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Five Lessons from Illinois’ Investment in the Child Care Workforce
As the U.S. continues to confront a child care crisis, with growth in the child care workforce slowing and child care programs reporting worsening staff shortages after the expiration of federal pandemic relief funding last year, states across the country have attempted to increase educator recruitment and retention and make child care more available for families. Illinois has recently made significant progress in this area with its Smart Start Workforce Grant program. Under this state grant program, child care programs that agree to pay a higher wage floor for staff receive stable, ongoing funds to cover their costs so they can invest in increased compensation for classroom staff without raising tuition or copayments for families.
Their efforts offer lessons for child care advocates (like me) who are interested in increasing the supply of affordable, high-quality child care. Here are five things I’ve taken away from Illinois’ historic program:
1. Child care access and affordability are inseparable from workforce support.
Because child care is what Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called a “broken market,” families spend too much of their income on early care and education, while the educators who provide essential care are paid far too little. Expanding eligibility for child care assistance programs can enable more families to receive help affording care, and decreasing copayments can ease the burden for families who do receive assistance. Yet, families still must be able to find child care that meets their needs. Investing in the child care workforce is a crucial part of solving the child care crisis.
2. All policies have trade-offs.
The Smart Start Workforce Grants require programs receiving grants to pay wages of at least $17 to $19.25 per hour for assistant teachers and teachers, depending on geography, resulting in a wage increase of about $2 to $4 per hour on average. The grants are provided on a per-classroom basis to licensed centers or family child care homes that meet eligibility requirements. With a target allocation of $200 million for the program, policymakers consciously made tradeoffs between how many programs would be served and how large the wage increase would be, and ultimately tried to find a balance where all eligible programs received enough funding for a meaningful wage increase.
3. Community input is invaluable.
To help determine where to make these tradeoffs and how to set the guidelines, providers and educators had to be involved. For over a year, an advisory group made up of providers and advocates met monthly to share their insights and provide input on policy options, while over 1,800 providers were surveyed and 110 participated in focus groups. The advisory group discussed which tradeoffs were most concerning, how much of a wage increase would increase retention, and what decisions best met the goals of the governor’s broader Smart Start initiative, a multi-year plan to strengthen the state’s early care and education system. Stakeholders and policymakers in other states might make different decisions about which tradeoffs to accept, because no policy is one-size-fits-all.
4. An advocate’s job is never done.
These grants come out of state general funds, and every year they will be subject to legislative funding. That means they are dependent upon legislators’ continued prioritization of early educator compensation. As advocates in DC demonstrated this year in their campaign to restore the DC Pay Equity Fund, legislators need to hear from the community that early educators deserve better pay for the essential work they do. Additionally, increased wages are a meaningful step forward, but early educators also need far greater access to health insurance, retirement benefits, and other elements of compensation that lead to a thriving workforce.
5. The federal government needs to step up.
Illinois has taken important action to raise early educators’ wages, but relying on state investments alone is not enough to compensate for decades of federal underinvestment in the child care system. Congress must provide robust, sustained investment to ensure equitable support for early educators and families across the country and to build a system where families have access to the care they need.
I am encouraged to see advocates, administrators, and legislators working together to increase compensation for early educators, and I hope Illinois serves as a model for the rest of the country
