The public health and economic crises brought on by a worldwide pandemic have made it abundantly
clear that our early childhood workforce—including those in child care, home visiting and early
intervention—are underpaid and undervalued. The essential work done by these individuals ensures
that parents can work while their infants and toddlers have access to the high-quality care and
education they need to take advantage of the unique window of brain growth that occurs in the rst
few years of life.
While many child care businesses remained open to help parents in essential jobs, and home
visitors and early interventionists struggled to nd ways to serve families remotely and safely, it
became increasingly dicult to continue to provide high-quality services. This was in large part
because the workforce caring for the state’s youngest children ages 0-2 aren’t compensated at a
level that makes it possible to recruit and retain qualied staff.
The window of opportunity for rapid learning, including the development of brain synapses that
form the very architecture of the brain, occurs during the rst months and years of life. Despite
this, few public resources are invested in the care and education of infants, toddlers and their
families, and the early childhood workforce has been poorly compensated in jobs, with little room for
advancement. To move Michigan forward, the state must confront the deep and chronic workforce
issues in its early childhood system.
Think Babies Michigan is a collaborative of more than 1,800 members—leaders, experts, families,
organizations and providers—working together to improve the lives of babies prenatally through age
three. A top priority for Think Babies Michigan is a cross-sector workforce strategy that ensures
that Michiganders who work with the state’s youngest children are adequately prepared for that
challenging work and fairly compensated.
Pat Sorenson, Michigan League for Public Policy | January 2022
Think Babies Michigan is a prenatal-to-three policy collaborative of 1,875 people
across the state working to make Michigan a top state to have a baby and raise a child.
Michigan’s early childhood workforce:
There are three primary sectors of the state’s early childhood workforce, including child care, home
visiting and Early On® Michigan early intervention.
Confronting Michigan’s Early Childhood Workforce
Crisis
2
• Michigan’s child care workforce of over 28,000 is available to provide care to both young and
school-age children, including 333,798 infants and toddlers.
1
Michigan had a child care workforce
of 28,360 in 2019, including child care and preschool teachers, and administrators.
2
Michigan’s
early educators work in a variety of settings, including the state-funded preschool program—the
Great Start Readiness Program—federally funded Head Start programs, community-based child
care centers and homes, and placements with family, friends and neighbors. Different settings
have different educational/training requirements, and wages vary as well.
• Low wages are endemic. The median wage for child care workers in the state was $11.13 in
2019—placing them among the lowest wage earners in Michigan. Nearly 1 of every 5 early
educators lives in poverty, and many are eligible for some form of public assistance.
3
Low
wages have resulted in stang turnover rates as high as 25-30%, affecting the quality of care
for infants and toddlers.
4
Most Common Public Subsidies Relied on by Early Educators in Michigan
Source: Michigan Early Care and Education Workforce Study, University of Denver (2018)
• The younger the child, the lower the pay for early educators. Michigan child care teachers with
bachelor’s degrees are being paid 22% less than their colleagues in the K-8 system, with nearly
1 in 5 having incomes below the poverty line.
5
The Younger the Child, The Lower the Pay
Michigan, 2019 Median Hourly Wage
Source: Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California, Berkeley
• Low wages have led to stang shortages. In a survey conducted between June 17 and July 5,
2021, 87% of child care centers indicated that they were experiencing stang shortages that
forced them to serve fewer children (49%), have a longer waitlist (38%), not open classrooms
(25%), or reduce their operating hours (28%). Eight out of 10 centers identied wages as the
Child Care
WIC or Food Assistance
Free- & Reduced School Meals
Earned Income Tax Credit
Medicaid/Medicare
MiChild
26%
30%
40%
42%
46%
Elementary teacher
Kindergarten teacher
Preschool teacher
Child care worker
$34.08
$38.09
$14.89
$11.13
3
main recruitment challenge.
6
• Training requirements for early educators also vary by the age of children in the programs.
Despite the indisputable evidence that the greatest learning growth occurs in the rst few
years of life, teachers who work with infants and toddlers have fewer education requirements.
Teachers who work with preschool-aged children are more likely to have a bachelors’ degree
(79%) compared to those who work with infants/toddlers (53%).
7
In a 2018 survey, 73% of family
child care providers and 76% of child care teachers expressed an interest in higher education,
with the biggest barrier being the cost. Family child care providers faced the biggest barriers,
including the need to take time off and the lack of substitute coverage.
8
Home Visiting
• Michigan has a diverse continuum of home visiting programs. Michigan provides home visiting
services through eight evidence-based models, including nurse visits after a child’s birth and
support for parent/child interactions by a family educator. These professionals collectively
serve nearly 30,000 families, with the range of services available varying from community to
community. Of the children served, 59% were under the age of one, with an additional 33%
between one and two years of age.
9
• Michigan’s home visiting programs face funding and stang barriers to serving at capacity.
In a 2020 survey, one-third of Michigan home visiting programs reported that they were not
able to function at 85% capacity for at least nine of the past 12 months in part because of staff
turnover, with funding and wages being likely contributors.
• One-third of the programs surveyed had waiting lists for services, and of those, four in 10 had
10 or more families waiting.
10
Home visiting program staff indicate that the most signicant
barriers they face in serving families in their community include: (1) limited funding to hire enough
staff; (2) problems recruiting staff from different linguistic, racial and cultural backgrounds
that match the community served; and (3) staff turnover, with more than one in ve programs
reporting that they had one or more full-time home visitor positions vacant, and one in 10 had
a part-time position open.
11
Source: Michigan Home Visiting Needs Assessment 2020
• More information is needed on the staff that deliver home visiting services and the professional
development systems that support them.
12
A 2020 national study found that home visiting
staff have strong qualications, with 73% having a bachelor’s or higher degree. On average,
home visitors earn less than workers in similar occupations, but earnings vary signicantly by
degree and eld of study, with median weekly earnings of approximately $713 per week—similar
to preschool teachers, but higher than child care workers.
13
46%
Workforce Problems Limit Home Visiting Services
• 31% of programs had a waiting list
• 22% had one or more full-time home visitor positions vacant, and 12% had
part-time vacancies
• 17% had a decrease in funding making it more dicult to hire enough staff
• One-third of programs said their staff reects the diversity of the
community they serve
4
Early On Michigan (Early Intervention)
• Early On Michigan provides early intervention services to families of infants and toddlers. Early
On emphasizes early identication of children ages 0-3 with developmental delays or disabilities,
and services that can enhance their development and take advantage of the signicant brain
growth that occurs during a child’s rst three years of life. In 2019-20, 21,739 children statewide
received Early On services.
16
Depending on the individual child, families need personnel from
diverse disciplines with education, experience, and skills to support them with their children
who often have complex physical, social-emotional, and/or communication needs.
• There are signicant shortages of qualied early intervention personnel available to work
with families. Michigan is experiencing extreme shortages in school psychologists, speech-
language pathologists, early childhood teachers and other personnel necessary to support
families statewide. Early On needs a funded strategy to support the recruitment and preparation
of early intervention personnel in Michigan.
• Due to Michigan’s dual eligibility (a sub-population of children in Early On is also eligible for
Michigan Mandatory Special Education), there are signicant disparities in the workforce
serving children through Early On. With two systems serving birth to three early intervention,
there are two sets of qualications for personnel, with lesser qualications for the broader
Early On system. Shifting Early On to a unied and streamlined system, with one set of updated
personnel standards, will help mitigate these workforce differences.
• Michigan’s recent increase in state funding for Early On is important, but not sucient, making
it dicult to provide the range of services necessary to meet the needs of eligible infants and
toddlers and their families. Across states, the top three barriers to early intervention are: (1)
lack of providers to meet a range of service needs (61%); (2) lack of stang at the lead agency
level (53%); and (3) insucient funding for services (51%).
17
The barriers to a thriving and high-quality early childhood workforce
• Too little is known about the early childhood workforce. One of the primary signs of the low
value placed on the early childhood workforce is the failure to collect and make public sucient
data on compensation, training, and working conditions across the early childhood sectors of
child care, home visiting, and Early On. Without comprehensive data, it is more dicult to craft
a cross-sector workforce strategy and assess its implementation over time.
• Public investments in the people who work with infants and toddlers and their families fall
far short. Despite the proven impact of early childhood programs on children’s learning and
development, the high return on investment from intervening early and the long-term benets
• Home visitors also have diculties securing the training they want, and lack a clear career
path. Home visiting staff are satised with their work with families, but dissatised with their job
earnings and opportunities for promotion. Lacking are enough opportunities for advancement
needed to help retain qualied staff, as well as such basic supports as pay for preparation time
and reective supervision.
14
• Efforts to attract a more diverse workforce are ongoing. Approximately one-third of Michigan’s
home visiting programs report that their staff reects the diversity of the community they serve,
and another third indicated that they were making progress toward that goal.
15
5
• for the state’s economy, Michigan does not adequately support a strong cross-sector early
childhood workforce.
• Many early childhood workers struggle to obtain additional education and training, and
lack a pathway for career advancement. Too few resources are available to ensure that early
childhood workers can further their education and training, including needed credentials. The
reality is that for many in the workforce, higher levels of education or training do not translate
into higher wages or promotions.
• Gender and racial inequities have suppressed wages and ignored the high-level skills
needed to work with very young children and their families. The early childhood workforce is
disproportionately women—many of color—who are some of the lowest wage workers in the
state.
Recommendations
1. Workforce data: The state must begin to comprehensively collect and make public data on the
early childhood workforce across sectors, including workers in both public and private settings.
Included should be data—disaggregated by race, ethnicity, geography, and type of setting—on
wages, benets, professional development opportunities, and qualications as they relate to
salary. While the state has made progress in documenting some early childhood demographic
and child outcome data through MI School Data, comprehensive workforce data across the
early childhood sectors is needed, with the data updated regularly and made public.
2. Compensation: Michigan must develop a strategy to improve compensation for the early
childhood workforce, including phasing in wage increases that are based on a salary schedule
that reects the true cost of care—based on regularly updated cost-of-care analyses. For
example, currently, child care teachers in Michigan do not have salary parity with teachers in
pre-K through grade three settings, and the rates that child care businesses can charge depend
largely on local income and property values—rather than the cost of providing services, making
it dicult to raise wages. This market-based approach has suppressed wages and the quality of
care in many lower-income communities in both urban and rural areas of the state. In addition,
wages for early interventionists and home visitors often fall below the true cost of delivering
services.
3. Opportunities for professional development, education, training and credentialing to support
existing child care workers and a career pathway: As part of the wage/salary schedule developed,
Michigan should create and implement a career pipeline for the early childhood workforce that
increases opportunities for education, training, and credentialing, while connecting additional
qualications to increased pay and access to needed benets. As part of that pipeline, the
following should be addressed:
• Recruitment strategies through high schools, vocational programs, colleges and
universities that include coursework and credentialing across all professional roles in
the prenatal-to-three workforce with a focus on equity and diversity. Additionally, the
state should launch public education and outreach campaigns demonstrating the value
of the early childhood workforce and the urgent need for more equitable compensation.
6
1 The State of Michigan’s Babies, State of Babies Yearbook 2021, Zero to Three, Think Babies (2021).
2 Early Childhood Workforce Index 2020 – Michigan, Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California, Berkeley.
3 Early Childhood Workforce Index 2020 – Michigan, Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California, Berkeley.
4 Caven, M., Khanani, N., Zhang, X., and Parker, C. Center- and Program-Level Factors Associated with Turnover in the Early
Childhood Education Workforce (March 2021).
5 Early Childhood Workforce Index 2020 – Michigan, Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California, Berkeley.
6 Progress and Peril: Child Care at a Crossroads, State Survey Data, National Association for the Education of Young Children (July
2021).
7 Early Childhood Workforce Index 2020 – Michigan, Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California, Berkeley.
8 Roberts, A., Le, V., Schaack, D., Franko, M., and Morgan, K. Michigan Early Care and Education Workforce Study, Butler Institute for
Families, Graduate School of Social Work, University of Denver.
9 Families Served Through Evidence-Based Home Visiting in 2019, National Home Visiting Research Center State Proles – Michigan,
2020 Home Visiting Yearbook, James Bell Associates and the Urban Institute.
10 Michigan Home Visiting Needs Assessment 2020, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Early Childhood Home
Visiting Unit and the Michigan Public health Institute Center for Healthy Communities.
11 Michigan Home Visiting Needs Assessment 2020, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Early Childhood Home
Visiting Unit and the Michigan Public health Institute Center for Healthy Communities.
12 Sandstrom, H, et al., Home Visiting Career Trajectories, OPRE Report #2020-11, Urban Institute (February 2020).
13 Sandstrom, H, et al., Home Visiting Career Trajectories, OPRE Report #2020-11, Urban Institute (February 2020).
14 Sandstrom, H, et al., Home Visiting Career Trajectories, OPRE Report #2020-11 (February 2020).
15 Michigan Home Visiting Needs Assessment 2020, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Early Childhood Home
Visiting Unit and the Michigan Public health Institute Center for Healthy Communities.
16 Child Count Trend Statewide: 2019-20/Early On/All Children, MI School Data, the Center for Educational Performance and
Information.
17 Greer, M., 2020 Tipping Points Survey, IDEA Infant and Toddler Coordinators Association (2020).
End notes
• Retention strategies that include compensation, professional recognition, manageable
caseloads across programs, and support for leadership development for experienced
members of the workforce.
• Growth opportunities, including professional development linked to promotion and
increased compensation, and clear career pathways through a lens of equity, diversity
and inclusion.
• Implement a plan to require and adequately resource implicit bias training for all early
childhood employees and contractors at all levels as outlined by the Think Babies
Michigan Implicit Bias Training Workgroup.
