Financial Resources

Public and private investment in the ECE workforce and broader ECE system

Creating good jobs for the early care and education (ECE) workforce requires multiple integrated strategies.  The National ECE Workforce Center recognizes this need and organizes its work around five essential policy areas, or key topics, identified by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) Early Childhood Workforce Index as being critical for supporting the ECE workforce and higher-quality services for children and families. Each of these policy areas directly impacts the ECE workforce’s ability to thrive, which in turn improves recruitment and retention of early educators, stabilizes services for families, supports small business and the economy, aids parents’ ability to work and seek out job training and education, and leads to improved outcomes for children and families.

Increased financial resources are essential to ensure we have an effective ECE system that meets the needs of early educators, children, and their families. These resources can also help the field meet high-quality standards. Funding for the ECE workforce and system must support appropriate levels of compensation for educators, relieve the financial burden on families, and increase access to high-quality, affordable early care and education.

Key challenges

Current public funding levels do not reflect the true cost of care. For too long, educators have subsidized child care costs with their own low wages.

Promising approaches

Programs that receive public funding such as pre-K or Head Start funds are better positioned to provide appropriate compensation and supportive working conditions. Federal stabilization funding has also shown that improvements to educator compensation are possible with direct program funding. Prenatal-to-Five Fiscal Strategies has developed an approach to identify the true cost of care in communities.

It’s important for cost-modeling exercises to reflect appropriate qualifications, compensation, staffing levels, and supports across center- and home-based programs. It’s also valuable to involve the ECE workforce (including those in home-based programs) in planning and designing funding goals and cost estimation models. Finally, programs greatly benefit from stable funding through long-term grants or contracts.

For a deeper dive into the status of financial resources and state progress in this space, see the Early Childhood Workforce Index chapter on this topic, and for more resources to support your own efforts to improve financial resources, see the section below.