Early learning teachers earn far less than they are worth – often $18,000 a year – and one of the reasons, and flaws in the economics of their industry, is that there are actually two child care markets, one expert says.

“We also have an unregulated market in early child care existing side by side with the licensed regulated market,” Marcy Whitebook, director of the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, said on NAEYC Radio. “…That puts some of the damper on what they will charge for the service because they know that parents who can’t afford it will opt out of the regulated market and go into the unregulated system where they can (get) cheaper care.” (Listen to the podcast here.)

The burgeoning field of brain research is beginning to change this dynamic because more people realize how important the first few years are, Whitebook added.

But, professionals teaching children during those critical years still make wages that often place them among the ranks of the working poor.  A child care worker earns, on average, $9.32 cents an hour and a preschool teacher $15.48 an hour, while an elementary school teacher commands $34.63, Whitebook said. (And these numbers are two or three years old.)

One of the many questions posed by this gap is how the Prek-3rd Reform movement, which strives to more closely integrate early education and the first years of elementary school – will bring the pay scales together.

There is another interesting obstacle. The early education community has often spent what capital it has on serving more children, not addressing pay issues, Whitebook points out.

“We are not really doing kids a great service if we are putting them in programs with teachers who are burned out, stressed out because they can’t afford to do the work and are leaving,” Whitebook said. “I really do think this is something that we’ve as a field and actually as a profession have pretty much shied away from really biting the bullet and saying this problem can’t get fixed until we think about early childhood in a new way.”