President Joe Biden 's administration is improving pay for Head Start educators in an effort to boost enrollment in the early childhood field. Early childhood educators are in short supply amid a working shortage.
The administration will require large operators to put their employees on a path to earn what their counterparts in local school districts make by 2031. Large operators will also need to provide health insurance. Small operators aren't expected to do either immediately, but will need to show compensation progress.
“We can’t expect to find and hire quality teachers who can make this a career if they’re not going to get a decent wage as much as they might love the kids,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in an interview with WJTV.
Head Start programs have cut the number of children and families they serve in recent years because they can't find enough educators. More than a million children and families relied on the program at its peak, but now the number is closer to 650,000.
Some teachers left due to better pay in other fields like retail. The Biden administration is betting the increased pay will lure them back.
One Republican, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-VA), accused the administration of pandering to teachers politically to gain their support. “The effort smells like an attempt to form Head Start educators into a unionized political block," the chair of the Committee on Education and the Workforce said. "Political patronage should never take precedent over children’s lives."
The program has generally enjoyed bipartisan support, and this year, Congress hiked its funding to provide Head Start employees with a cost-of-living increase. The White House believes the extra compensation for teachers will improve the quality of Head Start programs.
“This rule will not only deliver a fairer wage for thousands of Head Start teachers and staff, it will also strengthen the quality of Head Start for hundreds of thousands of America’s children,” Neera Tanden, White House domestic policy advisor, said.
The top organization backing Head Start educators, the National Head Start Association, is concerned about where the funding for the increased pay will come from. It “remains concerned that, if Congress and future administrations do not agree to such increases, the impact of the final rule could prove devastating, by significantly reducing the number of children and families served by Head Start programs.”
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There's also some concern that women of color have single-handedly "subsidized" the program, and that diversity in the program's ranks is needed.
“For 60 years, the Head Start model has essentially been subsidized by primarily of women of color,” Katie Hamm, a deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Early Childhood Development, said. “We can’t ask them to continue doing that.”
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