Survey Paints Bleak Picture of Day-Care Industry

A five-city survey of day-care centers paints a picture of an industry operating at the margins, where workers’ real wages have remained virtually stagnant for a decade, leaving the typical worker with an annual salary of $12,800, the federal poverty level for a family of three.

And while staff turnover in day-care centers has gone down over the last five years, the 30% annual departure rate remains alarmingly high in an industry that shapes young minds. Of the day-care centers surveyed, 20% had lost at least half their teaching staffs in the last year.

At a time when day-care centers are experiencing unprecedented growth, the study released Tuesday by the Center for the Child Care Workforce recommends that officials set aside more money to raise wages and safeguard quality in new federal and state initiatives.

The study’s authors noted that extending tax breaks for families, an approach favored by many Republicans, would provide little incentive to day-care centers to pay their workers better or invest in staff training and education.

They also called on parents to use the findings of the study to guide both their own child-care decisions and their activism.

“I really hope that parents . . . will use this information to realize that their personal problem is also a social problem,” said Marcy Whitebook, co-director of the center, which is based both here and in San Francisco. “They need to use their voices” to encourage business leaders and government officials to help not only with affordable day care but with good-quality day care as well, she said.

The center is a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that first began profiling the day-care industry in 1988. Its latest study--which surveyed 158 day-care centers in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Phoenix and Seattle--is the most comprehensive effort to profile an industry that gathers and maintains little central data.

As troubling as some will consider their findings, the researchers believe that the centers they surveyed are slightly better than average, since all have remained open for at least a decade.

Poor working conditions, depressed wages and high turnover rates of employees take on special importance in the day-care business because of the impact on the industry’s main product--young children. Ground-breaking research in brain science and child development has revealed in recent years that for very young children, positive stimulation and continuity of care are critical to fostering social and intellectual development. And academic experts have found strong links between the training and wages that day-care workers get and the quality and continuity of care they provide.

For those experts, the conclusion is clear: More--higher wages and better training--is better.

What the Center for the Child Care Workforce found, however, reflects a very different reality. On average, the centers surveyed paid their most experienced teaching assistants about $7 an hour, virtually unchanged from $6.96 in 1988. The lowest-paid teachers earned only slightly more--$7.50 an hour on average--than the top assistant, whereas pay increases of 5% over the period brought the average pay for the most experienced teachers (usually required to have a college degree) to $10.85 an hour last year.

Parking lot attendants earn on average $6.38 an hour and data entry key operators average $8.50 hourly, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Such salaries put the earnings of the day-care industry’s best-paid workers below the national average salary earned by civilian females with a high school diploma. The study found that day care’s top-paid teachers made $18,988 per year on average. Nationally, the average annual income for a working woman with a high school diploma is $19,656.

Generally, the study found that for-profit day-care chains offered the lowest salaries and had the highest rates of staff turnover.

In what appears to be a new wrinkle in child care, the study found extensive employment of welfare recipients among day-care centers--a fact that raises questions about the quality of care and reflects the day-care industry’s voracious appetite for unskilled low-wage workers. Eighty of the for-profit centers surveyed had hired public-assistance recipients in the last year, whereas 40% of nonprofit centers had hired such workers.

At an average starting salary of $5.50 an hour and little opportunity to further their training or education, welfare recipients turned day-care workers have little hope of supporting themselves, the study concluded. And by providing day-care centers with a rich source of entry-level labor, the legions of welfare recipients are likely to depress the wages of existing day-care workers as well, it found.