Biden’s Plan To Increase Educator Pay Could Mean Fewer Kids In Class

The Biden administration is lining up a big pay bump for early childhood educators, with one major asterisk: it risks forcing deep cuts to available classroom spots for high-need kids.

The Department of Health and Human Services is advancing plans to increase the annual salaries of some educators working for Head Start — the popular, free early learning and health program serving children from low-income families — by more than $10,000 on average. It would also require minimum pay for other Head Start staff, such as janitors and classroom aides, and add benefits like mental health support.

The proposed increases are meant to bring Head Start pay more in line with public elementary school teachers and reduce staff turnover, which spiked amid the Covid-19 pandemic. But the boon for workers will mean steadily cutting more than 110,000 slots for students over the next seven years unless Congress OKs additional funds — a difficult gambit for some Democratic lawmakers. The wage requirements alone would cost Congress $875 million in new annual dollars and $2.4 billion to implement the full proposal in 2030.

HHS’ plans come as other child care and early learning programs struggle with staff shortages and low pay after $24 billion in child care stabilization money in federal pandemic relief aid sunset last year. And the Biden administration and Congress are facing added pressure to shore up the sector’s workforce and access to affordable child care as another $15 billion in child care dollars expires this September.

“Families, when they can find child care — if they can find child care — it’s too expensive,” Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a senior Democrat from Oregon on the House education committee, said in an interview. “I would be concerned about anything that reduces the number of child care slots available.”

She added: “Once the federal funding, that pandemic funding, expired last September, we’re extremely concerned about that cliff."

Head Start teachers made on average $39,096 in 2022, and HHS’ Administration for Children and Families wants pay to at least be on par with preschool teachers, who made on average $53,200 in 2022. The administration wants programs to show they’re making progress toward pay parity with kindergarten through third-grade teachers. In 2022, kindergarten teachers made on average $65,120, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

President Joe Biden first directed HHS to find a solution that would shrink the pay gap between Head Start educators and elementary school teachers in an executive order on caregiving in April. HHS’ Administration for Children and Families wrote the proposal with the assumption that it would be finalized this year. Under the plan, Head Start workers would get a step closer to closing the gap with some elementary teachers.

HHS’ Administration for Children and Families, in its proposed rule, wrote that “slot loss is an acceptable tradeoff in order to improve staff compensation and other supports.”

In a statement to POLITICO, an HHS spokesperson added: "Most of the costs associated with this regulation could be covered within the existing funding allocation for Head Start. With the new rule, the quality and stability of Head Start programs will increase, and the number of children served would remain roughly the same as are currently being served. Today, programs are under-enrolled largely because of instability in staffing."

But reducing the number of classroom slots to boost worker pay could gut small programs, particularly ones in tribal communities, early education advocates warn.

Head Start was funded to enroll roughly 20,500 American Indian and Alaska Native children in 2022-2023, and the Iswa Head Start in the Catawba Nation serves nearly 80 students. At Iswa Head Start and other tribal Head Start programs, teaching children their language and culture is a part of the curriculum, which is threatened by the federal government’s plan.

“We are very blessed to have a cultural teacher in our program, who goes into the classrooms and is teaching our language and teaching our customs and our values into the program and feeding it into our children and our families,” said National Indian Head Start Directors Association President Melissa Harris, who leads the Catawba Nation’s Head Start program.

“Those programs that have to make cuts, fewer children and fewer employees would be the result and that would be an intangible loss from not being able to serve our full tribal community. I don't see any benefits to reducing slots to meet the proposal’s requirements,” she said.

The proposal would keep the number of funded slots around the same level as the actual enrollment for fiscal 2023, which is an estimated 650,000 children.

Some congressional Republicans worry that the credentialing and training for Head Start educators doesn’t warrant pay parity with some elementary school teachers and doesn’t consider future changes in teacher pay.

“Pay parity draws inappropriate parallels between the nature and qualification of teachers. Primary education teachers often hold degrees and certifications not required for early childhood instructors,” wrote House education committee chair Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) and Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.), who leads the House Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education Subcommittee with Bonamici, in a letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.

Bean believes Congress should have the upcoming spending deadline squared away before managing another expense.

“If we had a budget then we get to see and we’d get to prioritize and maybe we could increase or maybe we could look at what other priorities we have,” he said in an interview. “When you don’t have a budget there’s crises all over, crises everywhere.”

Congress made reforms to Head Start in its 2007 reauthorization of the law governing the program, requiring that half of all Head Start educators hold a bachelor’s degree which would have presumably led to pay parity with teachers who have a similar level of education. But as Head Start workers have gotten higher degrees inflation-adjusted salary for these early educators decreased by 2 percent between 2010 and 2022, according to HHS.

At the onset of the current Head Start year, the majority of programs surveyed by the National Head Start Association, an industry group representing workers, cited compensation as the top reason for staff vacancies.

A recent analysis from the Urban Institute found that Early Head Start, which serves infants and toddlers under age 3, had a high staff turnover rate of 57 percent in 2022 — a 19-point increase from pre-pandemic levels in 2019. Roughly 24 percent of Early Head Start teachers and home visitors cited higher elementary school teachers compensation as a reason for leaving.

The Biden administration is balancing a dual crisis to increase compensation to stop bleeding Head Start workers, at risk of reducing slots, in an attempt to keep the federal early education program from further enrollment declines because of the lack of workers.

“We’re already seeing enromllment drop and classrooms close because of the workforce crisis, so it’s a little bit of a chicken-and-egg situation,” said Daniel Hains, National Association for the Education of Young Children’s managing director of policy and professional development. “We need wages to attract more staff so that we can bring children into classrooms. We need more funding to pay for those wages.”