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Brief: Study Focuses on Child Care Workforce Crisis The Center for the Child Care Workforce has released a study focusing on child care staffing to determine the impact of staff compensation, training, and turnover on the overall quality of care provided. This study, conducted over a six-year period, was based on observations and interviews with teachers and directors from a sample of child care centers serving middle- and low-income children in three Northern California communities. Overall, the study found that the child care industry is losing well-educated teaching staff and directors at a very high rate. Only 24% of teaching staff employed in 1996 were still working at the centers in 2000. Centers not only had difficulty finding replacements for these teachers, but the replacements they found tended to have less training and education. Nearly 50% of teachers who left centers had a bachelor's degree, compared to only one-third of their replacements. The report states that compensation for the majority of teaching staff positions has not kept pace with the cost of living between 1994 and 2000. Wages for the majority of teaching staff positions, when adjusted for inflation, have decreased six percent for teachers and two percent for assistants. In addition, teaching staff who left their positions were leaving for higher paying jobs. Only 51% of teaching staff and 39% of directors who had left their positions were working in child care-related agencies, and those working in non-child care-related jobs earned $4 per hour ($8,000 per year) more on average. An abundance of studies of child care have shown that high turnover, low wages, and insufficient training have a direct impact on the quality of care provided, and as a result the developmental outcomes of children. The report makes several policy recommendations to address these issues. The study's authors recommend that policy makers close the economic and status gap between teachers based on the age of the children that they teach. For instance, even those child care teachers at the highest level of pay and experience in the study earned $10,000 less per year than the average K-12 California teacher with equivalent education. The report also calls for the expansion of the focus of education reform, and the resources dedicated to it, to include the preschool years. Source:
For
more information: Facts in Action, June 2001 |
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