Tiny Crayons & Big Promises: What is Next for Early Care Provider Compensation in the U.S.?

Society’s youngest members have received some pretty big mentions recently—and for good reason. The United States isn’t heading into a childcare crisis any longer; it is fully in it. The already struggling industry was hit especially hard by the pandemic and has impacted families across the nation. The childcare crisis is so pervasive that President Biden prioritized childcare and prekindergarten stating, “if you want America to have the best-educated workforce, let’s finish the job by providing access to preschool” in his State of the Union address.

In the audience, several U.S. Representatives brought individuals directly impacted by the childcare crisis as their guests of honor. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts brought Eugénie Ouedraogo, a mom and nursing student who depends on access to affordable early care and education. Senator Patty Murray of Washington brought Angélica María González, a mother who experienced firsthand the lack or quality care for her children and a Moms Rising advocate. Senator Murray took her statement of support beyond who was sitting with her to what she was wearing. Senator Murray organized Democrats in the House and Senate to wear pins in the shape of tiny crayons to signal support for childcare funding, as President Biden proposed at the beginning of his administration. In an analysis of the State of the State addresses given by governors, First Five Years Fund found that the childcare crisis was an important issue on both sides of the aisle, with 40 percent of Republicans and 60 percent of Democrats talking about it. However, of the governors who specifically mentioned early childhood education as a priority for their states, only one in four governors referenced the childcare workforce and the struggle to find, recruit and retain workers. While these are exciting developments (especially in contrast to Donald Trump’s one 16-word sentence in his State of the Union in 2019) why is so little of the conversation centered around the early care workforce? The priority seems to be getting parents with young children back to work with affordable childcare.

Heartwarming or Heartbreaking: Reflections on Abbott Elementary and Our Underfunded Schools

It took me about eight minutes into the pilot of Abbott Elementary, before I let out a sigh. For those who have not seen it, Abbott Elementary is a “mockumentary” that follows a group of passionate educators, all with vastly different experience levels, coming together to teach at an elementary school in Philadelphia. My sigh was coming from a place of relief—finally, someone had captured the duality of how heartwarming and heartbreaking being a teacher could be. The frustration, the tension, the passion, and the warmth was all there, neatly wrapped in about 22 minutes per episode. Now, Abbott Elementary is being nominated (and winning!) award after award, but to many former and current teachers, it is so much more than that. Personally, the show feels like my chance to explain what I did—to explain why I loved what I did but also to explain why ultimately, I had to leave the teaching field.

Some scenes felt so close to my own experiences, I wondered if the creator and star of the show, Quinta Brunson, had quietly but closely been watching my teaching journey. She had to have been there; she captured my experience too well to have not been with me through the astronomical highs and the gut-wrenching lows. From the anticipation and optimism of the first day, to my first moment of true clarity and understanding after a difficult yet urgent meeting with a parent, to the moments of connection with students. It is clear that despite having never taught, Brunson understood and continues to understand, the sheer joy that comes from being a teacher. But she also captured the disappointment, the feelings of failure, and the never-ending frustration of having to navigate problems that you did not create—all on top of the fact that when you finally get to go home, you live the lifestyle that comes with low pay and low respect. After watching and reflecting, I realized that perhaps my experience as a burnt-out teacher in an underfunded school was not as unique as I thought it was.

Labor Day Message

Happy Labor Day!

The famous adage to call for solidarity, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” is most often used by labor unions in times of struggle, like a dangerous or unfair practice by the boss or during strike. These times of struggle have been occurring across the country. My own home state of Minnesota saw the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and Education Support Professionals strike last spring for improvements to better meet the needs of students and strengthen their professions and the Minnesota Nurses Association Is on the verge of a strike 15,000 MNA members strong for better patient care. These unions, and those the AFL-CIO identify on their national strike map, have seen injuries on the job, from physical injuries that may come from unsafe staffing in a hospital to damage large class sizes, teacher shortages, and disrespectful pay for paraprofessionals do to teaching and learning. Unions, like these, see that “an injury to one is an injury to all” wraps up both patient and nurse, or educator, student, and family—the kind of common good bargaining the Shanker Institute continues to support.

Unsustainable Trends In Teacher Debt And Teacher Pay

Higher education is often presented as the sure pathway towards upward social mobility. However, the idea that higher education is for all has been slowly fading away. The combination of soaring tuition costs and student loan debt has placed higher education beyond the grasp of many Americans. 

Although this issue is typically framed in terms of undergraduate student debt, the problem is no less pronounced for many graduate students, particularly those pursuing master’s degrees (e.g., MBA, MFA) and advanced professional degrees (e.g., MD, JD, PhD, etc.).

Educators are no exception. Roughly half of public school teachers have master’s degrees (NCES). Some employers provide assistance with tuition, but many teachers pay part or all of the costs themselves. Many job opportunities outside of education are attracting young graduates, burdened with high student debt, through student loan benefit programs. These programs may have the employer contribute additional money on top of their salary to repay the loan. That said, most teachers who go for their master’s degree do incur debt as a result, which in many cases is added to debt accumulated during their undergraduate studies.

And the amount of debt that teachers take on has been rising, at the same time that teacher pay has fallen further and further behind that of similarly-educated professionals.

Preparing Future Leaders For Building Relationships

Our guest author today is Corrie Stone-Johnson, Associate Professor of Educational Administration at the University at Buffalo. She is Associate Editor of the journal Leadership and Policy in Schools published by Taylor & Francis. Her research in educational change and leadership examines the social contexts and organizational cultures within which teachers, leaders, and school support staff experience and enact change. 

While many “types” of leadership models, such as instructional leadership, transformative leadership, or moral leadership, have demonstrated positive effects on student learning, one common feature of high-quality leadership is that principals lead not by themselves but “with and through others” (Hargreaves and Harris 2010, p. 36), taking responsibility not just for success and failure but for developing the relationships needed to foster such success. Robust empirical evidence indicates that strong relationships between teachers are a key lever for a variety of important outcomes, including successful and sustainable change, teacher commitment, and student achievement. Relationships matter because they help to create social capital, which Leana and Pil define as the “glue that holds a school together.” The noted benefits of teacher social capital include student achievement gains above and beyond those attributable to teacher experience and instructional ability (see here). In schools where teachers collaborate, students do better in math and reading (see here) and teachers both stay and improve at greater rates (see here).

Social capital, or the value that inheres in the relationships among people (as opposed to the attributes of individuals), is developed in networks. Networks are important for the exchange of resources and they can be influenced by intentional strategies that build upon the existing relationships (or lack thereof) between and among district and school leaders —see here. There is no doubt that strong networks—to the extent that they generate trust and facilitate professional and organizational learning – can be a successful vehicle for student achievement and teacher retention. But—and this is very important—networks do not just happen; rather, they are the result of deliberate efforts undertaken by school administrators. Starratt (2004, 2005) argues that not only is a leader responsible to multiple stakeholders in the building, the district level and the community, he or she is also responsible for developing relationships with each of these stakeholders.

Contingent Faculty At U.S. Colleges And Universities

In a previous post, we discussed the prevalence of and trends in alternative employment arrangements, sometimes called “contingent work,” in the U.S. labor market. Contingent work is jobs with employment arrangements other than the “traditional” full-time model, including workers with temporary contracts, independent contractors, day laborers, and part-time employees.

Depending on how one defines this group of workers, who are a diverse group but tend to enjoy less job stability and lower compensation, they comprise anywhere between 10 and 40 percent of the U.S. workforce, and this share increased moderately between 2000 and 2010. Of course, how many contingents there are, and how this has changed over time, varies quite drastically by industry, as well as by occupation. For example, in 1990, around 28 percent of staffing services employees (sometimes called “temps”) worked in blue collar positions, while 42 percent had office jobs. By 2009, these proportions had reversed, with 41 percent of temps in blue collar jobs and 23 percent doing office work. This is a pretty striking change.

Another industry/occupation in which there has been significant short term change in the contingent work share is among faculty and instructors in higher education institutions.

Perceived Job Security Among Full Time U.S. Workers

In a previous post, we discussed some recent data on contingent work or alternative employment relationships – those that are different from standard full time jobs, including temporary help, day labor, independent contracting, and part time jobs. The prevalence of and trends in contingent work vary widely depending on which types of arrangements one includes in the definition, but most of them are characterized by less security (and inferior wages and benefits) relative to “traditional” full time employment.

The rise of contingent work is often presented as a sign of deteriorating conditions for workers (see the post mentioned above for more discussion of this claim). Needless to say, however, unemployment insecurity characterizes many jobs with "traditional" arrangements -- sometimes called precarious work -- which of course implies that contingent work is an incomplete conceptualization of the lack of stability that is its core feature.

One interesting way to examine job security is in terms of workers’ views of their own employment situations. In other words, how many workers perceive their jobs as insecure, and how has this changed over time? Perceived job security not only serves as a highly incomplete and imperfect indicator of “real” job security, but it also affects several meaningful non-employment outcomes related to well being, including health (e.g., Burgard et al. 2009). We might take a very quick look at perceived job security using data from the General Social Survey (GSS) between 1977 and 2014.

Contingent Work In The U.S. Labor Market

For the past 20 or so years, it is fairly common to hear that the U.S. workforce is an increasingly precarious workforce – that is, made up of jobs with non-standard employment arrangements, such as temp jobs, on call work, and independent contracting.

Because these types of employment arrangements, often called “contingent work,” tend to offer less stability, lower wages, and less opportunities for advancement, compared with “standard” full-time jobs, the growth of the contingent workforce is often portrayed as a cause and/or signal of the erosion of workers’ rights and the decline of the middle class in the U.S. Others see it differently, however, and argue that contingent work offers the flexibility desired by employers and employees alike, and that flexible jobs allow faster and more efficient “matching” of workers with positions, thus boosting productivity. This debate, of course, centers largely around empirical questions, and the body of research on contingent work has been building for a few decades now (see Kalleberg 2000; Connelly and Gallagher 2004). Yet not all labor force surveys are designed to capture the full set of nuances of workers’ employment arrangements. Starting in the mid 1990s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) had the good sense to collect data on this topic, in the form of the Contingent Worker Supplement (CWS) to the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CWS was administered five times between 1995 and 2005, and provided valuable data on these “nonstandard” employment relations.

The CWS, however, has not been conducted since 2005, substantially decreasing the high quality information available on contingent work at a particularly important time, given that the Great Recession began shortly thereafter. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) made a laudable attempt to fill this hole with an April 2015 report, which uses several data sources to provide an important snapshot on the prevalence of and trends in contingent work in the U.S. (the data go up to 2010). There are a few key takeaways from this report, some of which are long established.

Collaboration Is The Way We Work, Not An "Activity"

Our guest author today is Joseph Vincente, 10th Grade Chemistry Science Team Leader at the East Side Community High School in New York City. East Side is one of a growing network of 38 NY public high schools (mostly in NYC) with waivers that replace standardized state tests with performance based assessment. Vincente is interested in educational technology, sustainability education, and empowering young women and students of color to pursue STEM careers.

So, 300 homework assignments checked, 200 email replied to, 100 quizzes graded, 50 more lab reports left from Monday still to read, 30 lessons executed, 10 revised notebook entries re-graded, 5 phone calls home and texts made to check-in with parents, 4 curriculum maps revised, 3 extra help sessions held before school, during lunch, and after school, 2 college bound pep-talks made, and 1 mediation between quarreling best friends conducted.

Phew. 

I take a deep breath and do a bit of mindless silent cleaning and organizing in my classroom to decompress. Another exhausting week in the life of a high school teacher comes to a close. Must be time for the weekend, right?  Well, almost... Friday afternoon at my school is when we do some of our most demanding but essential work as teachers.  You may be thinking it’s time for the dreaded weekly PD meetings or for some “collaboration”. Yes, that’s right; but, at East Side collaboration isn’t just an activity or behaving in a friendly, respectful, or cooperative way toward colleagues. Rather, collaboration underpins how we structure and conduct most of our work, how we serve students, and how we learn and grow as professionals. In the next few paragraphs, I describe some of East Side’s collaborative structures as well as the norms and conditions that support them.

Fighting For Fairness For U.S. Domestic Workers

On September 17, 2013, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) announced the Home Care Final Rule, which extends the Fair Labor Standards Act’s (FLSA) minimum wage and overtime protections to domestic workers who provide home care assistance to the elderly, the infirm, and the disabled. The Home Care Final Rule is essential to improving the lives of two million domestic workers who, unlike other U.S. workers, are in many states not protected by the FLSA regarding minimum wage, overtime, sick leave, and vacation. Domestic work differs from other jobs in that the work takes place inside other people’s homes, which often puts domestic workers’ wellbeing at the mercy of their employers.

The exclusion of domestic workers from the FLSA was a concession to Southern politicians in the early 1900’s. It had left many homecare aides vulnerable to abuse and mistreatment by their employers. The rule was scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2015. However, lawsuits filed by homecare corporations have hindered the change and served as an excuse for states to postpone implementation. For example, in Home Care Association of America v. Weil, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon vacated the portion of the Rule that prevents third-party home care providers from using the companionship services exemption, and later vacated the revised definition of companionship services.

As of July 2015, only five states have passed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights: New York; Hawaii; California; Massachusetts; and Oregon. New York was the first state to pass the law (in July 2010) after six years of efforts by domestic workers, unions, employers, clergy and community organizations. The bill was introduced in two other states, Connecticut and Illinois, but has yet to be passed.

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