At the federal, state, and local level, governments in America have hundreds of programs spending billions of dollars to help babies, toddlers, and their mothers. We all agree that babies and toddlers need great care and that mothers need help doing it.
Yet somehow, governments never decided that paying caregivers well was part of this effort.
At Early Head Start, a federally funded program for pregnant women, infants, and toddlers under the age of 3, an assistant teacher with a bachelor’s degree can make just $31,000.
“You can make more as a dog walker in New York City than as an infant-toddler caregiver,” Shael Polakow-Suransky, president of Bank Street College of Education, told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s scary.”
That’s why Bank Street aims to get at some of the root causes of problems in early childhood education. One of them is low pay. The nonprofit institution is calling for more investment into early childhood education, and early childhood caregivers, in a new paper. Bank Street argues that investing more in young children isn’t merely a caring thing to do; it’s also fiscally responsible.
Educators tend to focus on children in higher grades, their minds set on good high schools that lead to good colleges and good careers. But if they don’t prioritize education from the beginning, they’ll find it much harder to catch up later.
“Most of what we’re doing in the K-12 system to remediate some of the challenges from insufficient support when kids are younger is wasted money,” Polakow-Suransky said.
One way to encourage better early childhood education in the United States is to involve more nongovernmental players in programs for children in the first few years of their lives. The need is certainly there: More than a million low-income children are enrolled in the government’s Head Start early childhood education program each year.
Marcy Whitebook, director emerita at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, says it’s backward to pay caregivers who look after younger children less. “It’s really misaligned with scientific data about the importance of the first three years,” she said.
While some educators prioritize the education of older children, others would like to issue a reminder: Let’s not forget about the little ones.
