Andrew White on the pay gap for preK teachers

Thirty thousand New York City children are in government-funded prekindergarten programs based in community centers, and thousands more are in creative, hybrid child care and early education programs that help kids learn while also educating parents about how children's brains develop. Many of the people who work in these schools are creative, talented and young—and many of them will last only a year or two before moving on to a “grown up” teaching job. Or out of education altogether.

That's because the pay scale in preK is lousy ("Degrees of Improvement"). While salaries for teachers at these community center-based programs start nearly at the same level as that of a new teacher hired by the public school system, increases quickly diverge. Within a few years a public school teacher makes substantially more than her or his preschool peers.

The incentive to move on couldn't be more obvious. Teachers in government-funded preK programs are required to obtain a teacher's certification just like their peers in the public schools. So, while they work in a community center-based preschool, they dutifully do their coursework, get their degree and teaching certificate—and then have every good reason to move on to a job with a far better salary scale through the city's Department of Education.

Preschools get short shrift. They are decidedly second-tier in a two-tier system.

A recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (December 8, 2005) attacked the many advocates and teachers who are campaigning for publicly funded universal prekindergarten in California. The basis of the attack? That the new law, if it were approved in a referendum in June 2006, would require everyone in the preschool workforce to meet basic standards for their job, including early childhood certification and, for teachers, a bachelor's degree.

The article’s authors are willfully stuck in an old paradigm. As Ellen Frede so eloquently points out, we already require teachers from kindergarten through high school to have bachelor’s degrees and teaching certification. Why should preK be any different?

Evidence for the positive long-term impact of quality early education is strong. We can make a substantial improvement in the educational achievement of young Americans—and a large dent in multi-generational family poverty in this country—if we would just institutionalize high-quality universal prekindergarten nationwide. Equal pay and equal training for the early education workforce is a necessary and fundamental step in that direction.

Andrew White is director of the Center for New York City Affairs at Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy.