Center for the Study of Childcare Employment

Early care and education Registered Apprenticeships are proliferating throughout the U.S. in an effort to bring new educators into the system and support existing educators to expand their credentials. This evaluation explores the experiences of apprentices in The Early Educator Apprentice Program at the YMCA of the East Bay in Alameda County, California.

The history of early care and education (ECE) is rarely told in the context of state history, yet much of how the ECE system operates reflects historical and present-day state and local contexts. California’s past underlies contemporary racial disparities in access to services for children and families, as well as job roles, training opportunities, and equitable pay for the early care and education workforce. This paper provides an overview of California history as it relates to caring for and teaching young children and aims to inform our understanding of how injustices from pre- and early-statehood continue to replicate themselves in different ways in present-day California. The paper also includes several accounts of resistance by non-White people. We aim to encourage readers to question what they have learned about California, to inspire them to think differently, and to uncover more about the history of their own states and its impact across early care and education today.

California is expanding transitional kindergarten (TK)—the state’s universal prekindergarten options—so that by the fall of 2025, all four-year-olds across the state will have access to TK in public schools. The fast pace of expansion has districts scrambling to secure facilities, adequately staff TK classrooms, and provide curriculum resources necessary for delivering a developmentally appropriate program for four-year-olds.

This report examines the working conditions and teaching experiences of TK teachers during the first year of expansion in 2023. It builds on our 2020 report, which looked at TK teachers’ working conditions prior to expansion.

Every day, approximately 2.2 million early childhood educators in the United States—predominantly women and disproportionately women of color—safeguard and facilitate the development of over 9.7 million young children. Despite their complex skills and significant experience, the historical and pervasive undervaluing of this feminized labor has entrenched severe economic insecurity within the field. Nationally, early educators are paid a median hourly wage of just $13.07—substantially lower than K–12 elementary school teachers ($31.80) and the broader U.S. workforce ($22.92)—resulting in a staggering 43% of early educator households relying on public safety net programs to survive. While historic federal investments via the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) provided a critical temporary lifeline to bolster compensation and work environment standards, the expiration of this pandemic relief funding at the end of 2024 has brought the early care and education (ECE) system to a critical crossroads. This report tracks state-level progress across five essential policy areas—Qualifications and Educational Supports, Work Environments, Compensation and Financial Relief, Workforce Data, and Public Funding—emphasizing that state and local leaders must urgently enact systemic reforms and commit sustained public funding to reshape early childhood jobs, ensure racial and gender equity, and build a stable, high-quality ECE system.

California has proposed a broad expansion of transitional kindergarten (TK), a school-based early learning program serving four-year-olds. This improvement will make TK universally available to all four-year-olds by 2025, framed as a pillar of the state’s early care and education (ECE) system.

This report takes a closer look at the impact of COVID-19 on early care and education (ECE) programs, staffing and disparities using data collected by the Center by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) through the 2020 California Early Care and Education Workforce Study.

The ECE system has been under-resourced and undervalued since well before the pandemic (McLean et al., 2021). Low pay and poor working environment have long plagued the ECE industry as key drivers of chronic high turnover rates and teacher staffing shortages in the field (U.S. Department of Treasury, 2021). Additional disparities within the system place providers on vastly different financial footing as a function of the type of program in which they operate, their access to public funding, and characteristics of the families they serve (Austin et al., 2018; Whitebook et al., 2014). The pandemic has exacerbated these pre-existing issues.

For decades, low levels of public investment in this sector have kept the ECE workforce—largely women of color and immigrant women—in a grim financial bind.

During the first year of the pandemic, the majority of early educators continued to work in person—risking their health and that of their families—while K-12 schools closed for distance learning. This report reveals new details on the economic realities of life as an early educator during the COVID-19 public health crisis.

This data snapshot focuses on the education and experience of family child care providers, center directors, and center-based teaching staff in California.

From October through December 2020, we surveyed representative samples of approximately 2,000 center administrators and 3,000 home-based family child care (FCC) providers, as well as non-probability samples of about 2,500 center-based teaching staff members and 280 transitional kindergarten (TK) teachers. Estimated workforce sizes for each of the populations are 24,700 FCC providers, 9,500 center directors, 60,800 center-based teachers, and 23,000 center-based assistant teachers (data snapshot on workforce size). 

Josephine Silone Yates (1859-1912) was an educator, writer, and Black women’s club leader, whose career and community work was grounded in a commitment to “racial uplift,” emphasizing the improvement of newly freed Black communities post-emancipation. One of the first Black women professors in the United States, Yates taught at Lincoln Institute, now Lincoln University, in Jefferson City, Missouri (Dublin, 2020). Yates was integral to the establishment of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896 (Dublin, 2020), and as the organization’s second president (1901-1904), she put her knowledge to work by establishing the NACW’s infrastructure to expand early care and education opportunities for Black children across the country (Robbins, 2011).

Early learning and child development theory shaped Yates’s pedagogical philosophy and grounded her advocacy for day nurseries and kindergartens, which remains a less-recognized aspect of her life’s work (Robbins, 2011). Her writings evidence her pedagogical fluency through the discussion of various educational theories and research and distinguish her as a great thought leader in education across the human lifespan. Nonetheless, Yates’s intellectual leadership and expertise in education is woefully understudied, buried like the efforts of many 20^th-century Black women whose perspectives on the role of education in Black liberation surpassed the boundaries of the Black men who dominate historical memory (Robbins, 2011).