Inside the Race to Recruit and Retain America’s Early Educators

In September 2020, amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning announced a $350 million plan to build six new early childhood centers across south-central Pennsylvania over six years. The network provides free early care and education for income-eligible children from birth through age five. Meeting construction timelines, however, has depended as much on building a reliable workforce as on bricks and mortar.

Workforce: hiring is only half the battle

Human resources director Beth Kroutch says hiring certified early educators is essential, but retaining them year to year is the larger challenge. With three centers already operating and three more planned by fall 2027, Kroutch emphasized that long-term success requires careful planning and partnerships with local colleges, high‑school internship pipelines, social media outreach and participation in career fairs.

Structural pressures: pay, benefits and turnover

Early childhood education has long struggled with low wages, limited benefits and few clear career pathways. The work is physically and emotionally demanding, and those pressures contribute to high turnover. Caitlin McLean, a senior research specialist at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE), notes that programs invest in training people only to see many leave for better-paying jobs.

“You’ve invested that money in training people to work with kids and who probably would like to work with kids, but they end up leaving,” McLean said.

Research indicates that higher pay reduces turnover. Some centers are experimenting with significantly higher wages: the RISE Child Development Center in Austin, Texas, founded in 2018, pays educators $28 per hour — roughly double the national median reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. To sustain that level of compensation, RISE uses a braided funding model that includes municipal support from Austin’s child-care assistance program.

Immigration enforcement and workforce stability

Immigration enforcement has intensified workforce strain in many communities. Analyses from CSCCE show that at least 21% of the early care and education workforce are immigrants. Changes to policies that once limited federal immigration arrests around sensitive locations have heightened fears among immigrant educators, affecting attendance and staffing stability.

Felicia Jones Taylor, co-founder of Siyana Partners, highlighted that many immigrant workers bring transferable experience from their home countries but face barriers to full participation in the formal early‑education workforce. Lauren Hogan, managing director of policy and professional advancement at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), warned that when educators feel unsafe or unsupported, the whole child-care community suffers.

Beyond pay: benefits, culture and pipeline development

While compensation is a powerful lever, leaders say retaining staff requires a broader strategy. Robust benefits — including health care, paid leave and retirement plans — can make a meaningful difference. Children’s Village, a nonprofit preschool in Philadelphia, provides these benefits as part of a retention strategy. Some states also subsidize child care for child-care workers, helping employees keep their jobs by reducing their own care costs.

Leaders also stressed the importance of building candidate pipelines. Programs often recruit more applicants than they expect to hire because candidates face personal and logistical barriers: missed interviews, competing responsibilities and unstable housing or transportation. Rhian Allvin, founder of Brynmor Early Education and Preschool, noted the precariousness of the first months on the job: many staff leave within the first six months, making early investment in culture and support critical.

Practical recruitment and retention tactics

Providers described a mix of tactics that together help stabilize staffing: building relationships with colleges and high schools, offering internships and apprenticeships, hosting open houses so candidates can experience workplace culture, raising wages where feasible, and offering comprehensive benefits. Kroutch explained that inviting candidates to existing centers to meet staff and see the culture firsthand has been an effective recruitment step for the Catherine Hershey Schools.

Conclusion

Child-care leaders agree the system faces deep, structural problems — low compensation, limited benefits and policy-level stressors — but they remain pragmatic and optimistic. By combining better pay, stronger benefits, community partnerships and intentional culture-building, many programs are demonstrating that hiring and retaining early educators is difficult but not impossible. As Lauren Hogan reflected, “Just because the system is broken does not mean that it is beyond fixing.”