Understanding Challenges Faced by Early Childhood Educators

The Challenge:

Early childhood educators play a vital role in the development of young children before kindergarten and play a key role in driving trust for families. However, early childhood educators turn over at rates of up to 30% per year,¹ and many programs vary widely in their ability to stay afloat, with some having waitlists years long while others struggle to fill their spots.

In spring of 2019, SKIP set out to listen to and learn about the experiences and challenges faced by early childhood educators.

The Approach:

SKIP conducted 33 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with early childhood teachers and program staff of eight centers across the metropolitan St. Louis region. Using grounded theory coding, SKIP’s staff coded the interviews for common themes.

The Result:

SKIP found four main factors influencing retention of teachers and staff:

1. Funding: early childhood education teachers are severely underpaid, forcing teachers to choose between jobs they love and the ability to support themselves.

2. Parent-teacher relationships: positive parent-teacher relationships motivate teachers to stay in the field, while contentious relationships with a lack of trust limit their ability to help families and children.

3. Unsupportive programs: discord between program directors and staff, dispassionate coworkers, and financial constraints of programs all drive people to leave the field

4. Lack of respect: teachers in early childhood education are often viewed as ‘babysitters’ rather than highly skilled professionals

Early childhood educators are highly motivated to provide the best environment for children to thrive and care deeply for the children and their families. However, they are trying to do this in an environment where they are under-paid and not respected. This causes high turnover rates and decreases trust of families in the early childhood system as a whole.

The results were shared with early childhood providers and advocates and used to inform SKIP’s system dynamics modeling of the early childhood education system.

Read more about the process of creating the model and the work of understanding parent and guardian perspectives in early childhood education.

1. Porter, Noriko. (2012). High Turnover Among Early Childhood Educators in the United States. Child Research Net. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260021078_High_Turnover_Among_Early_Childhood_Educators_in_the_United_States/citation/download