“Members of Congress need to know that early childhood educators shouldn’t have to work for peanuts,” said Monica Tabares, a Head Start teacher from New Jersey attending the summit.
She and her colleagues recently affiliated with the AFT. “Low wages don’t just hurt early childhood educators like me. They hurt parents, children and anyone looking for high-quality early childhood care because very few people can afford to live on our wages.”
Partly as a result of efforts by the AFT and other early childhood education advocates, Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) last week introduced the “Focus on Committed and Underpaid Staff for Children’s Sake (FOCUS) Act” to help raise wages.
If enacted, the bill would create a grant program to help early childhood educators to obtain scholarships, pay increases, and health benefits.
“Low wages, which contribute to high staff turnover rates and deter new people from entering the field, are a roadblock preventing a high-quality early childhood education system from being created in our nation,” said Antonia Cortese, executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
“One of the best ways to build and maintain a high-quality program is by attracting and retaining high-quality early childhood educators. This bill does just that.”
To further support these educators, the AFT convened a summit of working activists from around the country to discuss their most pressing concerns and find new ways of addressing them. Attendees discussed potential action plans for activism and advocacy.
“For too long, there has been a mismatch between the low wages and the high level of responsibility and importance of the work that early childhood educators undertake,” said Marci Young, deputy director in the executive vice president’s office.
“By working together, early childhood educators can better help the children they care for by creating new solutions to old problems, such as low wages, poor or nonexistent benefits, and bad working conditions.”
This is a wonderful beginning, a great initiative, but unfortunately
nothing will come of it because the importance of early childhood education is
the last number on the last page. We still don't understand what it is or what
we as a nation are supposed to do about it, and we sure aren't going to pay for
it.
Early childhood education is the holding tank between that cute crawling
infant to a child who can sit still more than five minutes.
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