I taught young children for years, so I’ve felt firsthand the sting of how people perceive early childhood educators. Childcare providers, daycare workers, preschool staff—whatever title people use, these educators are teachers. They are licensed, permitted, trained, and qualified to teach and care for young children.
Yet early childhood educators often earn the lowest salaries in teaching. The median annual wage for preschool teachers in the U.S. is just $37,120 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And despite being teachers, they often can’t access the very discounts designed for educators. You see a store advertising a teacher discount, you go to claim it, and the verification process tells you that you’re not eligible. Not because someone intentionally decided to exclude preschool teachers, but because the systems used to verify teachers never accounted for early childhood educators.
It’s Not Really the Brands’ Fault
A brand offering a teacher discount needs a fast, trustworthy way to confirm a teacher’s status. For K-12, that’s easy: a school-district email, a state license, a national database built over decades.
For a preschool or infant-toddler teacher at a small center, a family childcare home, or a nonprofit, none of that infrastructure exists to check against. The verification vendor isn’t discriminating. It simply has nothing to look you up in.
The Real Issue Starts With How “Early Education” Is Classified
Here’s the root of it: In the United States, policymakers have long treated education and care for children from birth to age 5 as a social service rather than part of the education system. Since 1969, the federal government has largely placed preschool and childcare under what is now the Department of Health and Human Services instead of the Department of Education.
That single classification has had tremendous consequences across the early education ecosystem. It closes off early childhood education from the Department of Education’s budget and its national systems. States regulate early childhood education, creating a fragmented patchwork of permits, licenses, and registries. As a result, brands have no single national database they can use to verify educators, even though most early childhood professionals hold permits and many have earned bachelor’s or master’s degrees.
That classification wasn’t an oversight or an accident. This choice reflects a long habit of treating early education as care work, as women’s work, often women of color’s work—and therefore as unskilled labor rather than a real profession.
The Research Is Clear: Preschool Teachers Are Educators
We now know that framing is plain wrong. In the first years of life, a child’s brain forms more than a million new neural connections every second, according to Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child. The “soft skills” we used to wave off—curiosity, focus, intrinsic motivation, self-regulation—turn out to be the foundational ones, and they are built in these early-year classrooms by these teachers. In 2015 the National Academies of Sciences concluded that educators of children from birth through age 8 are a highly skilled workforce and should be treated as one. And Nobel Prize–winning economist James Heckman’s research puts the return on investment for high-quality birth-to-5 programs at 13% per child per year.
Preschool teachers are teachers, and they are the lowest-paid ones. The most recent Early Childhood Workforce Index from UC Berkeley puts early childhood educators’ median wage at $13.07 an hour, with 43% of early educators’ families relying on public assistance. The people who could most use a discount are therefore the ones the discounts have forgotten.
Change Is Coming, and Brands Can Help Lead It
The perception of early childhood education is rapidly changing. New Mexico created a cabinet-level Early Childhood Education and Care Department in 2020 and is building a statewide workforce registry. Washington, D.C., now requires lead teachers to hold at least an associate degree and funds an Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund to pay them like the professionals they are. State by state, this workforce is being registered and recognized.
But brands don’t have to wait for all 50 states to get up to speed. The verification problem is already solvable: Services now exist that can confirm early childhood educators like CDA holders, licensed family childcare providers, and infant, toddler, and preschool teachers without a district email—using pay stubs, licenses, and center records instead of a K-12 login. A handful of companies have quietly started doing this already using companies like Verifypass.com to include early childhood educators.
So what I ask is small and very specific: When you build a teacher discount program, make sure you define “teacher” the way the data and research does by including the teachers who educate children first.
Preschool teachers are teachers. The science has already caught up. Now teacher discount programs need to do the same.
For more articles like this, be sure to subscribe to our newsletters to find out when they’re posted!
Source link
