Why the Dire State of the Early Learning Workforce Is ‘Alarming and Not Surprising’

The state of early care and education today is, in a word, unsustainable.

That’s what a recent survey of 10,000 early childhood educators found, and it’s what providers continue to share anecdotally.

With the pandemic in the rearview — and the accompanying funding it brought the field now a fading memory — many early education providers find that they cannot keep up with rising costs, staff shortages and low morale.

In January, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), a nonprofit advocacy group that works to promote high-quality early learning, surveyed early childhood educators across all states and settings, including center-based, home-based, Head Start and public preschool programs.

“What we see in this survey is both alarming and not surprising,” says Daniel Hains, managing director for policy and professional advancement at NAEYC.

About one-third of responding providers reported paying more for rent this year than they did the year prior, while nearly half said they are paying more for property insurance and liability insurance.

“Everything is just going up in price all the time,” says Meredith Burton, director of the Furman University Child Development Center, a small, two-classroom program in Greenville, South Carolina.

Burton has the unique advantage of operating her program inside a building owned by the university, which does not charge her rent, but everything else — from utilities to cleaning supplies to food — has continued to rise since 2020, she says.

That reality makes it near-impossible to pay staff livable wages, let alone pay them what they deserve, without forcing programs to go under, many providers have found.

After 28 years working in early childhood, Jennifer Trippett’s program experienced a budget shortfall for the first time in 2024. In response, she had to raise tuition prices on families by 20 percent in January. More than half (55 percent) of providers surveyed by NAEYC in January said they had also raised tuition in the last year.

Even with that tuition adjustment, Trippett, who is the director of Cubby’s Child Care Center in Bridgeport, West Virginia — the largest licensed program in the state, serving around 450 kids every day — is “seriously contemplating” closing down some of her classrooms in August, when kids enrolled move up to the next age band.

“I am struggling every day with staffing,” she admits. “Every day, I’m walking on eggshells: ‘Who’s going to call off? Who do we have to cover for?’ It’s every day. That’s the game we’re living in. ‘Can we get enough bodies in the door?’ That’s not where I want to be.”

Back in 2019, before the pandemic, Trippett paid her staff about the same wages that Walmart, Target and hospitality businesses paid their employees. It worked out alright, since some people preferred to be around young kids, and she could guarantee regular business hours, whereas the other jobs required some night and weekend shifts.

Today, that’s not the case. Those same employers have doubled their starting wages, according to Trippett, and “I haven’t been able to keep up,” she said.

Cubby’s pays its staff between $12 and $16 an hour. The local gas station, meanwhile, starts employees at $15.50 an hour, she says, and “my 15-year-old niece started at $12 an hour at the mall.”

Trippett finds herself in the same Catch-22 that so many other early education providers do: She really needs to give her staff a raise to compete with other businesses in the community, but she cannot ask families enrolled in her program to pay any more than they do. Already, she says, she’s charging more than many can afford.

This is emblematic of what thousands of providers shared in the NAEYC survey. More than half said their programs were underenrolled compared to what they would like to see. Asked why, 41 percent said it’s because parents can’t afford the cost of care, and 37 percent said their compensation is too low to recruit and retain qualified staff.

Burton, the provider in South Carolina, feels that, after a momentary boost in status during the worst days of the pandemic, early childhood educators have once again been forgotten by the public.

Hains, of NAEYC, confirmed that many providers feel this way. He described it as a return to an “uneasy status quo.”

“It feels almost like a slap in the face to many providers,” Burton says. “Here we were, finally being acknowledged as an essential workforce, and now we’re back to, ‘Work as hard as you can, as many hours as you can, for low wages and almost no benefits, and we still expect you to be delivering the highest quality possible.’ That’s just not sustainable for anyone. The morale for many providers has gone down tremendously.”

Indeed, nearly half (47 percent) of providers in the survey said their burnout has worsened in the last year, attributing their condition to low wages, physical and mental demands of the job, and inadequate resources to deal with children’s developmental and behavioral challenges.

Burton can attest to all of that, including navigating how best to serve children with “very specific needs we’ve never encountered before.”

“It has definitely gotten harder,” Burton says. “I love what I do, [but] I am tired a lot of the time — not necessarily physically tired, just emotionally and mentally exhausted.”

She adds: “A huge part of that is the expectation I set for myself. I feel a huge sense of responsibility to my staff and the families we serve. I want us to be successful, and I want us to be able to meet our mission and provide the highest quality care and education to these children we spend the majority of our time with. It’s an emotionally exhausting journey.”

Though not reflected in the survey, Hains says he’s had conversations with providers recently who are experiencing “concern, confusion and uncertainty” around the flurry of changes coming out of the federal government.

The temporary funding freeze in February caused some panic, since it affected a number of Head Start programs, he acknowledges. Many educators are also worried about the fate of Medicaid, which about 230,000 of them — or one in four nationally — rely on for health insurance.

The funding disruptions and pullbacks come at a time when the field needs more public investment, not less, Hains notes.

“We’ve gotten so used to how bad things are, and how much folks are struggling,” he concedes. “But this remains a crisis, even if we’ve gotten used to the crisis.”