Increasing child care teacher pay doesn’t have to mean charging parents more

Jacqueline Strickland was tired, but hopeful. The Washington, DC, early childhood educator had been teaching young children for nearly 40 years, and prayed that one day she would be fairly compensated for her experience and education. Strickland even went back to school, years into teaching, to upgrade her credentials, acquiring associate’s and bachelor’s degrees to better understand youth brain development. She watched as valued colleagues left for higher-paying pastures, teaching older children, driving school buses, working for the postal service.

Strickland kept with her career path though, partly out of passion for young kids, but also because she knew there was a local effort afoot to raise the wages of teachers like her. She began testifying at council hearings in support of the idea. Finally, two years ago, after years of waiting, Strickland’s salary was bumped. She’s gone from earning $57,000 a year to $75,000, and gained access to free health insurance.

“I’m a mother of two, both my daughters have gone to college and I had to pay for school, maintain my own household, I didn’t have money to put away for retirement,” she said. “That was the scary part for me. I will be 60 in November and I couldn’t save.”

Strickland’s raise came from the nation’s first program aimed at aligning the salaries of the city’s 4,000 day care teachers with their public school counterparts. Known as the Pay Equity Fund, this innovative program has paid more than $80 million over the last two years to augment the salaries of child care workers, and was funded by a new non-lapsing tax increase on DC’s wealthiest residents, approved by the local council in 2021. 

In the program’s first year, lead teachers like Strickland received lump-sum payments of $14,000, assistant teachers $10,000, and part-time teachers $5,000. In its second year, the city began issuing wage increases through quarterly payments, eventually transitioning these boosts into newly established salary minimums.

While DC’s Pay Equity program stands out for its scale, its wage supplement effort reflects a broader national trend, as states try to stabilize child care sectors hit hard by the pandemic and address the chronic underpayment of the workforce. In 2022, the median hourly wage for child care workers was just $13.71, significantly less than comparable roles like preschool and kindergarten teachers. Child care is the 10th lowest-paid occupation out of roughly 750 occupations in the economy, per one industry analysis.  

Out of recognition that families are already burdened by high costs and can’t afford to pay much more for child care, states like North Carolina, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Maine, and Tennessee have introduced wage supplement programs to boost child care teacher recruitment, retention, and quality. And on the federal level, several proposals aim to bolster child care workers’ salaries. One bipartisan bill introduced this summer by Sens. Katie Britt (R-AL) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) proposes new federal grants to state and local governments that supplement child care worker pay. 

As politicians elevate child care on the campaign trail and polls suggest it’s a motivating concern for voters, the pressure to raise wages for one of America’s most underpaid professions has taken on new importance. DC’s Pay Equity Fund is proving the model can work — provided elected officials stay committed to funding it.

What we’ve learned from DC’s pay equity fund

Leading researchers have been analyzing the impact of DC’s wage supplement program on child care providers and the early education sector more broadly.

Data from the first two years of the program showed that the wage supplements had increased lead teachers’ pay by 37 percent and assistant teachers’ wages by 31 percent.

On a practical level, the increased pay has enabled child care teachers to pay off their debts, cover emergency expenses, and cover essentials like food, rent, and utilities. Some began looking to purchase homes, and nearly 70 percent said the fund allowed them to actually save money, some, like Strickland, for the first time in their careers. 

On an emotional level, many educators reported in surveys that the extra pay made them feel genuinely appreciated and respected, and that reduced financial stress helped them focus more on the children they work with. 

Researchers found that assistant teachers, in particular, reported significantly improved mental health. “Indeed, the Pay Equity Fund…appears to have contributed to educators’ beliefs that they are now being compensated fairly,” the Urban Institute concluded.

From a hiring perspective, research by the think tank Mathematica found that the first few years of the Pay Equity Fund boosted the number of early childhood educators working in DC. Mathematica estimated the program led to an increase of 100 new hires, representing a 3 percentage point increase over what would have been expected without the wage boosts. Many child-care center directors also told Urban Institute researchers that the wage supplements made it easier to attract qualified new teachers and easier to retain their best staff.

“What’s new about the pay equity program compared to other states is that they had a dedicated source of revenue,” said Erica Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who has been studying the program. “And that it was not just to stabilize the sector, but was really also about fairness.”

Can the idea spread further?

Taking a page out of DC’s playbook, Maine has similarly sought a dedicated funding stream to boost child care wages. 

Maine’s child care wage supplement program began in September 2021 using American Rescue Plan relief funds.  “Stability grants” provided nearly 7,000 child care staff with an additional $200 per month, according to Tara Williams, the associate director of early care and education in Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services. Maine officials solicited feedback on how best to distribute the dollars, and concluded that sending the money to program owners and directors, so they could put the funding directly into staff payroll, made the most sense. 

Beginning in October 2022, Maine included the program in its state budget, continuing to fund it through general state revenues at a cost of $30 million annually.

It now exists as a three-tiered program, in which the lowest eligible tier of child care workers can earn an additional $275 per month, the second tier earns an additional $415 per month, and the highest-tier providers can earn an additional $625 a month.

“So that’s an over $3,000 a year bonus for the first tier,” Williams said proudly. “I’ve just been really excited to watch the expansion and implementation of this program.” Over 7,500 child care workers were receiving the Maine supplements as of June.

Williams has been sharing Maine’s experience with compensation reform with other states, including this past summer at a conference hosted by the North Carolina-based Hunt Institute. 

In Pennsylvania, advocates have been organizing for their own child care wage supplement program, arguing that such investments are necessary to address the state’s worker shortage. They pointed to Republican-led states like Alaska and Georgia that have recently made new investments to support child care wages ($7.5 million and $23.6 million respectively) and Democratic-led ones like New York and Minnesota that have done the same ($500 million and $316 million respectively).

Some cities are also taking their own steps. This past June, a coalition of care advocacy organizations launched an 18-month pilot in New York City to provide $1,000 per month to licensed home-based child care providers.“We have educators deciding every month what bills to pay, they are deciding every month whether to stay open,” said Jessica Sager, the CEO of All Our Kin, a national group that trains and supports home-based child care educators and is involved with the pilot. “When educators don’t have that stress they can focus wholly on the care.”

The policy will require sustained commitment

Wage supplements are not unique to child care, and governments have long used them to augment salaries of workers in fields like health care, home care, and agriculture. 

Yet as promising as these wage supplements are, advocates are learning that even passing a dedicated funding stream is not enough to insulate the salary boosts from politics and annual budget fights.

Earlier this year, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed gutting the Pay Equity Fund entirely as a way to balance the city’s budget amid flat growth and declining revenue from vacant office buildings. Teachers and community allies rallied for months in protest and in the end the DC Council restored $70 million to the program, though that still represented a $17 million cut.

“We thought we were done with this kind of fighting — we had found a non-lapsing funding source for the program, there isn’t that much more security we can build in,” said Ruquiyyah Anbar-Shaheen, the director of early childhood at DC Action, a local advocacy group. “The challenge is just having the political will to keep the program in place.” 

Strickland said if the city had gone forward with gutting the program, she would have had to look for an alternative job. 

“I’ve been fighting this fight a long time, but this shouldn’t be a fight, it should be a given,” she told Vox. “It’s not a bonus, it’s what’s owed to early childhood educators. We put in a lot of time and we give children the foundation that supports them for future learning.”

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.