Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

“Why Are Our Most Important Teachers Paid the Least?” journalist Jeneen Interlandi asks in the title of a recent New York Times Magazine article.

The article tells the story of Kejo Kelly, an early educator in Springfield, Mass., who is devoted to her work despite earning a low salary, weathering personal tragedies, and covering for absent colleagues.

“The community Kelly taught in was low-income by all the standard metrics,” the article says. “Many of her students came from single-parent households — some from teenage mothers, at least one from foster care — and nearly all of them qualified for state-funded child care vouchers.”

Teachers at Kelly’s preschool program earn some $10 per hour, and staff turnover is high. The preschool can afford to “cover basics like food and art supplies but not enough to pay for on-site behavioral specialists or occupational therapists.” That’s why:

“Kelly kept her own fractured vigil — taking note of which students couldn’t control their emotions, or sit still for the life of them, or engage with others in a meaningful way — and giving those students whatever extra attention could be spared. She sometimes imagined the classroom as a bubble, inside which her students were temporarily spared from the hazards of everyday life. Her job, as she saw it, was to hold that bubble open for the ones who couldn’t always hold it open themselves.”

That article tells a tale of two preschools by contrasting Kelly’s experience in Springfield with a wealthier preschool program in New Jersey where — thanks in part to a lawsuit — preschool teachers earn upwards of $53,000 a year, so staff turnover is low.

In the resource-rich New Jersey classroom:

“A 3-year-old girl with soft brown pigtails and a white shirt examined a row of water bottles, each of which had a pine cone submerged in a different liquid, and dictated observations to her teacher, Yamila Lopez Hevia. The cone in the ‘cold water’ bottle was closing up. The one in warm water was closing, too — but more slowly. ‘And what do we think is going on?’ Lopez asked. ‘Why might that happen?’ After a brief pause, the girl pulled up two big words, each of which she had heard from Lopez.

“The pine cones, she explained, were a-dap-ting to their en-viron-ment.”

New Jersey’s example is impressive and sets an important professional standard.

The article notes, “A successful preschool teacher needs to make her students feel safe and help them understand their emotions and regulate their own behavior. Children can’t concentrate long enough to absorb new ideas or develop new skills if every slight sets them off crying or swinging at other children, or if they feel constantly threatened or mistrustful of their surroundings. And teachers who earn poverty-level wages can’t be expected to create consistent and reassuring classrooms.”

One way to equalize early educators’ skills and positive impact is to require all of them to have college degrees, but second jobs, low salaries, and other obstacles make it tough to find the time and money for higher education.

New Jersey’s court-ordered preschool program “addressed these issues head-on. It provided intensive college-admissions counseling, including help with financial-aid forms and scheduling. It also covered tuition for teachers in the program and nudged the college programs to bring their classes to the preschools.”

“We had the college professors go into the Newark schools and hold their classes there so that the teachers didn’t have to travel,” Steven Barnett, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, tells the New York Times. “We also paid for substitutes when the teachers needed to go to classes during the day, because we knew that not everybody could do this at night school.”

The article adds: “Many teachers struggled through remedial courses and community college before making their way into bachelor’s degree programs. All told, it costs $14,000 per child per year, more than twice the national average.”

New Jersey’s program isn’t cheap, but it works.

“We have to come to terms with the fact that this is going to cost a lot more money,” Amy O’Leary, director of Strategies for Children’s Early Education for All Campaign, says in the article. “And to accept that, I think we still have to shed a lot of prejudices about working mothers and the working poor, and what it means to help them.”

New Jersey shows how much can be done. Now it’s up to Massachusetts and other states to fulfill this potential on their own terms.