Dive Brief:
- Public school pre-K teachers earn about $7,000 less per year than public K-12 teachers and about $24,000 less than similar working adults, but were less likely to say they intend to leave their jobs at the end of the 2023-24 school year, according to Rand Corp. survey results released Tuesday.
- About 18% of public school-based pre-K teachers surveyed said they intended to leave their jobs by the end of the 2023-24 school year, compared with 22% of public K-12 teachers and 24% of similar working adults.
- Meanwhile, preschool enrollment soared to a record high of 1.75 million children during the 2023-24 school year — a 7% increase from the year before that shows strong recovery from COVID-19 setbacks, according to the 2024 State of Preschool Yearbook from the National Institute of Early Education Research released last week.
Dive Insight:
In the Rand survey, nearly twice as many pre-K teachers said they have frequent job-related stress compared to similar working adults. Pre-K teachers who lead special education classes or are in early childhood education-only buildings reported more stress than other groups of teachers and other adults in the workforce who have a bachelor's degree and work at least 35 hours a week.
Managing student behavior was the top source of job-related stress for pre-K teachers across the board, with early educators who had five years of experience or less reporting the highest levels of stress over this issue. Other top areas of job-related stress for pre-K teachers included low pay, students' mental health, administrative work and lack of support from school administrators.
Pre-K teachers also cited the long hours they work, with an average of 47 hours in a typical work week — or eight hours more than they were contracted to work. K-12 teachers reported working an average of 53 hours a week, and similar working adults spent 44 hours on the job, according to Rand.
The average 2023-24 base pay for pre-K teachers was $63,588, and for K-12 teachers, it was $70,464. Similar working adults earned about $87,800 on average. Pre-K teachers who worked in states with required collective bargaining reported significantly higher base pay compared to those employed in states where bargaining is allowed but not required, or where it is prohibited.
Rand surveyed 1,427 public school–based pre-K general and special education teachers across the U.S. in March and April 2024.
The NIEER yearbook — an annual report on national and state-level preschool initiatives and trends — highlighted efforts in Georgia to provide lead and assistance preschool teachers with $2,000 raises, as well as the state’s steps to reduce class sizes from 22 to 20 and improve child-teacher ratios.
Pre-K programs in Alabama and New Mexico were also highlighted in the report as supporting salary parity comparable to other public school teachers.
"While states as different as California, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico have made remarkable progress in expanding preschool, many states are trailing further and further behind,” said Allison Friedman-Krauss, lead author of the report, in a statement. “With increased uncertainty about federal funding for programs supporting children, including Head Start, states could be left picking up the tab.”
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