A few months before the pandemic hit, the University of Massachusetts Boston conducted a survey of the early education and care workforce.

The survey results are a pre-pandemic snapshot of a shaky situation that policymakers can use to understand the toll that the pandemic has taken on providers.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that early care and education is a key piece of infrastructure for the economy,” Anne Douglass, the executive director of UMass Boston’s Institute for Early Education Leadership and Innovation, says in a blog post. “Parents need early care and education options that are high quality and affordable because when child care isn’t available, parents can’t work.”

The institute released a report on the survey results along with UMass Boston’s Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy and its Center for Social Policy. The survey was commissioned by the Department of Early Education and Care.

One important lesson from the survey, Douglass says, is that “returning to pre-pandemic ways of doing business is not an option.”

That’s because even before COVID-19, early childhood providers faced significant financial distress. Low salaries and financial instability of programs are the norm. The field is also facing a “silver tsunami,” the report says, “with about 20% of Center Directors and Family Child Care Providers” reporting that retirement is on their horizon.

And while the workforce is diverse, providers of color tend to be clustered in lower-paying positions. Specifically, the report notes, “Fourteen percent of Center Educators and 8% of Family Child Care Providers identified as Black or African American, compared to 4% of Center Directors. These findings may point to systemic factors in career advancement… The majority of each workforce group identified as White, at 66% of Center Educators, nine out of ten Center Directors, and 73% of FCC Providers.”

The survey also found good news. As Douglass and Christa Kelleher, the research and policy director at the Center for Women in Politics, explain in a CommonWealth magazine article, “leaders in the workforce are drawing on deep experience to do their work. Over half of family child care providers and 67 percent of the directors of child care centers have more than 16 years’ experience in the field.”

In addition, “there is strong interest among early educators at every level of the field to further their expertise. A majority of center directors (58 percent) and more than one-third of family child care providers (39 percent) and those who teach at centers (36 percent) want to earn a degree or attain a higher one if they already had a degree.”

Federal action could also help rebuild the workforce. A key step would be passing into law Massachusetts Representative Katherine Clark’s bill calling for a $50 billion bailout of the child care sector.

It’s also vital, Douglass and Kelleher say, for policymakers to work closely with early childhood providers to develop innovative policy reforms.

“Another change we might expect to see if early educators were at the policy planning table is an expansion of leadership development opportunities to all educators. Many of the early childhood education leadership development programs across the country are designed for current program directors,” Douglass and Kelleher note in their article, adding:

“A recent report on early care and education leadership development programs found that most programs unintentionally reinforce existing inequities by limiting their availability to center directors and other administrative leaders. As a result, a majority of black, African American, Hispanic/Latinx, and Asian educators now working in the field cannot access these programs. This not only creates barriers to advancement into more highly compensated leadership positions but diminishes the capacity of educators of color to serve as role models and influencers as leaders in this vital field.”

The survey makes it clear, that as the country moves through the pandemic, stabilizing and investing in the early childhood workforce and addressing its racial inequities is essential. It’s the only way to stabilize the lives of young children and restore economic prosperity.