�鶹������ý

High-quality, affordable early education promotes children’s healthy development and lets families fully participate in work and community life. But quality depends on a workforce that is well-supported, both financially and professionally—and in most of the country, early educators are not. When educators can’t find jobs that pay a livable wage, they leave the profession, reducing the supply of high-quality care and pushing families out of the workforce. States and communities are taking smart steps—like introducing compensation supports and expanded eligibility for child care assistance—to keep educators in the field and strengthen the early childhood workforce.

What Does the Research Say?

Findings from the indicate that early educators function as essential partners for families and as the cornerstones of communities and local economies. Yet their , , and other professional supports are often inadequate in light of the demands of their jobs and the cost of living. When early educators face without adequate support, it can be hard for them to or sustain those practices over time, feeding a and discouraging talented people from entering the early education workforce altogether. This limits the supply of high-quality early learning environments, with significant implications for children, families, employers, and local economies.

Investing in Educators Across the Mixed-Delivery System: San Francisco’s Early Educator Stipend and Salary Support Programs

Despite investment in early educator compensation at the state level, San Francisco teachers’ pay remained inadequate given the city’s high cost of living. 

The uses dedicated city funds to provide cash stipends to early childhood educators working in licensed family child care homes and center-based programs.The works in tandem with CARES 3.0 to provide grants to early care and education agencies that have the organizational capacity to administer funding to increase educators’ salaries. Unlike CARES 3.0, teachers in programs that receive the grants get a wage increase directly from their employers.

How Leaders Made It Happen

Committed to a whole-system approach. Leaders differentiated implementation across program types but maintained a common vision, matching wage supports with provider capacity: while EESSG targets larger programs, CARES 3.0 supports FCCs and smaller centers for whom payroll-based mechanisms would be too burdensome. 

Invited open discussion about unresolved problems. Existing wage ladders emphasized formal education, but many experienced educators—often women of color or older women—don’t hold a bachelor’s degree. Leaders worked closely with early educators to ensure that new wage and stipend structures advance professional growth while honoring lived experience.

Learned the importance of building data infrastructure from the start. The San Francisco Department of Early Childhood (DEC) initially verified quarterly payroll and aggregated participation data manually. Leaders wish they had built in at least a year of infrastructure development before launching. As one leader put it, “We are paying heavily, painfully, for not having an infrastructure, because we did not have a data system built in.”¹

Invested in community engagement and long-term sustainability. Leaders meet regularly with advocates and providers to gather feedback. One leader noted: “That’s who built the movement here in San Francisco…so they’re going to have a large table and many chairs at that table.”² Leaders maintain a reserve fund equal to at least a year’s worth of workforce spending to ensure that educators can count on the compensation they have been promised.

Expanding Child Care Benefits for Child Care Workers: Iowa’s Workforce Pilot Program

In Iowa, people with small children who wanted to work in child care faced a dilemma: if their spouse or partner also worked, they typically earned too much to qualify for state Child Care Assistance (CCA) but not enough to pay for care on their own. Thus programs had trouble recruiting them, and people already working in child care tended to drop out of the workforce when they had a baby.

To help these workers, the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched even if their household income exceeded the standard eligibility limit. The program was codified into law in April 2026.

How Leaders Made It Happen

Grounded design in a clear theory of change. A clear theory of change grounded design choices and allowed leaders to resist politically attractive but counterproductive tweaks. When an income cap was proposed to contain costs, leaders used the program’s theory of change to be direct with legislators that some cost containment strategies could be detrimental.

Took a “steward of information” stance. As one leader put it, “We’re not coming to them with an agenda, we’re coming to them with options.”³ That meant being explicit about potential unintended consequences and about who would be most affected. Leaders relied on strong existing relationships with Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R) agencies to carry messaging to directors, who shared program information with their staff and families and then channeled feedback from those constituencies back to the legislators. 

Treated novel situations as iterative design work. Leaders heeded feedback from directors and staff experience when they drafted rules and revised policies. They used those insights to clarify eligibility gray areas and to identify where rules were misaligned with the program’s intent.

Maintaining Local Decision-Making: North Carolina’s WAGE$ Program

A 1980s statewide workforce study identified three primary problems facing the field of early education and care: low teacher education levels, high staff turnover, and low compensation. 

is an education-based salary supplement program for teachers, directors, and family child care providers. The state’s Division of Child Development and Early Education funds the program’s administration through Early Years North Carolina, and local Smart Start partnerships choose to buy in and fund supplements.

How Leaders Made It Happen

Maintained local decision-making authority. Certain elements of the program, like transcript review, are consistent across the state, but participating Smart Start partners have considerable control over how WAGE$ operates in their counties or regions. Local partners can determine the amount of funding that goes to supplements, the award level, and many eligibility criteria.

Paired compensation and preparation as a key equity strategy. Leaders view WAGE$ and TEACH Early Childhood Scholarships, which provide debt-free access to credentials and degrees, as interconnected strategies that together create more equitable pathways for early childhood educators. 

Recognized the need to preserve institutional memory. Much of the program’s original work was done through “gentlemen’s agreements”⁴ rather than using formal documentation. With many early champions now stepping back, leaders see institutional memory and historical precedent as assets that must be documented for the program’s long-term preservation.

Evolved the story, not the core facts. Early messaging centered on brain development; over time—and especially after COVID, when child care stayed open to support essential workers—the emphasis shifted toward economic stability. As one leader put it, messaging must “meet the different audiences that are listening to it.”⁵

What These Stories Tell Us and a Glimpse at Other Examples

A few patterns stand out across these examples:

• Leaders invited open discussion about unresolved problems, novel situations, and unintended consequences. They used these discussions to make changes and increase program clarity.
• Leaders identified and addressed tensions around equity. They designed around the needs of educators across the mixed delivery system, attended to wage ladders that prioritize formal education over experience, and centered Black and Brown women, who face wage disparities and barriers to professional development.
• Evidence pushed programs forward. Telling a compelling story—but staying true to the facts—helped leaders build trust, connect with legislators, and sustain programming over time.
• Sustainability required active, structural choices. San Francisco built a reserve fund, Iowa codified a pilot into law, and North Carolina documented institutional memory to preserve what early leaders had built.

Other Promising Approaches

Establishing legal protections for home-based providers. In Minnesota, included protections for family child care providers in communities with homeowners associations (HOAs). In California, the prohibits landlords from evicting family child care providers or refusing to rent to them because they operate a child care business out of their home.

Making child care more affordable for educators. Santa Fe Public Schools (SFPS) that aligns with the school-year calendar. Several other states have moved to make early educators eligible for child care assistance, including , , , and .

Expanding workforce pathways for high school students. In 2021, Milwaukee launched the program, providing local high school participants with no-cost college-level training to begin careers in early childhood education and to earn a Preschool Technical Diploma by graduation. Students in South Dakota at no cost while pursuing a high school diploma.  

Establishing training programs to help the workforce better serve diverse communities. In addition to higher wages and child care benefits, professional development opportunities are to higher rates of job satisfaction and retention among early educators. Communities throughout California have created a number of different training programs in response to local needs. In Fresno, a coalition developed a training model focused on supporting teachers working with young dual language learners. In Oakland, teachers identified a need to support students with challenging behaviors, so a training program in trauma-responsive classroom practices was developed. And, in the Franklin-McKinley School District in East San Jose, teachers and child care providers co-designed a professional development program focused on strategies for responding to children’s social and emotional needs.

Cross-Cutting Implementation Challenges

Common friction points in developing and implementing policies to support the workforce include:

• Upholding equity – Wage ladders often prioritize formal education over experience, keeping talented practitioners without a degree from accessing higher wages
• Sustainability – Meaningful impacts on the workforce will be short-lived without plans for ongoing financial and operational support
• Administrative burden – Initiatives aiming to pay educators more are counter-productive if their implementation only adds to program leaders’ plates
• Data systems – Launching a provider-facing program without a robust data system can slow down operations, create confusion, and shut out harder-to-reach providers 
• Access –Trust deteriorates when eligibility or inclusion is not clearly stated or when initiatives leave out home-based providers

Measures of Progress

Consider tracking:

• Number of educators retained and classroom closures prevented
• Administrator and provider experience (process clarity, burden, perceived support)
• Time from inquiry/application to stipend receipt, wage increase, or benefit enrollment
• Mix of setting types supported (home-based, center, school, community-based)
• Fund utilization and time to deploy capital

Tools for Action

• Toolkit for translating this brief’s findings into concrete next steps
• Questions to guide your work
• —a user-friendly, interactive digital tool that helps policymakers, advocates, and leaders explore how cities and states across the country are tackling challenges related to early education