Ruqiyyah Anbar-Shaheen and Tazra Mitchell: A workforce exodus threatens DC’s child care recovery
Now is the time to reimagine how we prioritize child care and compensate early educators in the District. As some parents begin to return to work after more than a year at home, many child care program directors are scrambling to rehire or replace staff members they laid off or lost during the pandemic. But they’re finding that what was already a workforce shortage has become an exodus. Teachers have fled the sector searching for higher-paying jobs. Small centers and family-care homes can’t afford to offer the salaries necessary to be attractive in a now competitive labor market.
Chatting with any program director, it’s easy to see that we are in the midst of a child care workforce crisis — and it is getting worse. But you wouldn’t know it from the District’s proposed fiscal year 2022 budget now under review by the DC Council. Although educators, program directors and advocates are urgently calling for funds to help solve this problem, the proposed budget misguidedly experiments with bonuses as a way to address low educator pay — beginning in 2023. When it comes to fair compensation, the budget feebly kicks the can down the road, which threatens the quality, access and affordability of child care now.
The mayor deemed early educators essential workers in March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up, in view of their crucial role in keeping our economy moving. Yet, early educators — primarily Black and brown women — have long been underpaid and undervalued. They earn a median annual wage of approximately $31,950. That’s barely above minimum wage. As a result, many of them turn to anti-poverty programs to make ends meet and provide for their families. About one-third of them face poverty.
The compensation problem is nothing new. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the DC Council promised in 2018 to improve the quality of early education by beginning to pay programs participating in the District’s child care subsidy program according to the actual cost of providing care and offering early educators compensation on par with public school teachers with similar credentials and experience.
Unfortunately, they haven’t followed through.
As policymakers continue to ignore early educator salary needs, the scheduled 2023 implementation of new credentialing requirements continues to get closer. However, without increasing pay to match the required credentials, DC risks pushing more child care teachers to leave the field for better pay. For example, educators with a bachelor’s degree face a pay penalty of 33% compared to their peers in public education.
DC Council members can take an enormous step to solve the crisis with the FY 2022 budget by increasing funding to early education programs participating in the District’s Child Care Subsidy Program by $60 million. Right now, payments to programs fail to cover the full cost of high-quality care. Unfortunately, this inadequate reimbursement also makes it impossible to pay educators what they deserve.
Asking well-off residents to contribute more to their taxes is another way to help solve the early educator compensation crisis. Those earning more than $250,000 — and who’ve seen their incomes and savings grow during the pandemic — can afford it. An increase of one percentage point in the tax rate on taxable incomes above $250,000 would cost someone earning $260,000 just an extra $100 per year — about two fancy coffees per month. And just 3% of DC taxpayers with high incomes would face a tax increase — adding some fairness to our tax system, in which the wealthiest 20% of residents pay less in taxes as a share of income than the bottom 80%. But necessary public investments like fair compensation for early educators get pushed aside when residents at the top — mostly white — are undertaxed.
We are moving toward a new normal in the District. Everyone must understand that restoring the availability of child care to pre-pandemic levels may not be possible without solving the workforce exodus. As demand picks back up, child care programs are making some tough choices: Charge parents more than they can afford to retain staff and pay them fairly, or pay early educators less than they deserve to serve families. It could be a lose-lose situation for everyone — and our economy — if the DC Council fails to change course with the 2022 budget.
Ruqiyyah Anbar-Shaheen is director of early childhood at DC Action and director of the Under 3 DC coalition. Tazra Mitchell is policy director at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.
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