1-036 - The Early Childhood Workforce: A Look at Over-Time Trends and Contemporary Status and Wellbeing

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Early-childhood teachers are heralded as the linchpin of program quality and yet, as a workforce, are characterized by vast variation in education and training, poor wages, and high turnover (Allen & Kelly, 2015; Whitebook, Phillips, & Howes, 2013). And, research is increasingly documenting the detrimental consequences for young children of poor well-being among their teachers (Phillips, Austin, & Whitebook, in press). This paper symposium adds nationally representative data, a look at trends over time, and a detailed examination of economic stress among the child care workforce to this growing knowledge base. Papers 1 and 2 analyze the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE) to provide portraits of the qualifications and compensation of the center-based workforce, one in comparison to nationally representative data from 1990, and the other with regard to six subgroups of subsidized and non-subsidized child care centers that characterize the landscape of child care today. Paper 3 utilizes a newly-developed survey of teacher working conditions and well-being – the Supportive Environment Quality Underlying Adult Learning survey – to report on associations between the quality of centers in one state’s Quality Rating and Improvement System and teacher reports of workplace support, economic security, and adult well-being. Taken together, the papers raise critical policy issues concerning inequities in the backgrounds and compensation of teachers in different sectors of the child care market, some of which appear to be widening over time, and their implications for the quality of care received by young children in center-based arrangements in the U.S.

Sub Unit

• Social Policy

Chair

• Deborah Phillips, Georgetown University

Discussant

• Megan Gunnar, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Individual Presentations

• Characteristics of the Child Care Workforce: 1990 and 2012 - Presenting Author: Deborah Phillips, Georgetown University; Sara Anderson, West Virginia University; Rupa Datta, NORC; Ellen Kisker, Twin Peaks Partners

• Variation in ECE Workforce Characteristics across Publicly Funded Preschool Settings - Presenting Author: Anne Martin, Teachers College; Anna Johnson, Georgetown University

• Ask the teachers: Their voices as predictors of quality improvement in early childhood programs - Presenting Author: Laura Sakai, University of California at Berkeley; Devika Dhamija, University of California at Berkeley; Marcy Whitebook, University of California at Berkeley