Early educators and public school teachers: a comparison of labor market outcomes

In this article, we focus on the childcare sector from the worker’s perspective, analyzing prepandemic (2014–18) Current Population Survey data to compare privately employed early educators and public K–8 teachers with bachelor’s degrees along several dimensions of job quality. Consistent with other research, we show that, compared with public K–8 teachers with bachelor’s degrees, private early educators with similar work patterns and educational attainment earned less and lacked critical employer-sponsored benefits such as health insurance and retirement accounts. As the COVID-19 pandemic starkly illuminated, parents’ ability to work often depends on access to affordable, high-quality childcare. Indeed, some research conducted 2 years into the pandemic suggests that access to childcare may partially explain why women’s labor force participation had not yet fully recovered by that point.1 Previous analyses have also uncovered a labor shortage within the childcare sector—a shortage that continues to constrain the supply of available childcare options for parents.2 Less well appreciated is the