In the Shadows

The child care workforce has been at the center of national discussions about child care access, affordability, and quality—rightly so. Despite a pent-up demand for child care, many programs have vacant classrooms because they cannot attract and retain qualified child care workers.  This impacts parents, businesses, and especially children.  As noted in this and previous reports, the quality of a child’s experiences depends on the quality and consistency of interactions with the adults who care for them. This depends on their preparation for the job and their compensation.

Since COVID-19 and the pandemic, the country has recognized the crucial role child care plays in the lives of families, businesses and our national economy.  With child care workers among the country’s lowest paid occupations, the nation needs a plan to move the issue forward.  This requires an understanding of the actual cost of child care, including the preparation and compensation of the workforce.  This begins with adequate data.  This report is an effort to understand better the current workforce and what we know and don’t know.  Only by understanding what we have can we understand the actual cost of a competent and well-compensated workforce.

For this report, we set out to understand 10 basic things about each state’s workforce. This includes employment setting and status, gender, age, years of experience, average compensation, highest level of education, CDA, and other credentials. States were not asked to collect data specifically for this report. Instead, we asked them to provide what they know about their workforce (within a two-year window).

We relied heavily on the National Workforce Registry Alliance and its members. 45 states have some type of workforce registry, and 34 of these registries provided data for this report. Where registry data was not available, we contacted State Child Care Administrators. Eight states either had no data or declined to participate.  While we do not consider this a nationally representative dataset, the report does illustrate what we do, and do not, know about the Early Childhood Workforce nationally and sets a baseline for future work.

This report is intended to help state CCDF administrators and state policymakers see how their workforce data collection compares to the ten key data elements selected for understanding the workforce. The report also demonstrates where we have a strong understanding of the workforce and where we do not. As illustrated in the publication “Top Down and Bottom Up Brief” workforce definitions vary from one state to another. We worked to move all state reporting into the same template; thus, within each state, the data are a good depiction of what the state knows and does not know about its early learning workforce demographic, preparation, and compensation (earnings and access to benefits).

Before we can adequately plan for and support broad investments in child care (and the workforce), we need baseline data on the existing workers. To provide that baseline data, we also need investments in our system of workforce registries.  As we consider the total infrastructure of the child care system, it is essential to ensure we are building on a solid foundation of data. Understanding the true cost of publicly accessible workforce data is a crucial next step in ensuring adequately resourced and staffed registries. With near population-level data, registries provide a unique infrastructure for data information exchange with the early learning workforce. However, investments in robust data collection remain astonishingly insufficient. Effective utilization of workforce data depends on a myriad of specialized knowledge, skills, and technology to support moving information from users to policymakers and change agents mobilizing to support the workforce.