Photo: Micaela Bedell for Strategies for Children

Every day, early educators go into classrooms and sing, read, teach, and play. They also accept a raw deal: demanding work for low pay.

How bad is it? According to the new 2018 Early Childhood Workforce Index, released by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley:

“While a major goal of early childhood services has been to relieve poverty among children, many of these same efforts continue to generate poverty in the early care and education (ECE) workforce…”

“Any woman doing ‘women’s work’ is not seen as skilled,” Marcy Whitebook told the Hechinger Report. Whitebook is the co-director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the 2018 Early Childhood Workforce Index. “We have a history… of relying on poor women and women of color to take care of children of people who have more resources.”

The Hechinger Report adds:

“Whitebook has studied the plight of child care workers for more than 40 years. When first researching the issue in 1976, she was stunned to find a 1918 review of ‘day nurseries’ in Chicago highlighting the problems with low pay and poor working conditions for nursery ‘matrons.’ ”

“We’ve never built a 21^st century system,” Whitebook told Hechinger. “That’s what we have to do. The solution is public investment.”

The Workforce Index — a biennial publication that was first released in 2016 — notes:

“Inadequate levels of public financing and heavy reliance on families to cover the costs of ECE services render professional pay for early educators unattainable,” according to the index’s executive summary.

The index covers four areas:

• workforce demographics at the state and national levels

• data on early educators’ earnings and economic security

• a review of early childhood workforce policies, and

• a look at family and income support policies

Among the report’s key findings:

• early educators who work with toddlers experience a “significant wage penalty:” 86 percent of center-based teaching staff working with infants and toddlers earned less than $15 an hour, compared to only 67 percent of those working with older children ages 3 to 5

• despite some progress, most states are “stalled” or only “edging forward” in developing workforce policies on qualifications, work environments, compensation, and financial resources. “Workforce data remains the strongest area of progress, though there is still much room for improvement.”

• economic insecurity among families is “rampant.” Since 2016, “there has been some state progress in supports for workers and families, particularly with more states implementing paid sick and family leave.” But for the most part, “the number of states with key supports for income and health and well-being has changed little since 2016.”

The index’s state profiles reveal more details.

In Massachusetts, for example, there are 32,840 members of the early childhood teaching workforce.

In addition: “74 percent of children live in households where all available parents are currently working, and 15 percent of all Massachusetts children are part of low-income families.”

Median hourly wages for early educators in Massachusetts are increasing slowly but are still low. In 2017:

• child care workers earned $12.74, a 3% increase since 2015

• preschool teachers earned $15.71, a 1% increase since 2015, and

• preschool or child care center directors earned $27.11, a 5% decrease since 2015

Compare these to the $41.24 earned by kindergarten teachers, and the disparities in the early education workforce become even more apparent.

In addition to the index, there’s an interactive map that makes it easy to see how states compare to each other on salaries, workforce policies, and family and income support programs.

How can the country make progress? The index offers a number of policy recommendations, including:

• setting “minimum requirements that reflect foundational knowledge for all early childhood teaching staff”

• ensuring that staff have the support they need to achieve these requirements

• develop “workplace standards, such as guidance on appropriate levels of paid planning time, which are necessary for educators to engage in professional practice to support children’s development and learning and to alleviate conditions that cause educator stress”

• “Articulate long- and short-term goals for increasing annual earnings of early educators”

• develop and strengthen workforce data collection, and

• “Develop an educational campaign to assist policymakers and the public in understanding what building an equitable system will cost and the benefits of this investment.”

In other words, the country has to take a systematic approach to building a modern system of early education and care. As the index says:

“To ensure that a generation from now” there is no longer “a decades-long call to action” on early education “will require the joining of a chorus of voices — leaders in the ECE field, economic justice advocates, K-12 colleagues, parents, and early educators themselves — to realize a system that is equitable, efficient, and effective for children, their families, and educators.”