About this poster

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Panel information
Panel 3. Schooling and Education

Abstract

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The educators who teach and care for children aged 0 to 5 in the United States do complex, challenging work that supports both the early learning and development of young children and the well-being of working families. Yet pay for these educators—who are nearly all women, and oftentimes women of color—is low (Whitebook, Phillips, & Howes, 2014). There is also evidence that within the ECE workforce, women of color earn less than their white counterparts (McLean et al., 2021). Data from the nationally-representative NSECE, for example, shows that Black educators working with children aged 3 to 5 earn, on average, about $1.70 per hour less than teachers of other races/ethnicities (Austin et al., 2019).

To date, however, there has been little research exploring the drivers of racial and ethnic wage gaps. For instance, national estimates do not account for geography. Previous studies have not examined to what extent differences in teachers’ professional characteristics (e.g., role, education level, experience) contribute to wage gaps, nor have they examined if differences in the racial composition of the teacher workforce across the three primary early care and education (ECE) sectors (e.g., private child care, Head Start, state pre-k) contribute to the gaps.

The present study addresses these issues and asks three questions:

• To what extent are there racial and ethnic differences in ECE teacher wages across a large, state-wide dataset?
• To what extent do region, sector, and teachers’ role, education level, and experience each contribute to racial and ethnic differences in ECE teacher wages?
• Are there racial and ethnic wage differences among ECE teachers working in the same site after accounting for the above factors?

In doing so, this study identifies key structural drivers of disparities in teacher compensation—a critical first step for rectifying inequities.
Data came from the Spring 2022 Virginia Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five Workforce Survey (response rate 57%). The analytic sample included 4,382 teachers working with 0-5-year-old children in 1,098 center-based sites. Race/ethnicity was self-reported. Our sample was 27% Black, 7% Hispanic, 59% White, and 7% multiracial or other race (Table 1).

We compared mean hourly wage between teachers who self-identified as non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, Non-Hispanic White, or other race/ethnicity or multiracial. Next, to test whether teachers’ geographic region, sector, and role, education level, and experience, contribute to wage differences, we ran four regression models.
On average, White teachers earned $1.46 more than Black teachers, $0.59 more than Hispanic teachers, and $1.01 more than other/multiracial teachers (not shown). Regression results presented in Table 2 show that wage gaps increased when we made within-region comparisons (Model 2). They decreased but were not eliminated when we included sector (Model 3) and teacher role, education level, and experience (Model 4). Model 5 shows that pay gaps persist within sites, after accounting for professional characteristics. Within site, Black and Hispanic teachers earn about $0.70 less (p < 0.01) per hour compared to White teachers in similar roles and with similar education and experience levels. Other/multiracial teachers earned $0.88 (p < 0.01) less than White teachers.

We found that racial differences in teachers’ sector, role, education level and experiences contribute to pay gaps. Our data also provide the first evidence of within-site racial/ethnic disparities in teacher compensation—even after accounting for role, education, and experience. Efforts to create pay parity across sectors, support educators’ ongoing professional growth, and recruit more teachers of color into state pre-k could reduce these gaps. Further research on the roles structural, institutional, and interpersonal racism play in ECE compensation, as well as on how ECE workforce policy may exacerbate these inequities, is necessary.

Author information

Author	Role
Deiby Mayaris Cubides Mateus, University of Virginia	Presenting author
Daphna Bassok , University of Virginia, United States	Non-presenting author
Anna Markowitz, University of California Los Angeles, United States	Non-presenting author

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