Full Citation
Title: Using Worker Flows to Assess the Stability of the Early Childcare and Education Workforce, 2010-2022
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2024
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI: 10.26509/FRBC-CD-20240119
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PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: While discussion of early childcare and education services (ECE) frequently focuses on availability and the costs for parents, conditions within the ECE workforce deserve greater attention.1 In a labor-intensive sector such as ECE, a stable workforce is critically important to basic day-to-day operations and the overall quality of services (Grunewald and Stepick, 2022). A stable ECE workforce helps promote full employment (Bick et al., 2023; Crockett and Zhang, 2022; Horowitz, 2023), especially for working mothers (Hofferth and Collins, 2000) and people of color (Novoa, 2020), while building the foundation for the workforce of the future (Rolnick and Grunewald, 2003). This report provides information that can be used to assess the stability of the ECE workforce. It highlights staffing trends for childcare workers, who, along with preschool and kindergarten teachers, make up the ECE workforce. Staff turnover is one of the main obstacles to a stable ECE workforce. The 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education found that roughly one-third of centers had turnover rates of 20 percent or greater, while 44 percent of centers experienced no turnover at all (Amadon et al., 2023). This disparity makes understanding the scope of the problem difficult, since turnover can be described as elevated in a large number of facilities and nonexistent in many others. Although the level of turnover may be hard to gauge, the reasons for it are often linked to low wages. The 2019 survey showed, for example, that turnover tended to be higher in ECE centers with lower pay (Grunewald et al., 2022). And from the workers’ perspective, a review of studies based on either administrative or small-sample surveys found that turnover was more common among lower-wage workers with less experience and lower job satisfaction and among those working in private centers without accreditation standards (Totenhagen et al., 2016). High turnover has also been linked to the combination of childcare and educational services offered at centers. Those offering more educational services tended to have less turnover because they often have dedicated funding sources (Bassok et al., 2021; Phillips et al., 2019; Doromal et al., 2022; Federal Reserve’s Early Care and Education Work Group, 2023). Properly assessing the stability of the ECE workforce requires asking additional turnover and staffing questions into which we currently have little insight: How does the level of turnover vary by ECE's component occupations? How does the level of turnover compare with that of other occupations? Where are workers who leave an ECE occupation going? At what rate and from where are new ECE workers entering the field? For answers, this report uses the Current Population Survey to estimate the rates at which workers moved into and out of ECE occupations from 2010 to 2022.
Url: https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/cd-reports/2024/20240119-childcare-and-education-workforce
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Fee, Kyle D.
Publisher: Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Data Collections: IPUMS USA, IPUMS CPS
Topics: Education, Labor Force and Occupational Structure
Countries: