Reevaluating K-12 Parity: Is It the Right Approach for Early Childhood Education Compensation?

By Autumn Hagstrom

Historically, K-12 parity has been considered the north star for setting teacher salaries for those working in community-based early learning programs. However, issues with K-12 compensation raise the question, "Should early childhood education and care (ECEC) always strive to replicate K-12 parity?"

The ECEC workforce is plagued by low wages, with the national median hourly wage of early childhood workers being $13.01, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment’s 2024 Early Childhood Workforce Index. These poverty-level wages—much lower than the national average median wage of all workers of $22.92—result in lower staff well-being, significant staff turn-over in the field, and ultimately, lower quality of care for young children.

To better quantify the extent and impact of the compensation crisis, states and communities are creating model salary scales to establish target wages that can help to stabilize the ECEC workforce. Salary scales are used in cost modeling and other fiscal analyses to understand the necessary investment to bolster the supply of child care and early education, as well as inform the design and evaluation of compensation initiatives. A well-designed scale is informed by economic data and provider input.

An effective salary scale must address the key question: What wages would be adequate to recruit and retain an employee of that level of training, experience, and education?

A popular strategy for setting target salary scale wages for BA-level ECEC teachers is the K-12 parity approach, which uses current K-12 teacher salaries to set salary targets for the early childhood education and care workforce. The K-12 parity approach also aligns with the most recent Head Start rule change, which calls for grantees to pay ECEC teachers at parity with the K-12 system. The rationale behind using K-12 parity is two-fold. First, like K-12 teachers, ECEC educators have specialized skills and training that should be recognized by their wages. Second, the early childhood education system will never be able to recruit and retain bachelor's level teachers if they do not pay competitive wages with the K-12 system, as those teachers who meet the qualifications will opt to work in the K-12 system instead. While not a tool that can set targets for the workforce at all credential levels, K-12 parity can be a good data point to identify competitive wages for entry-level BA-level teachers.

In many cases, however, the K-12 approach, while offering substantial wage increases to ECEC teachers, may not actually translate to the competitive wages needed to stabilize the field. Factors outside economic market competitiveness, such as collective bargaining agreements, local property wealth, and local taxing ability, all drive K-12 teachers' salaries, resulting in these salaries not always being truly competitive in the overall labor market. This results in three practical problems for ECEC system leaders who are aiming to build a compensation strategy that will stabilize and grow the workforce:

1. K-12 Teacher wages are often far lower than those of other skilled workers with bachelor's degrees. According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the weekly wage gap between what teachers earn compared to other college-educated workers grew to a record 26.6% in 2023. K-12 wages are also not growing at the same rate as those of other college educator workers, so this problem will likely worsen in the coming years. This results in K-12 teacher wages that may not be aspirational or competitive enough for BA-educated workers, ultimately weakening the salary scale's efficacy.
2. K-12 teacher wages may vary widely among districts in the same region. For example, starting teacher wages vary as much as 30% across 39 school districts in one midwestern suburban county. This variation results in a strategic challenge for both the state and child care programs. At the state level, salary scale design should be rooted in equity, yet the variation in district salaries in each state or county could produce a wage target that reinforces lower wages for communities with fewer resources. At the provider level, it can be difficult to establish what K-12 parity is, as a provider may serve children or hire staff from multiple school district catchment areas. Determining a parity benchmark may require obtaining a dozen or more district collective bargaining agreements and calculating a weighted average of the starting teacher salaries.
3. Teacher salary scales are anomalous to the compensation structure of other industries in that entry-level teachers make as much as 40% less than their colleagues with more years of experience. This begs the question of which K-12 teacher salary figure to use as a parity marker? ECEC salary scales are typically designed to be used as a wage floor, or the lowest wage an ECEC teacher should receive. By this logic, it would make sense to also use an entry-level salary for K-12 teacher with no years of experience as a wage target for BA-level ECEC teacher with no experience as an “apples to apples” approach. However, it may not be prudent to use a starting teacher salary in our ECEC wage scale, because we would not expect the ECEC system to give raises using the same step method as the K-12 system which would result in overall ECEC wages remaining behind those of K-12 teachers.

While K-12 parity would in most cases be a monumental improvement for ECEC teachers, there may be more work needed to reach a competitive and sustainable compensation target that can truly stabilize the field. States should be wary of using the K-12 system as a sole marker of compensation competitiveness, as the ECEC industry does not solely compete with the K-12 system for workers. Further, the K-12 system has a unique funding structure that may not lead to the most equitable outcomes for children and thus should not always be replicated exactly. To truly understand the compensation investments necessary to recruit and retain qualified individuals to provide high-quality early experiences to young children, careful consideration must be given to the design of the tools that help systems leaders understand these investments.

Autumn Hagstrom is a Policy Associate at the Center for Early Learning Funding Equity.