Building a Comprehensive Early Education Workforce Infrastructure

“For many people, working as an early educator is their dream job but they’re choosing to work in retail or something else because they can’t afford to work in this industry. We are competing with Amazon and Dunkin’ Donuts for talent. This is a high-skill job. It requires patience and know-how and passion, but we can’t get those people to stay because they can’t afford to.”

— Lauren Cook, CEO of Ellis Early Learning

As we continue to lose early educators to higher paying jobs at fast food chains, warehouses, and retail establishments, it’s clear that something’s got to give.

The early education workforce is paid little more than minimum wage: in Massachusetts and nationally, early educators often earn salaries as low as $14 or $15 an hour. More than 15% of child care workers in Massachusetts live below the poverty line. The low wages that are being paid to a workforce that is majority female and disproportionately people of color, reveals troubling, systemically racist social attitudes about whose work is valuable and what’s considered to be a professional career.

Early education and care programs have long struggled to hire and retain qualified, experienced early educators and low salaries have always contributed to high turnover rate, which is between 30-40% annually. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated a full-blown workforce crisis for the early education and care sector in Massachusetts and across the country, increasing workforce churn and propelling an unprecedented exodus of educators from the field. Nationally, we are still missing more than 100,000 of early educators who were previously in the field and in Massachusetts, job levels for the child care sector are still 23.5% below pre-pandemic levels.

While Neighborhood Villages continues to advocate at the state and federal level for significant and permanent wage increases for educators — increases that are commensurate with the invaluable service they provide in our society — that alone is not enough. Right now, we do little to invest in early educators’ professional development — and, where we do, we fail to match advanced credentials and degrees with increases in wages. This needs to change. In addition to livable wages and better benefits, we also must ensure that early educators have access to the academic and professional development programs that enable them to advance their careers in early education.

Unfortunately, early educators are not assigned the same value as teachers in the K-12 system, and are often treated more as caretakers than professionals. In order to address the exodus of educators from the early childhood workforce, we — as a society — need to place more value on early educators who play a critical role in our child’s development and start paying them dignified wages and support their professional development. Until we start treating early educators as professionals and assign them wages that reflect the value they provide to our society, the child care system will remain broken for ALL of us.

At Neighborhood Villages, we are working to make investments in early educators and in early learning programs to address key systemic drivers of the early education workforce crisis including lack of career mobility, workforce instability, and the need for compensation reform.

Through our workforce programming, we are piloting what a comprehensive early education workforce infrastructure can and should look like. This includes our Professional Pathways program, through which early educators are supported with enrollment in credit-bearing college courses in pursuit of advanced credentials and postsecondary degrees, and our Business Management Training program, in which center-based directors and family child care (FCC) providers can access high-level business training, coaching, and technical assistance. We are also building a greater supportive infrastructure for educators who wish to pursue non-college pathways in early education and care through our Registered Apprenticeship Program for Early Educators. 

Here’s a snapshot of how Neighborhood Villages is working to build professional development infrastructure that works for early educators to begin and advance their careers in Massachusetts:

Professional Pathways
Neighborhood Villages, in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care (EEC), runs the Professional Pathways program, a resource designed to help early educators enroll in higher education courses towards a credential or degree and advance their careers.

Through Professional Pathways, educators can work with Neighborhood Villages Student Support Associates (SSA) to help identify professional and educational goals and enroll in courses and degree programs offered by Massachusetts community colleges, and higher ed institutions with Associates, Bachelors and Masters degrees. SSAs help students enroll in courses that fit their needs and schedule, including options for online, hybrid, and/or in-person courses in various languages.

This program is designed to meet the unique needs of this workforce and set them up for success. Each student is connected to a dedicated SSA who provides one-on-one assistance to help them navigate the system and enroll in courses that work with their goals and their schedules.

In addition to the one-on-one direct guidance that SSAs provide to individual students through Professional Pathways, child care programs licensed by EEC can also establish groups of educators, connect them to a coursework cohort, and request a specific course or pathway to meet their needs.

Business Management Training
Neighborhood Villages also offers free business training for early education providers in Massachusetts, in partnership with EEC, United Way Shared Services, and Urban College.

The Urban College Business Management Training classes include seven business-focused modules with individual office hours and are taught by instructors at Urban College. These modules cover topics like record keeping, budgeting, reading financial statements, marketing, financial management, business planning, and HR practices.

Licensed Family Child Care providers in Massachusetts are also eligible to participate in free business training designed to meet the unique needs of running a family child care business. Offered in partnership with EEC and United Way - Shared Services of Boston, the 12-week program includes six business-focused Zoom classes and three 1:1 coaching sessions, followed by topic-focused workshops. The goal is to help participants gain important skills in record keeping, budgeting, marketing, financial management, and business planning.

Registered Apprenticeship Program
Registered Apprenticeships are widely seen by states, the federal government, and the business community as crucial to recruitment and retention of high-quality educators and school leaders in the field. The Department of Labor has identified registered apprenticeships in early education as a strategic priority for workforce stabilization; yet no state-wide apprenticeship program for early educators currently exists in Massachusetts. That’s why Neighborhood Villages has stepped in to pilot a Registered Apprenticeship program to offer non-college pathways to entering the field of early education and care and enable earlier recruitment of prospective educators.

This program, launching this winter, adds three critical (and currently missing) elements to Massachusetts' early education workforce development infrastructure: mentorship, wage increases, and on-the-job training. It combines onsite job coaching and mentoring with skills training and incremental wage increases as competency and knowledge progress, working to ensure that each apprentice is supported through their professional development journey.

These three programs lay the foundation for Neighborhood Villages’ vision for a comprehensive, no-wrong-door professional development landscape in Massachusetts. Long-term, Neighborhood Villages’ objective is to create a national workforce development infrastructure model for the early education and care sector with both college and non-college pathway options that could be adopted not only across Massachusetts, but by other states or municipalities across the country, as well. Early educators are highly skilled professionals. Investing in this crucial workforce is not only an economic mandate, but a gender and racial justice imperative.