Beyond K-12 Parity: Alternative Strategies for Equitable Early Childhood Education Compensation
By Autumn Hagstrom
States and communities who are striving to study and address the early childhood education and care (ECEC) teacher compensation crisis have long used K-12 parity as a north star to inform cost models, salary scales, and other parts of their ECEC funding strategy. Our previous blog post reviewed some of the unique attributes of the K-12 funding system and cautioned ECEC system leaders from adopting K-12 parity into their compensation strategy without consideration of how external factors may impact K-12 teacher salaries in their system.
In this post, we explore strategies states can consider addressing the challenges that a K-12-parity approach presents as they develop targets for competitive wages for BA-level ECEC teachers.
Adjust for geographic variation in salary scale. K-12 teacher wages may vary widely even across districts in the same region, resulting in a strategic challenge for system leaders who hope to pin down a single wage target for their scale for each region in their state. A key factor driving this variation is that district salaries are funded at least in part by local property taxes, meaning that wealthier areas often have higher teacher salaries. If local K-12 salaries are adopted directly into a salary scale for community-based ECEC teachers, this would result in those ECEC teachers working in communities with less property wealth earning less than teachers in wealthier communities, potentially just miles apart from each other. A better approach might be to use a regional average of K-12 salaries to lessen the impact of this variation. However, this adjustment still won’t address the fact that salaries in more economically depressed regions will be substantially lower than in more economically vibrant areas of the state.
At CELFE, we have addressed this challenge by using the K-12 parity wage in areas where K-12 salaries are highest and then adjusting wages downward in each subsequent region based on how the “living wage” or wages in other industries decrease. For example, in our cost modeling work in Maine, we used the percentage by which the living wage varied across four regions to set the target salary differential across regions for BA-level ECEC teachers. The resulting pattern of target wages mirrored the variation in current ECEC salaries across regions, suggesting that this approach was more closely aligned with market salary competitiveness across the state.
Use the salary of a more experienced teacher. K-12 salary scales are unique in that they are structured to provide "step” increases for each year of employment in addition to annual cost-of-living adjustments. This often results in entry-level teachers with 0 years of experience making dramatically less than their more experienced counterparts. This trend is fairly unique to the K-12 system, as most other industries do not have such dramatic disparities between tenured and entry-level workers who are performing the same job. System leaders should be wary of replicating the K-12 pattern in their ECEC salary scale, as it is not likely to address the current challenge of ECEC teachers leaving the field within their first few years. To address entry-level teachers' extremely low compensation, states could use a “meet in the middle” approach and use the wages of a somewhat more experienced teacher as the parity goal.
Use additional data points to inform your target salary scale for community-based providers. States can consider identifying a new target wage by looking at the wages of other college-educated workers in addition to K-12 teacher wages. This process should consider an early childhood teacher's required skills and responsibilities and attempt to identify multiple jobs in a variety of industries that have similar requirements. Potential occupations could include human resource specialists, child and family social workers, substance abuse and behavioral health counselors, and registered nurses. Using these like occupations, states can calculate a composite salary to inform the scale.
While K-12 parity is an important data point to consider in salary scale design, the above strategies guide system leaders who want to cast a wider data net to avoid recreating in their ECE system salary scale the inequitable practices that exist in the K-12 system.
Looking for more guidance on designing an intentional and equitable salary scale for your early childhood education and care system? We’d love to hear from you!
Autumn Hagstrom is a Policy Associate at the Center for Early Learning Funding Equity.