Even before the pandemic pushed the early childhood sector into crisis, California educators were paying a wage penalty for working with younger children, according to a new report from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California at Berkeley.
Preschool teachers and child care workers earn 38% less than their colleagues in the K-8 system, the report says. This explains why 17% of early childhood educators live in poverty in California. That’s almost 7 times the poverty rate for the state’s K-8 teachers. Those are some key findings from the 2020 Early Childhood Workforce Index, a biennial report that tracks pay for early childhood jobs, the state poverty rate and a range of other workforce policies. All across the country, the research reveals, childcare workers often earn poverty wages.
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Lavida Reaves spent more than a decade working as an early childhood educator at a daycare center, nurturing young minds and bodies day in and day out throughout most of her twenties, while the infants and toddlers parents earned livings in other professions.
At her peak, after earning an associate s degree in early childhood education, Reaves said she made $1,200 a month working for a small, community-based program in North Carolina. She loved the tightknit community her employer, Excel Christian Academy, provided. But she simply could not make ends meet, and pursued a bachelor s degree so that she could transition to working in the public school system.