The Obama administration has just a released a new report that sums up its point with its title: “High-Quality Early Learning Settings Depend on a High-Quality Workforce: Low Compensation Undermines Quality.” It has been jointly released by the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The report also features wage profiles for each state, including one for Massachusetts that’s posted here.

Wages are “sometimes at or near the Federal poverty line,” the report says, even when early educators “obtain credentials and higher levels of education.” It’s a deeply rooted problem that we blog about often, and one that other research reports have covered.

Compared to other fields, early educators are at the bottom of the salary range. According to a fact sheet that accompanies the report, preschool teachers are “paid less than mail order clerks, tree trimmers and pest control workers. Child care workers make less than hairdressers and janitors. In fact, most early childhood educators earn so little that they qualify for public benefits, including for the very programs they teach targeting low-income families.”

Sounding an alarm, U.S. Education Secretary John B. King, Jr., said, “Undervaluing [the] nation’s early childhood educators flies in the face of what we know about brain development and the optimal time for learning. Educating children before kindergarten requires significant knowledge, expertise, and skill—especially in light of the critical importance of the early years for children’s growth, development, and future academic and life success.”

Linda Smith, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Early Childhood Development at the Administration for Children and Families adds, “The quality of any early care and learning setting is directly related to the quality of the staff, their education and training and understanding of child development and the ability to translate that understanding through effective practice. Wage parity across settings is critical to attracting and retaining a high-quality workforce, essential for a high-quality program.”

An EdWeek article points to the differences in educators salaries, noting, “…drawing attention to the low pay of child-care workers, the report also shows how different a woman’s salary might be depending on where she works… For example, a preschool teacher’s median salary in 2015 was $28,570, just over half of the median kindergarten teacher salary that year of $51,640.”

The article adds: “Some of that disparity is due to differing education levels—a kindergarten teacher is far more likely to have a college degree than a child-care worker. But education doesn’t explain all the difference. For example, some of the gap is connected simply to where a teacher works. A teacher with a bachelor’s degree in a public school-sponsored preschool earns $6.70 an hour more in median wages than a teacher with the same education level in a community-based program. That’s a nearly $14,000 per year difference.”

The report itself points to another troubling fact:

“The wage gap between those who work with infants and toddlers and those who work with preschool age children is particularly stark when looking at annual wages. If employed full-time for a standard 2,080-hour year, the average staff salary would translate to a difference of $8,944 per year.”

Among the report’s other findings:

• “In 9 states (Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Utah), Head Start teacher annual wages were less than the 2015 poverty threshold ($24,036) for a family of four.”

• “Preschool teachers earned less than 50 percent of the annual wages earned by kindergarten teachers in 13 states (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Wyoming),” and

• “Head Start teachers earned less than 50 percent of the annual wages earned by kindergarten teachers in 15 states (Alabama, Alaska, Connecticut, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming).”

In conclusion, the report notes:

“Education, training, and fair compensation are essential to promoting high-quality experiences for all children, across all early education settings. In order for programs to be effective, early educators across all settings must be compensated at comparable rates to their elementary school counterparts… the system requires an infusion of resources and adequate funding to support higher earnings. Throughout every community, our children depend on this critical work for success in school and life.”

And summing up the view from the White House, the report reprints what President Obama said in his 2015 State of the Union address:

“In today’s economy, when having both parents in the workforce is an economic necessity for many families, we need affordable, high-quality child care more than ever. It’s not a nice-to-have – it’s a must-have. It’s time we stop treating child care as a side issue, or a women’s issue, and treat it like the national economic priority that it is for all of us.”