’t be adding to the child care crisis and adding to destabilization in the sector.”

Last week, HHS released a to rescind those changes, claiming it received feedback from several states and territories that the changes were “more costly and difficult to implement than HHS had estimated” and were “onerous,” with no mention of fraud as justification. But then the administration an announcement about the proposed rescission that claimed the Biden-era rules “weakened oversight and increased the risk of waste, fraud and abuse,” citing the fraud allegations in Minnesota. In a posted to X, O’Neill said the rules “weakened accountability and made fraud easier and not harder.” 

“They’re just outright lying,” Friedman said. But she fears that, while states are technically still allowed to pay providers upfront and for enrollment rather than attendance, the rhetoric around fraud will scare them off. “That will be devastating for providers,” she said. 

That day marks an important shift for her and other early care and education providers in Nebraska who serve low-income families. On that date, the state intended to begin paying providers a consistent rate for families who use government subsidies to pay for child care. 

Instead of reimbursing providers based on children’s attendance — which can vary wildly, especially this time of year, based on factors like illness and family travel — Nebraska would pay providers the same amount each month based on enrollment. 

Last year, because of the change expected to come in summer 2026, Hampson, who owns a home-based child care program in Lincoln, Nebraska, felt comfortable filling more of her program slots with children whose families pay with subsidies. Today, she does not have one private-paying family. She made the shift assuming the enrollment-based pay would insulate her from the instability that often accompanies subsidy slots. 

“I was super excited to know more of these families were going to get that quality, consistent care,” Hampson said, adding that reaching more low-income families is important in the field. “It’s not that providers don’t want to.”

Now, though, that could all be about to change. 

Nebraska’s transition to enrollment-based pay was part of an effort to get in compliance with a rule . Enrollment-based payments, that administration believed, would create greater predictability for providers, allowing them to serve more low-income families who need child care and, eventually, could entice more providers to participate in the subsidy program. 

The rule was one of a handful of changes made by the prior administration related to the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), the primary federal program that states use to provide financial assistance to low-income families in need of child care. Other shifts include paying providers up front for child care, rather than reimbursing them the following month, and encouraging the use of grants and contracts with providers. timelines for implementing these changes have varied. As of September 2025, 24 states were paying based on enrollment, according to an by New America. For the others, the latest deadline granted was Aug. 1, 2026. 

Just this week, however, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, through the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), that it would seek to rescind many of the 2024 rules, returning these issues to states. 

The cannot be enforced right away. Under federal law, the agency is required to take public comments, review them, and use that input to make final decisions, noted Alex Adams, who leads ACF. He declined to give a timeline for any changes to take effect.

If approved, the changes would not “make any net new policy decisions,” he added. “It simply goes back to where we were prior to 2024 regulations.”

The administration wants to rescind the 2024 rules, he said, because all 50 states had requested waivers related to some or all of these rules due to budget constraints and other implementation challenges. 

“Any time 50 states are asking for a waiver from something,” Adams said, “it suggests to me that maybe the rule isn’t working as intended.”

He also noted that “attendance-verified payment,” rather than enrollment-based, “is more of a deterrent to fraud.” Leaders in the Trump administration are concerned about programs with “phantom attendance” — suggesting they receive government payments but don’t actually serve the children they say they do — Adams said, but he declined to share specifics of ongoing investigations. 

Many early care and education advocates and policy experts have that rampant fraud and abuse is going unchecked. 

Casey Peeks, senior director of early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, called the allegations “unfounded” and worried that they would undo real progress made in the field in recent years. 

“It is very unhelpful and destabilizing to the sector, in the immediate- and long-term, to take some of these most foundational levers we have to stabilize the sector and claim that they result in fraud,” Peeks said.

Upon hearing the news this week, Hampson said she’s had to remind herself to “just breathe.” She knew she was taking a risk by enrolling 100% of families on subsidies.

Now, she said, she will have to rearrange her budget to continue to serve all of those families. Under an attendance-based pay structure, her income is just that much more volatile.

In December, for example, between holidays, vacation time and children’s absences, Hampson was only able to bill the state for 18 child care days. If the children in her program were from private-paying families, she would have been paid for 23 days, she said. 

But Hampson’s operational costs didn’t see a material decrease in December. 

“Without a provider being at fault at all, they could be at 50% attendance one day just because the flu is going around. That shouldn’t harm their bottom line,” Peeks said. 

“It’s really unpredictable and unfair for the provider,” she added. “Just because attendance is down doesn’t mean operation costs go down.”

In West Virginia, where providers have been paid based on enrollment since 2020, Katelyn Vandal emphasized how critical the change has been to keeping her rural, center-based program open. 

“Our mortgage payment doesn’t cost less because two kids in the classroom have the flu,” noted Vandal, director of A Place to Grow, a child care center in Oak Hill, West Virginia. Nor does her electricity bill and a host of other overhead costs. 

If her state returns to attendance-based pay, she’s not sure A Place to Grow would be able to continue operating. The center serves about 100 kids, with 60% from families that pay with subsidies. 

“We run such a fine budget line anyway that if, six months from now, we were going back to attendance, we would be looking at closing,” she said. “We would not survive transitioning back to that.”

Sheryl Hutzenbiler, owner of Munchkin Land Daycare in Billings, Montana, said she suspects that, under attendance-based pay, providers will either raise tuition rates on families — many of whom are already paying the maximum they can afford without one parent leaving the workforce — or, like Vandal, be forced to close their doors. 

But that is not a decision Hutzenbiler will have to face, should the Trump administration successfully restore attendance-based pay. Since she lives in Montana, where enrollment-based pay became in 2023, she and other providers in the state are protected from policy fluctuations at the federal level. 

That’s true for a , which have either passed laws protecting enrollment-based pay or have continued paying based on enrollment, on a temporary basis, since the pandemic. (West Virginia is in the latter category.)

Enrollment-based pay has been pivotal for Hutzenbiler, whose home-based program consists of about 60% of families who pay with subsidies. Back when she was paid based on attendance, she said her first sacrifice during low-attendance months would be her own wages. She would pay her full-time teacher first and make sure program costs were covered, often leaving nothing for herself and relying on her husband’s income instead. With the consistent subsidy income each month, though, she’s not only been able to avoid missed paychecks for herself, she’s been able to add two part-time workers to the payroll. 

Hampson, in Nebraska, said she was part of a group last year advocating for the state to pass around enrollment-based pay. It was ultimately unsuccessful.

“We wanted to know our state had already said yes, so we wouldn’t go backwards,” she said. “And here we are going backwards.”

In an industry where profit margins are at less than 1%, these changes will inevitably leave providers who participate in the subsidy program with less revenue to survive on. The shifts will likely also deter providers who participate in the subsidy program, or who might have considered participating, from doing so in the future, said Peeks. This will likely, in effect, leave low-income families with fewer choices about where to go for child care. 

“When you’re stabilizing providers overall, you’re often creating more options for families overall,” said Peeks. “I think it could definitely have a chilling effect.”

In June, 58% of early care and education providers surveyed by the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford said they were experiencing hunger, which researchers measured using six questions about food insecurity developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These providers, who span a variety of roles and settings, are not just dealing with sticker shock at the grocery store; they are skipping meals, eating smaller portions to stretch food supplies further, and going hungry because they’ve run out of money to purchase food.

RAPID has charted provider food insecurity for the past four years. Rates of hunger held steady between 20% and 30% from summer 2021 until early 2024, then began rising precipitously. 

Phil Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, said the status quo rates of provider hunger were “unacceptable to begin with,” but that this recent spike is both “alarming” and “concerning.” 

“The early care and education workforce is incredibly vulnerable to economic trends,” Fisher said, explaining the rise. “Part of it is just how close to abject poverty many [educators] are.”

Indeed, early educators earn a median wage of , making it one of the lowest-paid professions in the United States. An 43% of the workforce relies on public benefits, such as Medicaid and food stamps, to get by. 

So when prices go up, early educators are among the first to feel the effects, and lately, food prices have done nothing but climb. The cost of groceries has almost 30% since February 2020. 

“Food is very expensive,” said Isabel Blair, a home-based child care provider of almost 20 years who recently decided to close her program in Michigan. “It’s hard for families earning minimum wage to cover their basic needs — housing, child care and food.”

Blair has noticed among eggs and produce, in particular. Both are staples in an early education program. 

“You go to the grocery store, and the fresh vegetables are very expensive. For a tomato, you pay like three bucks. Or a dozen eggs, you play close to $4 now,” she said. “Feeding the children, you have to provide breakfast, a snack and lunch. Some programs offer dinner. Add those up, and ����’s very costly.”

In the RAPID survey, providers shared written responses to open-ended questions, and some highlighted how high grocery prices are affecting their own families. 

“We’re skipping meals so the kids can eat,” a teacher in Colorado said. “Grocery prices are through the roof.” 

“Grocery bills continue to rise and we are having to cut back on what we buy and redo our menu at home to be able to afford the same amount of food we were buying just months ago…” wrote a center director in Washington.

“[My biggest concern right now is that] we don’t go hungry in the street someday,” a teacher at a center-based program in Georgia wrote. 

A center director in Indiana said the “cost of groceries is going up and I can’t afford enough food … to last the entire month. We have to skimp on meals or bring leftovers from work home for the kids to eat.” 

“Keeping food in the house and meeting our nutritional needs as a family [are my biggest concerns],” wrote a home-based provider in Ohio.

Cristi Carman, director of the RAPID Survey Project, said the difficult choices providers must make, between buying more groceries or paying off a bill, is “really, really devastating.” Carman and Fisher separately noted that it becomes harder for caregivers to provide a nurturing, high-quality environment for kids when their stomachs are growling and they’re worried about how to put food on the tables for their own families before their next paycheck hits.

“That’s not humane circumstances for individuals in any role, especially when they’re caring for the youngest children,” Carman said. “They’re not operating under the best set of circumstances. They’re operating at reduced need.”

What’s more, Fisher said, is that early care and education providers often aren’t just buying groceries for themselves, but for the kids in their programs as well. (Rising costs have hit unlicensed providers who care for millions of children from birth to age 5 in the U.S. especially hard, because while they are technically eligible, many remain excluded from the federal food program for child care providers.) So when providers are going hungry, it usually means the kids they’re serving are affected too. Maybe fresh fruits and vegetables are replaced with canned items, or proteins are replaced with carbs. Corner-cutting becomes unavoidable. 

Despite the severity of food insecurity among providers, grocery prices are not expected to stabilize anytime soon, with the Trump administration’s tariffs forcing up the cost of imported foods. Meanwhile, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps low-income households offset the cost of food, was disrupted during the government shutdown this fall, leaving many recipients without benefits for weeks. RAPID researchers have not yet finished analyzing survey data from that period, but Fisher acknowledged it may only show a worsening situation.

“We’re not expecting these things to get better in the short term,” Fisher said. “If anything it will either reach a ceiling or continue to spiral.”

Tucked in New Mexico’s new is a less-talked-about provision that could expand access to free child care for some of the state’s most vulnerable caregivers: grandparents. 

In most cities and states, child care is designed to help support working parents, and so caregivers need to prove they are working or going to school to access subsidized care. That’s the way it had been in New Mexico until government officials started asking families across the state about their child care needs. 

Again and again for the past two years, they heard from grandparents who are raising grandchildren. Because most were retired, they didn’t meet the work or school qualifications to receive any of the government assistance the state was offering. Grandparents who were finding themselves once again in the role of parent lacked the financial support or even the physical ability to provide that caregiving. 

New Mexico has the highest share of children in kinship care of any state. Between 2021 and 2023, 8% of kids in New Mexico were being raised by grandparents or other kin, more than double the national average of 3%. And that percentage has been going up, according to a from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Foundation, which supports public education and community development in seven counties and 18 tribal nations.

The state has been roiled by a substance abuse epidemic that affects about 16% of the adult, non-senior population. In 2021, New Mexico ranked first in alcohol deaths and sixth in drug overdose deaths, according to LANL’s report. That is a large part of the reason many grandparents are stepping in to take over children’s care. But those grandparents are also struggling financially. According to LANL, 1 in 3 are living at or below the poverty level. That’s a rate that is also almost twice the national average in a state where the average annual cost of child care is . 

The substantial share of grandparents caring for grandkids was a problem that the state was uniquely positioned to address as it formulated its new universal child care program, which launched last month with the aim of making child care free for all kids.  

The way the new regulations are written, grandparents with legal custody or kinship guardianship are specifically from work and school requirements, making them now newly eligible for free child care. 

“We wanted grandparents to see that we see them and that we recognize they are doing hero’s work by taking care of their grandchildren,” said Elizabeth Groginsky, New Mexico’s cabinet secretary for early childhood education. 

New Mexico is not the first state to give grandparents an exemption from work restrictions so they can access child care assistance — 21 states have some variation of an exemption for kinship caregivers, said Grace Reef, the president of the Early Learning Policy Group and an expert in child care policy who has analyzed all of the state exemptions. 

But those exemptions are often tucked in a complicated part of the law that may make it difficult for families to understand that they even qualify. And no other state is offering anything as robust as universal care. 

“New Mexico’s approach is simpler and more universally applicable to grandparents, helping reduce confusion and barriers for grandparents seeking child care access for their family,” said Anne Hedgepeth, the senior vice president of policy and research at Child Care Aware of America, a national child care advocacy organization. 

Groginsky said the popularity of New Mexico’s universal program has also helped more residents become aware of the options available to them. 

New Mexico became the first state to offer free child care this year, one of the most high-profile child care launches in the United States. The state had been preparing for the step over the course of years, establishing a fund in 2020 with money earmarked for early childhood education. Thanks to tax collections from the oil and gas industries, the fund has grown from $320 million to $10 billion. helped pass a constitutional amendment in 2022 that ensured a portion of a second state fund went specifically to universal child care. 

What happens now in the state is expected to become a model for others to follow. Already, proposals for universal child care are being considered in and . Following New Mexico’s example, states could choose to include grandparents — nationwide, the share of grandparents caring for grandkids has been for the past 25 years, driven in part by the . 

About 916 children from grandparent-lead households received child care assistance in fiscal year 2025. In the three weeks since universal child care launched in New Mexico, 61 new grandparent-headed households have applied and been approved to receive funds. 

Jovanna Archuleta, the early childhood program director at LANL, said what grandparents repeatedly expressed to them was the need for options. 

In LANL’s report, one grandparent described her day like this: “My day consist[s] of jumping out of bed, starting breakfast, getting kids up and dressed. Kids are then fed, hair and teeth brushed. Jump in the car, drop one at school at 8 and the twins at 9. Hurry home, start laundry and wash dishes and pick up. At 1:30 p.m. return to school to pick up the 5-year-olds. Get home, make lunch and do any required school work and more household chores. At 3:30 pick up 7-year-old, fix snacks, do homework, start dinner. A short bit of playtime then dinner and dishes. Then it is bath, and bedtime… By the way I am 70 and a disabled vet, and a widow.”

Caring for young children is physically and mentally demanding for anyone, and especially for older people who were not expecting to take on that caregiving responsibility again later in life, Archuleta said.  

“They don’t always need every day, full-day child care because a lot of grandparents are retired, but they need respite care. They need drop-in spots and times where they can just have time for themselves. That has carried into this universal child care conversation,” she said.

Before universal child care was opened up to grandparents, some providers like Barbara Tedrow, who owns five centers in Farmington, would have grandparents come in who had just taken custody of their young grandchildren asking for a spot at the center that they typically could not afford. 

“I felt so bad, so I just gave them free tuition. … They were older, and they weren’t working — they were in their 70s taking care of a 2-year-old. There was no way they could afford the tuition. So we as providers, we’re normally just letting them come for free,” Tedrow said. 

The change in the law was something providers had also been advocating for as a way to give those children, many of whom had experienced trauma, more consistency of care.

“Let this child at least stay during their core hours of their waking hours getting fed, getting nurtured, educated, playing with other children their age, and that’s what they say: ‘I’m 70. I don’t know where to go find 2-year-olds for my granddaughter to play with,’” Tedrow said. 

Still, changing the regulation is a first step. For New Mexico’s program to be truly universal and accessible for grandparents — and caregivers more broadly — there needs to be child care slots for children. 

Archuleta said groups like hers are working with the state to figure out how to build up that capacity, whether ����’s in a center-based home-based child care program, so that every family that needs free child care and is eligible for it can actually access it.  

Before New Mexico went fully universal, it had already reduced some of the eligibility criteria so that 80% of children were eligible for free child care. But still only about 35% of children under 5 who were eligible for child care assistance were actually receiving it. That could be because there were either not enough slots for those kids or because some programs chose not to accept state assistance. 

The state reimburses programs for the cost of caring for each child, but because some charge more than the state reimburses, or they prefer to be paid upfront by parents, they choose not to take government assistance. 

Now, families have to not only find a program that has a slot at a time when waitlists in New Mexico and across the country , but find that slot at a program that takes government payment. 

Part of the universal child care roll-out involves raising the state’s reimbursement rate and speeding up the payment process so more providers will be incentivized to participate. 

But more centers and providers are still needed for families to really have ample choice — and that’s going to take time. 

Already, slots in home-based child care for more than a decade nationwide. In New Mexico, from 2010 to 2025, the number of registered home-based providers fell from 4,840 to 821, according to the state. Now, New Mexico is projecting it will need to build to meet the demand of its universal system. To do that, the state is offering low-interest loans from a $13 million fund to providers who want to build or expand centers, and ����’s already reduced some barriers for those registering as home-based providers. 

Easing the registration process for home-based providers may be the key to helping families find slots quickly, said Kate Noble, the president and CEO of Growing Up New Mexico, a state child care advocacy organization. In rural communities where there are already very few centers, home-based providers set up shop much faster. Many of those providers are , which could be an attractive option for families looking for care that reflects their culture in a state where Latinx people make up . 

But that process is riddled with barriers for providers who need to obtain a fingerprint and background check and a home inspection. Those who are Spanish-speaking may be wary of going to a police station for a fingerprint or allowing inspectors into their home, said Lucy Leon, a former home-based provider in New Mexico. And the background check requirement applies not only to the provider but to every adult living in the home.  

“The majority of those families, if not half, live with an uncle, a grandfather or a coworker because that’s how we support each other,” Leon said. “From the jump ����’s like ‘There’s no way I’m going to do a background check for my husband, my son, and much less a coworker.’ That’s another great barrier — they don’t take that step.” 

The whole process can take six months, she said. 

If the state can build up the number of providers, it will then need the staff to run the expanded system. In addition to maintaining its current staffing levels, the state is projecting having to recruit at least more educators. Part of the universal program includes higher reimbursement rates for providers that commit to paying staff at least . 

To achieve the ramp-up to universal care, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is expected to request an additional $120 million from the state legislature next year for the program, a tall ask as states face budget shortfalls next year due to cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP. Already, states across the country have been because of those budget pressures. 

It’s an ambitious plan, but if ����’s designed in a way that is responsive to the true needs families have — with expansive definitions of family that considers the role grandparents play — then it can be a model that’s worth perfecting, said Natalie Renew, the executive director of Home Grown, a national group working to expand home-based care access.

“If we are going to invest a huge amount of money into a universal child care system, let’s hold an ambitious goal for what it delivers to families,” Renew said. “I don’t think it’s going to be easy, but I think it is possible, and I really want the sector to be in this problem solving mode with them — what do you need to figure this out?” 

Keeping to this ambitious timeline has depended on more than picking a location and making sure the facility meets regulatory standards. The initiative’s success depends on building a strong, sustainable workforce. It’s not just finding talented, certified early educators and getting them to show up on opening day, but creating a plan to retain them year over year. 

In light of an uncertain economy and a number of systemic factors, achieving this goal may be easier said than done. “We recognize many organizations have experienced challenges in attracting educators. Fewer people are entering the field, which makes it even more important to invest in developing and supporting those who choose this career,” said Beth Kroutch, human resources director for Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning. 

With three centers already open and three set to open by fall 2027, Kroutch stressed the importance of planning ahead and forging partnerships. One approach her team has taken, she said, “is to reach out proactively to local colleges and universities in advance to talk about our organization, engage in a partnership and make a connection that hopefully shows benefits to both parties.” In addition to developing partnerships with local higher education institutions, the Catherine Hershey Schools have an internship program for high school students that offers a pathway to employment. She also described other recruitment strategies such as social media and career fairs. 

Kroutch is right. Other early learning leaders are feeling the pain, too. “I spend most of my waking hours contemplating this topic,” said Rhian Allvin, founder of , a network of three centers — two in northern Virginia and one in Washington, D.C. It was never easy to attract talent to a profession with low wages, poor or nonexistent benefits and minimal opportunities for career advancement. And ����’s a challenge to keep early educators in the field. Physical demands, long hours and emotional stress of the work all contribute to a in early childhood education.

A dramatic intensification of immigration enforcement has exacerbated these challenges. A considerable segment of the early care and education workforce are immigrants — at least 21% nationwide, according to published by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California, Berkeley. With the of protections limiting federal immigration arrests around sensitive sites, about immigration raids on schools and child care programs have escalated and many providers are faced with difficult decisions like .

Felicia Jones Taylor, co-founder of , a consultancy that provides technical assistance to child care centers, underscored the impact of immigration policies on early educators. “Immigrants came from their countries with transferable skills. They have experience working with children, but there are barriers preventing them from participating in this workforce,” she said. 

More than other workplaces, child care centers are protective communities that support kids and families, said Lauren Hogan, managing director of policy and professional advancement at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). When educators are afraid, it affects the whole community.

Amid major workforce challenges, developing creative approaches to recruiting and retaining qualified child care staff has become increasingly important, early learning leaders said. Wages came up again and again as the most powerful recruitment tool. The child care , which is predominantly female and often women of color, has long endured . Unless and until things change, compensation will remain a leading reason why ����’s hard to attract new talent, and why some experienced providers for higher-paying jobs. Caitlin McLean, a senior research specialist at CSCCE, summarized the problem: “You’ve invested that money in training people to work with kids and who probably would like to work with kids, but they end up leaving.” While the profession is rewarding, she noted, it is also demanding, and the supports that might keep them on the job aren’t always readily available.

of child care providers are considering leaving the workforce. that increasing pay reduces turnover and some programs have raised wages. The , a child care program that arose in Austin, Texas, in 2018, with a drop-in care model to offer flexibility for families, pays its educators $28 per hour, according to the center’s founder Choquette Hamilton. That’s nearly twice , according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. To make this level of compensation possible, Hamilton said the center uses a braided funding model including support from the city of Austin’s . 

The choice to prioritize compensation was intentional. “That rate was a decision from the beginning,” said Hamilton. “The educators do feel respected and valued. All of our recruitment has come from word of mouth, so they definitely tell their friends, but sadly, it still isn’t enough, because the work is not full-time at that rate.” She explained that many of their educators work part time and are gig workers who piece together their livelihoods working multiple jobs. 

While compensation is key, leaders said a thoughtful recruitment and retention strategy goes beyond the paycheck. “There are lots of ways that directors demonstrate, in partnership with the families, just how much they really appreciate the work that the early childhood educators are doing,” explained NAEYC’s Hogan. She cited Children’s Village, a nonprofit preschool in Philadelphia, as an example of a program illustrating that appreciation by for employees including health care, vacation, sick leave and a retirement plan. “Most of our educators do not have access to that,” she said. “That demonstrates caring for them in a real way, thinking about their long-term well-being.” Hogan also pointed to the for child care workers to access child care for their own children, and said, “It has definitely had an impact on recruitment and retention, helping staff come in and stay and feel supported.” 

In addition to improving working conditions and pulling levers that make the field more hospitable, building a robust pipeline of candidates is also crucial. Keeping a full staff in place often means recruiting more people than you think you might need, but even in the rare instances when a child care program is able to offer and sustain higher pay and good benefits for employees, there are other factors that make it hard to hire and keep employees. Candidates are juggling personal and professional stressors that often shape their decisions. 

Allvin described frequent instances in which an educator will get through the screening part of the hiring process at Brynmor, but fail to show up for the interview. “We don’t ever hear from them again,” she says. “It happens all the time.” 

One point all leaders were sure to make is that community is key to retention, but building it takes time. The first year is critical, leaders said. Once staff see the investment, culture and support, they’re more likely to stay long term.

“You lose people mostly within the first six months,” said Allvin. Keeping the turnover rate under 20% per year has been a steady challenge. She expressed relief that after two years at her flagship site in Lorton, Virginia, the center finally has no openings to fill.

Kroutch said that because there are a number of Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning, her team has been able to show potential staff members for new locations what the culture is like by inviting them to open house events at existing sites. Meeting candidates in person is important, Kroutch said. It’s a first step in building community. 

In the face of staffing challenges, many child care professionals who are responsible for hiring and maintaining staff, have adopted an all-of-the-above approach, and have maintained optimism in spite of the odds. “Just because the system is broken,” Hogan mused, “does not mean that it is beyond fixing.” 

Early Learning Nation spoke about the newest funding opportunity with Dr. Ola J. Friday, director of the collaborative, which includes the Ballmer Group, the Bezos Family Foundation, Buffett Early Childhood Fund, David & Lucile Packard Foundation, Foundation for Child Development, Gates Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation and Stranahan Foundation.

Mark Swartz: How much is the collaborative investing in boosting salaries and benefits of lead teachers and other early childhood education professionals?

Ola J. Friday: The total funding will be approximately $10 million over up to three years. The amount depends on the need being met and where the project is in the development process.

Swartz: How is this round of grants different from , which focused on eliminating structural inequities in the preparation of the early childhood education workforce?

Friday: Whereas the initial investments promoted teacher preparation, this time we’re looking to give educators a raise. In the RFP, we quote the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment’s : “The average wage of $13.31/hour for early educators in birth through age five settings undermines their quality and diminishes the benefits to children, families, and our economy.

Additionally, compared with their K-8 colleagues, early educators face poverty rates on average of 7.7 times higher.” Too many teachers are leaving the field, just when we need them most. Also, low wages deter new practitioners from wanting to do this work. Ultimately, women, and disproportionately women of color, are kept in poverty wages and families experience a lack of continuity of care for their children.  As a society, we have to do something.

Swartz: What’s the solution to these wage challenges?

Friday: As Dr. Sara Vecchiotti, vice president at the Foundation for Child Development, , “For too long, ECE financing of programs within fragmented public and private systems has not supported the true and fair cost of high-quality ECE.”

By funding innovations in financial systems and by working with government partners, the collaborative hopes to support long term increases of compensation for the ECE workforce. The partners can be state, local, municipal, territory or tribal governments. Eligible projects must include both the administer of child care funding and the budget person.

We call out this partnership because too often we’ve seen the lack of coordination among the fiscal leadership and the program leadership as an obstacle to leveraging all the funding that may be possible to support ECE efforts, including workforce compensation.

Swartz: That might be two people who work in the same office building but have never sat down together.

Friday: Exactly, and they come to that meeting with two very different kinds of expertise. The education program administrator will know about things like curricula, social-emotional learning and licensing. The budget officer will know how to pool various funding streams, which could be, for example, the typical Child Care and Development Block or Title I grants. They’ll put their heads together to figure out innovative ways to drive more resources towards ECE financing and long term compensation increases, not only short term fixes.

Swartz: What about just handing out bonus money?

Friday: With a bonus, one dollar gets you one dollar, and then ����’s gone. It can be very short term. Financial systems that leverage existing sources of revenue, both typical and atypical funding streams, and promote new sources of revenue, on the other hand, can support sustainability over the long term. Those are the solutions we’re excited about.

Swartz: What else is new or different about this funding opportunity?

Friday: ECE professionals don’t always get to be there when important systems and financial decisions are made. That’s why we’re requiring an advisory body made up of workforce members, and they will play an active role in project design and implementation.

Swartz: How did the collaborative arrive at this approach for supporting educators?

Friday: We spent last year doing research and learning from the field, including speaking to system administrators, practitioners and ECE finance experts. We heard too many stories of agencies operating in siloes, and funding that isn’t fully leveraged. Governments are leaving money on the table. This is an opportunity to use fiscal expertise to leverage program expertise.

Swartz: Where does that fiscal expertise come from?

Friday: Sometimes ����’s already there, and all we need to do is get the experts to sit down together. Too often, however, the fiscal expertise is outsourced, which means the knowledge walks out the door when the project is over. Just as we have an educator shortage, we have a shortage of people who understand ECE financing and budgets and can use their skills to build systems. One of them said to me, “There aren’t enough of us.” We need to build that internal capacity. I heard that message loud and clear.

Disclosure: The Bezos Family Foundation provides financial support to Early Learning Nation.

This is the life of a child care director before and since the pandemic.

In addition to her personal interest as a mom in the ballet (or circus) of child care, Thibodeaux is also observing the juggling and managing as Early Childhood Network Supervisor with (LRS). It’s a program of the Louisiana Department of Education dedicated to expanding access to and improving the quality of early care in the parish. This includes public preschool, nonpublic schools of early childhood development, Head Start, Early Head Start or Type III Early Learning Centers ( as those authorized to accept public funding through the Child Care Assistance Program).

For Thibodeaux, “There’s the heart of this work, and there’s the business. I love to see a child care center that has both. That’s where the magic happens.”

LRS has been doing this work since 2012, and the program was making steady improvements until the pandemic hit. “It was like taking 10 backward steps,” Thibodeaux says. “Sites started closing classrooms because they didn’t have teachers.”

In order to get a handle on what was happening in its network, LRS commissioned (ACE) to conduct a survey and virtual focus groups. Directors of and teachers in 51 early childhood centers across the parish expressed their views on business challenges, supports and the future. Many of the responses corresponded with Thibodeaux’s account, with a director of a three-center business reporting, “We had to reduce enrollment because we did not have teachers. Before the pandemic, we were full. In the last 16 months, we have been unable to enroll new children.”

“Two years into this pandemic,” said another director. “We are starting to see burnout. Teachers don’t want to work as much as they had. They could go down the road and make more at McDonalds.”

ACE’s Emmy O’Dwyer knows these issues inside and out. She started her education career as a middle school teacher, but she started an early childhood center shortly after Hurricane Katrina, upon discovering her newborn had a disability. “I just couldn’t believe how underfunded and decentralized everything was,” she says. “I couldn’t believe the work that these teachers were doing and how little I was able to pay them.”

For her LRS-commissioned research into Lafayette early learning centers, O’Dwyer set out to identify meaningful differences between centers whose directors characterized their situation as thriving, maintaining and struggling. She considered size, pay, benefits, instructional leadership and organizational culture. While pay is an inevitable factor, with directors saying they were competing with other employers (as well as the option of accessing unemployment benefits), staff size emerged as the most notable difference between thriving and maintaining centers. According to O’Dwyer, “Thriving centers had the largest staffs and indicated fewer pandemic-related staffing challenges.”

Pay and benefits matter, of course (and will continue to matter until early educators are compensated like schoolteachers), but O’Dwyer found that money counts less to the educators than how they are treated. As long as the community continues to regard their work as babysitting, they will feel undervalued — a factor that determines whether they remain in the field or defect to retail or other, better-paying sectors. “It would be nice to get paid a little more,” one teacher acknowledged, “or get benefits like teachers. I would just like some respect, that what we do is important.”

These findings resonated with Thibodeaux’s sense of the mood of early educators during this fragile moment. “We need to celebrate and recognize the workforce. They’re performing at a very high level despite the lack of materials and lack of supports.”

Awards and recognition help them feel respected “As a mom,” Thibodeaux reflects, “I drop off, I pick up, and I’m just rushing in and out.” Like a lot of parents, she finds herself forgetting to acknowledge the many ways that early educators make her career possible.

“We need to honor this important work,” contends O’Dwyer. “And centers need to get their business operations in order. They need to use the ‘Iron Triangle’ of early childhood finance (full enrollment, full fee collection and revenues that cover per-child cost), and they need to be supported on the front end to set up their business the right way.”

For O’Dwyer, organizational culture is a critical factor that determines whether a child care center will flourish. She touts early childhood fellowship programs (such as ) as an efficient and pragmatic way to help directors to focus on their own leadership, learning and growth. “Teachers might turn over every two years,” she says. “In Louisiana, someone is a director for seven to nine years. And so that’s a worthwhile investment.”

In response to the survey findings, LRS is studying high school pathways for students to earn a credential upon graduation, a teacher mentor program for onboarding new educators and a deeper study into the feasibility of increased pay, expanded benefits, substitutes pools and other workforce strategies.

Thibodeaux describes LRS as a testing ground for pilot programs. “We’re the first to jump in,” she says, and “find out what works and what doesn’t in our community.”

“We had a huge attrition rate,” acknowledges Dr. Calvin E. Moore, Jr., CEO of the Council for Professional Recognition, which awards Child Development Associate (CDA) credentials. “I really wanted to unpack why so many folks never complete the process.”

As the nation wakes up to the importance of the workforce that educates young children and keeps them safe and protected, Moore and the Council have embarked on a sweeping of the credentialing process, making use of a design-thinking approach that prioritizes equity and access. Ultimately, the initiative could bring more talent into the field at a time when it is needed more than ever.

In the past 37 years, the Council has awarded nearly a million CDAs. Maintaining the standards of early educators and measuring their competencies help families and communities to feel confidence in the professionals trusted to facilitate the brain development of young children. These standards apply to preschool centers, family child care and home-visitors, so getting them right matters.

Upon joining the organization in May 2020 as Interim CEO, Moore realized, “The status quo was not really efficient for candidates or for the council staff.” The board supported his commitment to listen to stakeholders and to heed their voices.

Moore’s career began with the Jefferson County Committee for Economic Opportunity in Birmingham, Ala., where he worked as a teacher’s aide. As the organization’s first CEO who has a CDA certification, he has a unique perspective on the value of the credential as well as the potential to make it an even more powerful lever for the sector. “The CDA process jump-started my own career and made me feel more deeply connected to it,” he says.

Inspired by Daniel Coyle’s 2018 book , Moore dedicated himself to “using this period of transition as a way to crystallize our purpose.” To begin, the Council commissioned — a New Jersey-based consulting firm that counts the federal Head Start program among its clients — to facilitate what Moore describes as “an iterative process that allowed us to challenge our assumptions and define our program.” This work entails surveys, focus groups and interviews to gather perspectives from those using the system.

In other words, it involves design thinking, as “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology and the requirements for business success.”

“Reimagining systems is essential for organizations that want to scale and grow,” says BCT’s Lawrence M. Hibbert. And wholesale, holistic reimagining doesn’t happen in silos. Alongside the credentialing initiative, the Council is also collaborating with the at Arizona State University. Dr. Shantel Meek has been leading the effort, making sure that the latest and greatest information around equity is applied to Council publications as well as the national CDA standards. Reinforcing the Council’s partnership the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) has been another priority. The Council also starts high schoolers on the path to early childhood education careers.

“Design thinking begins with empathy,” Hibbert explains. “Who is your user? What is it like to be in his or her shoes?” Subsequent steps in the process are defining the users’ needs, ideating new and challenging concepts, prototyping solutions and testing them out.

Technology has been a recurring theme in the responses. “Candidates had a hard time getting answers to their questions and finding the resources they need,” says Moore. “Depending on what part of the country they were in, some have had internet issues or lack of access to the internet.” Many of the responses detail problems scheduling assessments in Pearson VUE Centers — a pain point that became even more painful during the pandemic. Possible solutions, says Moore, include an online-proctored exam, where someone can take the exam in their home, or at an office or at the library.

While technology is holding candidates back, it also holds powerful solutions. Local libraries were revealed to play a surprisingly major role. “Even if there was a community where there may not have been a large number of high school graduates or college graduates,” Moore reports, “if that community had a lot of libraries and other kinds of resources for those CDA candidates to tap into, then they did better on the assessment than communities that were resource poor.”

The CDA is changing to meet community and workforce needs, but access has always guided the Council’s work. “At last count,” Moore says, “we have done assessments in 23 different languages. If ����’s a bilingual program, they can be assessed in a bilingual way. If ����’s a monolingual setting, we make sure that assessment is done in the language that is being spoken at the center.”

Fresh dimensions to the credentialing process will start rolling out in 2023, but don’t expect a shiny new CDA assessment process to be unveiled like the latest model of an SUV. It’s an ongoing process, Hibbert stresses, constantly informed by practitioners.

Ultimately, ����’s just like education in general. “The more you learn,” Moore says, “the more you want to know.”

The following experts shared their perspectives on the flaws inherent in Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) and how to build better, more equitable systems:

• Stephanie Curenton, executive director of the (CEED) and associate professor at Boston University
• Alexandra Figueras-Daniel, research assistant professor and bilingual ECE senior policy specialist at the (NIEER)
• Sarika S. Gupta, senior researcher at the at Bank Street College of Education
• Maki Park, senior policy analyst at

Here are 5 takeaways:

1. ‘Quality’ lacks a unified definition. “High-quality learning experiences are essential for fostering healthy child development,” Sharrock said, but we shouldn’t pretend we all define quality the same way. Every state in the U.S. has its own child care system, and no two use the same definition. Within states, different stakeholders differ in how they define the term. “It is important to find clarity on what measures of quality are meaningful to you,” said Park, adding that family, friend and neighbor (FFN) care is often overlooked in standard formulations or derided as a last resort.

2. QRIS is flawed. Alternatives exist. QRIS, which originated in the 1990s, was a top-down phenomenon by design, neglecting to listen to and learn from the educators devoting their professional lives to child development. Immigrant and bilingual learning environments have, in particular, been given short shrift.

Redefining quality, Curenton said, demands a pivot from ratings to a “cycle of improvement.” She described the , which addresses “the ways in which interactions between teachers and students, or among students themselves, are equitable, anti-biased and culturally responsive.”

Gupta celebrated the shared ownership achieved through the pioneered by Elena Soukakou, which evaluates the quality of interactions within the learning environment.

3. Inclusion should be integrated into every system. Today’s teachers are being resourceful, innovative and effective, and however you define quality, there should be more opportunities to validate and honor their work, Figueras-Daniel stated.

Park urged participants to prioritize language access and cultural responsiveness, and to recognize that educators’ practices and insights are valuable, even if—especially if—they don’t speak English well, don’t have formal education or have undocumented immigration status.

4. Professional development promotes equity. Historically left out of the quality conversation, the culturally and linguistically diverse workforce isn’t a problem to be solved. It has an important role to play in this process — especially in this time of acute teacher shortages.

Figueras-Daniel’s research in New Jersey has found teachers don’t feel empowered to use children’s home language in the classroom. She sees considerable room for improvement in making teachers feel their experience is valued, and stressed the importance of equipping teachers with the resources to make their own decisions about how they want their practice to grow. Park envisions more realistic career ladders.

5. Brave conversations like this will lead to change. The pandemic and racial reckoning of the past few years give us an opportunity to take a new look at the systems in which young children are learning.

Huge problems come with the segregation that exists in early childhood education. A racially equitable system, Curenton said, will address access, quality and the workforce in new ways. The title of her recent book co-authored with Iheoma Iruka sums up the approach needed to reinvent our systems:

More than 900 miles to the north, Dr. Lauren “Candy” Waukau-Villagomez describes the particular strengths of the teachers studying at the College of Menominee Nation. “We have subjugated knowledge. That means we’ve been disrespected and disregarded by the dominant culture. We have to learn to decolonize ourselves.”

The urgent work of both women received a boost last month through the Transforming ECE Lead Teacher Preparation Programs Grant Opportunity made by the , a coalition of nine funders that includes the Ballmer Group, the Bezos Family Foundation, the Buffet Early Childhood Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Foundation for Child Development, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, the Stranahan Foundation and TSNE MissionWorks.

Dr. Ola J. Friday, recently named inaugural director of the collaborative, explains that while each grantmaker in the group has its own priorities and styles, they are aligned around a common, ambitious vision of transforming the way early educators are prepared, bringing their compensation in line with their skills and ensuring that all children have great teachers.

Totaling $10.4 million, the six grants target educational institutions across the country that are boosting the capacity of the child care workforce and making it even more resilient. “All six grants focus on the most important lever of early education,” says Friday, “and that’s the people doing the work.”

Georgia on Their Minds

Durden, the Birth Through Five Program coordinator of GSU’s , envisions a day when early education is a career that compensates workers as professionals and treats them with respect. “There’s still a gap,” she says, “between how society views us and the skills and competencies we deploy every day.”

The new grants will help GSU to make progress on closing this gap. It starts with spreading the word about a viable and thriving career. That includes strengthening partnerships with the local YMCA early childhood programs, Atlanta Public Schools, the (a network of 22 colleges on 88 campuses), Atlanta Black Child Development Institute, Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning, and Georgia’s Professional Standards Commission.

The Birth through Five Program starts engagement as soon as GSU accepts students, rather than waiting for them to choose this concentration. Professor Durden says the Innovation Grant will help her attract students to and retain them for a program that prepares them to teach young children in and beyond her state, and positions them for career advancement. “We believe that every early-education teacher in Georgia who wants to, should be able to get her four-year degree.”

With a focus on people already working in the field—after all, they know what they’re getting into—the program offers late-afternoon and evening classes. If a prerequisite course is offered only at 1:00 p.m., it won’t fit their work schedules. Students shouldn’t have to navigate that kind of obstacle on their own, Durden notes. The program team gets involved.

The Birth through Five Program eliminates financial and systemic barriers through and an innovative partnership with the Atlanta Black Child Development Institute that matches students with peer coaches. Nine out of 10 students in the program are Black or Latina, and the supports offered by the Birth through Five Program reflect that reality. “You can’t put this project in a bubble. You can’t ignore the historic trauma of racism and racial terror, therefore our program not only focuses on teacher preparation but also provides culturally responsive engagement to our program participants and is also grounded in racial educational equity,” Durden asserts.

She adds: “Our graduates are attaining leadership positions in the field because they have become experts in high-quality, culturally relevant child education.”

Resilience on the Reservation

“We’re a small, creative program,” says Waukau-Villagomez about the education department at the College of the Menominee, northwest of Green Bay in Keshena, Wisconsin. “It’s not big and bureaucratic.”

She is especially proud of Sacred Little Ones, a collection of student-written and -illustrated storybooks including The Frybread Man and How the Porcupine Got Its Quills, along with lesson plans.

It might sound strange to teachers who want to leave their work behind them at the end of the day, but Waukau-Villagomez (recently named Wisconsin Indian Education Association’s Outstanding Indian Elder of the Year) says that on the reservation, everybody knows everybody’s business. Educating teachers who are culturally responsive means more than teaching the Menominee language through song, dance and nursery rhymes; it means family and personal issues are part of the curriculum. “We’re gossips,” she admits, adding, “You can’t teach unless you make a personal ���DzԲԱ𳦳پ��Dz�.”

Many of the students here are coping with work and family issues while they’re going to school. “They take a little longer,” Waukau-Villagomez says. Markie Miller, for example, began course work in 2004, when the first of her three children was still a toddler.

“Markie pushes herself,” says Waukau-Villagomez. “She’s a hard worker. School hasn’t always been easy for her, but nothing was going to stop her.”

The COVID pandemic has caused extensive economic and emotional damage on the reservation. Kelli Chelberg, chair of the teacher education department at the College of Menominee Nation, says the reservation sent out school buses outfitted with WiFi and provided laptops and hotspots. Despite these and other efforts, a number of young children became disconnected from schooling.

As with many areas of the country where families are struggling, opioid and alcohol abuse are prevalent on the reservation. Miller says she’s had to have difficult conversations with parents. “I’ve had to pull them aside and say, ‘This isn’t okay. What can I do to help?’” she recalls.

Alongside the challenges of life on the Menominee reservation is a longstanding tradition of activism, most notably embodied by , who served as assistant secretary of the interior and head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1990s. Teaching children belongs to this heritage.

“Our students realize they are educational leaders,” says Waukau-Villagomez. “They gain the courage to share their knowledge with those who don’t want to hear it.”

Shared Knowledge and Competencies Are Needed Across the Workforce

As children progress from infancy to preschool and through their early elementary years, it is important for them to have continuous, consistent, high-quality support for their development and learning. Ensuring this continuity and quality means that all professionals who work with children need a shared base of knowledge and skills. Across age ranges and settings, care and education professionals need:

• core knowledge of developmental science and content knowledge;
• mastery of practices that help children learn and develop on individual pathways;
• knowledge of how to work with diverse populations of children;
• the capability to partner with children’s families and with professional colleagues; and
• the ability to access and engage in ongoing professional learning to keep current in their knowledge and continuously improve their professional practice.

—From the Institute of Medicine’s which gathers research underlying the Innovation Grants

Disclosure: The Bezos Family Foundation provides financial support to Early Learning Nation.

“Since the pandemic,” Taylor says, “We’ve had to change everything: furniture, toys, curriculum, training.” Costs of supplies have skyrocketed. For example, a pack of 1,000 latex gloves went from $30 to $125. “Luckily, the staff has stayed with us, but ����’s always a challenge,” she admits. “The Target in Des Moines pays $3 an hour more than we do.”

The imbalance between wages in retail and the vital work of caring for and educating our youngest children highlights a crisis with long-term consequences for Iowa, along with most other states, says Jillian LS Herink, executive director, Iowa AEYC. “I cannot emphasize enough,” she says, “the lack of child care providers is the number one issue in Iowa. We need to professionalize the field, so that we have a well-qualified and well-compensated child care workforce.”

“This is skilled labor,” Herink insists, dismissing recent proposals to let high school students fill the child care gap in her state. She points to the recently announced Investing in Iowa’s Child Care funding program and as evidence that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and the state legislature are starting to treat the crisis seriously. She lists four additional measures the state could implement in the next three to five years:

1. Provide sustained funding for Child Care WAGE$®, a salary supplement program offered by Iowa AEYC. It offers salary supplements (also called stipends) to the early care and education workforce, based on the individual’s level of formal education and commitment to their program. Thanks to Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act 2021, WAGE$ is now going statewide in Iowa. According to Herink, this step will enhance the stability and retention of the child care workforce.

2. Support (Teacher Education And Compensation Helps) Early Childhood® Iowa scholarships—which Taylor has benefited from—enabling the workforce to attend college and earn degrees. Like WAGE$, T.E.A.C.H. is a licensed program of Child Care Services Association.

3. Name early care and education a “high demand” occupation. This recognition of the value of the workforce will create an avenue to increased professionalism for the field. The “high demand” designation can also mean enhanced funding via state initiatives.

4. Implement a salary scale that is tied to education and include a mechanism for child care providers to access benefits or additional pay for purchasing benefits

The business model of Taylor’s center is to combine families who can afford to pay for care with families on public assistance. The parents work in law enforcement, fast food and retail. Some live in a shelter for homeless youth. “It’s a lonely job sometimes,” says Taylor, “but other center directors have taken me under their wing. I thrive with group support.”

Social and economic currents have left us with a ramshackle, unsustainable system. “The way ����’s organized now doesn’t make sense,” explains Emily Sharrock, associate vice president of the Bank Street Education Center. Together with Courtney Parkerson, consultant with the organization’s Birth-to-Three Policy Initiative, she has written a new paper describing pay as “the obvious but elusive lever to sustainably improving the quality of child care in this country.”

lays out the problem, the consequences and a vision for transitioning to a system more aligned with the values most of us recognize as essential to a functioning society.

“Increasing compensation is not only key to quality improvement,” Sharrock and Parkerson write, “It’s essential to building an equity-centered system that values the lives and work of early childhood educators, who are disproportionately women of color.”

Parkerson and Sharrock’s paper isn’t just about pay. Strengthening the expertise of the workforce is critical. are proven ways of helping junior staff and those new to the profession to learn—and earn—on the job. Sharrock describes it as “rebuilding the talent pool.”

Founded in 1916 as the Bureau of Educational Experiments, Bank Street has been a force for children’s and teacher development for more than a century. Located in New York City, Bank Street’s graduate school and children’s programs are known for a longstanding focus on and expertise in early childhood, and for ways to support the development of teachers, schools and communities to realize each learner’s full potential. The organization has recently become a voice in the national education policy landscape. Its new Birth-to-Three Policy Initiative is grounded in neuroscience proving that learning, in fact, starts at birth.

Bank Street’s team is working on behalf of young children, families and the caregivers who support them. The paper’s authors describe it as educator development rooted in practice, under the guidance of an experienced coach. Acknowledging the economic and personal stress that plague the workforce (and discourage many from participating), they argue the enterprise of child development will never be sustainable until educators achieve a living wage and, eventually, pay parity with K-12 teachers.

So how much would this all cost? When you include comprehensive benefits for all birth-to-three educators nationwide, it comes to $40.2 billion per year. The paper juxtaposes this figure with $591 billion spent on compensation and benefits for K-12 public school teachers.

“It’s not only possible,” affirms Sharrock. “It’s essential.”

With a new administration coming in and a growing recognition of historical factors that unduly burden women of color, this may be the time to pump up the volume. The paper notes that “public support for investment in child care is the highest it has ever been.” Furthermore, disruption and, indeed, chaos wrought by the pandemic could usher in new dynamics that make child care a more attractive career option than working in a big box retail store.

“We have to persuade government to subsidize the system,” says Sharrock. She cites the initiative as an example of how it can happen. Bank Street has supported the city’s Department of Education by providing professional learning that will lead to a Child Development Associate credential for all child care providers working in the EarlyLearn networks.

Making space for early childhood education in federal, state and municipal budgets takes time—think years, not months—and a diverse coalition of stakeholders. One reliable way to build organizational muscle is through papers like Parkerson and Sharrock’s. “By developing proof points,” explains Parkerson, “we can generate public will.” Ultimately, they hope that people regard the sector as infrastructure so that it can be scaled up—and scaled up at a high quality.

In surveys, education almost always comes near the top of voter priorities. Increasingly, voters of all parties are prioritizing investment in child care or early education on par with K-12 schools. (.) “Imagine,” says Parkerson, “a future where communities value and invest in learning experiences for children from birth through age five in the same way they do for their K-12 schools.”