Center for the Study of Childcare Employment

This report takes a closer look at the impact of COVID-19 on early care and education (ECE) programs, staffing and disparities using data collected by the Center by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) through the 2020 California Early Care and Education Workforce Study.

The ECE system has been under-resourced and undervalued since well before the pandemic (McLean et al., 2021). Low pay and poor working environment have long plagued the ECE industry as key drivers of chronic high turnover rates and teacher staffing shortages in the field (U.S. Department of Treasury, 2021). Additional disparities within the system place providers on vastly different financial footing as a function of the type of program in which they operate, their access to public funding, and characteristics of the families they serve (Austin et al., 2018; Whitebook et al., 2014). The pandemic has exacerbated these pre-existing issues.

California has proposed a broad expansion of transitional kindergarten (TK), a school-based early learning program serving four-year-olds. This improvement will make TK universally available to all four-year-olds by 2025, framed as a pillar of the state’s early care and education (ECE) system.

For decades, low levels of public investment in this sector have kept the ECE workforce—largely women of color and immigrant women—in a grim financial bind.

During the first year of the pandemic, the majority of early educators continued to work in person—risking their health and that of their families—while K-12 schools closed for distance learning. This report reveals new details on the economic realities of life as an early educator during the COVID-19 public health crisis.

This data snapshot focuses on the education and experience of family child care providers, center directors, and center-based teaching staff in California.

From October through December 2020, we surveyed representative samples of approximately 2,000 center administrators and 3,000 home-based family child care (FCC) providers, as well as non-probability samples of about 2,500 center-based teaching staff members and 280 transitional kindergarten (TK) teachers. Estimated workforce sizes for each of the populations are 24,700 FCC providers, 9,500 center directors, 60,800 center-based teachers, and 23,000 center-based assistant teachers (data snapshot on workforce size). 

Josephine Silone Yates (1859-1912) was an educator, writer, and Black women’s club leader, whose career and community work was grounded in a commitment to “racial uplift,” emphasizing the improvement of newly freed Black communities post-emancipation. One of the first Black women professors in the United States, Yates taught at Lincoln Institute, now Lincoln University, in Jefferson City, Missouri (Dublin, 2020). Yates was integral to the establishment of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896 (Dublin, 2020), and as the organization’s second president (1901-1904), she put her knowledge to work by establishing the NACW’s infrastructure to expand early care and education opportunities for Black children across the country (Robbins, 2011).

Early learning and child development theory shaped Yates’s pedagogical philosophy and grounded her advocacy for day nurseries and kindergartens, which remains a less-recognized aspect of her life’s work (Robbins, 2011). Her writings evidence her pedagogical fluency through the discussion of various educational theories and research and distinguish her as a great thought leader in education across the human lifespan. Nonetheless, Yates’s intellectual leadership and expertise in education is woefully understudied, buried like the efforts of many 20^th-century Black women whose perspectives on the role of education in Black liberation surpassed the boundaries of the Black men who dominate historical memory (Robbins, 2011).

This data snapshot features demographics for center directors, family child care providers, and center teachers in California. It is one of a series of releases from CSCCE’s 2020 California Early Care & Education (ECE) Workforce Study, the first comprehensive study of early educators in the state in more than 15 years.

From October through December 2020, we surveyed representative samples of approximately 2,000 center administrators and 3,000 home-based family child care (FCC) providers, as well as non-probability samples of about 2,500 center-based teaching staff members and 280 transitional kindergarten teachers.

California is moving quickly to transform transitional kindergarten (TK) into a universal preschool program to be available to all four-year-olds in the state by 2025 (California Legislative Information, 2021b).

This will create the need for as many as 8,000 to 11,000 additional lead TK teachers.¹ In child care centers and family child care homes across the state, a diverse cadre of early educators are experienced in teaching young children and well prepared to meet this demand. Yet this expansion of TK — currently planned to operate exclusively in public school settings — risks bypassing these trained professionals. Without careful attention to how TK is implemented, this model stands to bring greater instability to the early care and education (ECE) system and fuel existing racial pay gaps among the ECE workforce, ultimately undermining the state’s vision for an equitable system for children, families, and educators.

This snapshot highlights original key findings from a recent workforce survey of center-based and TK teachers and includes analysis of secondary data that are immediately relevant to the expansion of transitional kindergarten.² Additional findings from the workforce study, including results from family child care (FCC) providers and center administrators, are forthcoming.

This report is the third resource in a three-part series on pre-K teacher compensation parity, jointly undertaken by CSCCE and NIEER. The report examines parity policies in 5 states (Alabama, Georgia, New Jersey, Oregon, and West Virginia) and 2 cities (New York City and San Antonio) in order to understand the policy rationale and process for moving toward compensation parity for pre-K teachers in different contexts.

This report is the second resource in a three-part series on pre-K teacher compensation parity, jointly undertaken by CSCCE and NIEER. The report provides a detailed description of the current landscape of state pre-K teacher compensation parity policies.