This summary describes how the District of Columbia’s wage enhancement program for early childhood educators, the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, promotes the supply of high-quality child care in DC. The summary is one in a series that documents implementation findings from the initiative in fiscal year 2024.

Why This Matters

Children who attend early childhood education programs benefit from consistent, high-quality interactions with caregivers. Yet low wages drive several conditions that impede the supply of child care quality, including high prevalence of mental health challenges, high rates of turnover, and difficulties pursuing professional development and career advancement. Increasing educators’ pay has the potential to improve children’s development, particularly through improvements to educator well-being and the retention and development of the child care workforce.

The District of Columbia began enhancing the wages of early childhood educators in its licensed child care facilities in 2022 through a landmark initiative supported by tax revenue. The initiative is designed to increase early educators’ wages to achieve pay parity between early educators and their K–12 school counterparts. These wage enhancements have demonstrated continued benefits for child care businesses, educators, and children.

What We Learned

Child care programs that opted to receive funding to implement wage enhancements were more likely to be in Capital Quality, DC’s quality rating and improvement system, than those that did not. They were also more likely to be rated as Quality or High-Quality, the District’s two highest quality designations.

Center directors and educators indicated that the fund has improved the quality of educators’ interactions with children, particularly through

• supporting educators’ pursuit of education and training via the promise of higher salaries, and
• improving the recruitment and retention of qualified educators.

How We Did It

We are undertaking a multiyear analysis of DC’s wage enhancement program for early educators in licensed child care facilities. For this analysis of fiscal year 2024 implementation, we analyzed licensing data on 441 child care facilities, and we administered voluntary web surveys in September–October 2024 and analyzed responses from 1,525 early educators, 67 home-based child care providers, and 123 child care center directors.