#early childhood education
Can child care workers afford child care? This chart maps the share of median preschool worker earnings required to pay for center-based child care by state.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ official affordability threshold for child care costs is 10 percent or less of a family’s income (Office of the President 2014). Typical preschool workers’ wages are not sufficient to meet that affordability standard anywhere. The share of their earnings going to center-based infant care ranges from 17 percent in Louisiana to 66 percent in D.C., as shown in Figure E. In 32 states and D.C., it takes more than one-third of total earnings to cover infant care costs. That means that a preschool worker’s entire pay in those states from January through at least April would be consumed by infant care costs.
Four-year-old care is slightly less expensive than infant care, primarily because of the lower teacher-to-child ratios. The National Association for the Education of Young Children recommends a 1:4 staffing ratio for infants, compared with a 1:10 ratio for 4-year-olds (CCAA 2013). Even so, when it comes to 4-year-old care, in no state are typical preschool or other child care workers’ earnings sufficient to meet the HHS 10 percent affordability standard. Child care costs range from 14 percent of total earnings in Louisiana to 52 percent of earnings in D.C., as shown in Figure F. A preschool teacher in D.C. would have to devote half her annual earnings to 4-year-old care.
Think you’re raising your daughter to be a strong leader? Look more closely: You, and the people around her, may unwittingly be doing just the opposite.
Teen boys, teen girls, and, yes, even parents have biases against girls and women as leaders, new research from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and its Making Caring Common project found.
Richard Weissbourd, a Harvard psychologist who runs the Making Caring Common project, said he was “surprised by the extent of it … how gendered both the boys’ and the girls’ responses were.”
Weissbourd decided to look at bias as part of the larger goal of helping children learn to be kind. “We were concerned that biases get in the way of people caring about and respecting other people, so our initial study was just looking at biases,” he said. “And one of the striking findings that emerged was gender bias.”
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