Changing Course in New Jersey Early Childhood Education:

Declining Workforce Qualifications Drive Home Need for Requirement that Abbott Preschool Teachers Have Bachelors Degrees

1980-2004 Trends Show Need to Extent Higher Standards Industrywide

Stephen Herzenberg, Mark Price, and David Bradley

Introduction

Through its compliance with the 1998 Abbott decision that low-income school districts establish preschool programs taught by highly qualified teachers, New Jersey has been at the forefront of a national movement to deliver high quality early childhood education (ECE) that improves long-term academic outcomes for children and delivers benefits to the community that far outweigh the costs.

This briefing paper shows how low New Jersey ECE teacher qualifications had sunk in the years leading up to the recent requirement that Abbott school districts have a bachelor’s degree plus qualifications for teaching preschool through third grade.  The report also suggests a need to extend improvements in qualifications beyond teachers in the Abbott districts serving approximately 25 percent of New Jersey 3-4 year olds.   

The briefing paper relies on new data sets that track the center-based portion of ECE outside public schools for a 25-year period ending in 2004 when the Abbott decision came into effect (in September).  For home-based early childhood education consistent data are available for 2000-04. 

Main findings

A lower share of center-based early childhood educators has a four-year college degree than in the early 1980s.  In center-based ECE programs, the share of New Jersey early childhood educators (teachers, directors, assistant teachers, and teacher aides) with a four-year college degree fell from 40% in the 1983-87 period to 31% from 1988-97 to 26% in 1998-2004.    

A higher share has a high school degree or less.  The share of New Jersey center-based early childhood educators with a high school education or less climbed from 33% in 1983-87 to an average of 42% in 1988-97 and then up to 47% in 2000-04.

By the year 2000,less than a third of center-based early childhood educators had a college degree in every one of seven New Jersey metropolitan areas.  In Jersey City, Trenton, and the New Jersey portion of the Philadelphia Metropolitan area, this same figure was lower than one in four. 

Education levels lower still in home-based ECE.  In New Jersey home-based ECE, only 14% of staff members has a college degree or more and 15% do not have a high school degree.

Low wages and benefits help explain ECE education levels. The fall in the education levels of center-based early childhood educators is related to median pay that remains about $9.60 per hour—some $20,000 per year for a full-time worker—and a lack of health care and pension benefits.  

The story that emerges from the data is that the position of ECE in the New Jersey labor market changed for the worse between the 1980s and the years before full implementation of Abbott.  As the field expanded from less than 10,000 in 1980 to nearly 30,000 in recent years, female college graduates enjoyed expanding career opportunities in other fields and, in some families, greater economic need.  As a result, center directors found they must hire individuals with low education levels and no specialized training.

These trends underscore the pressing need for New Jersey’s Abbott decision reforms.   Since Abbott only covers a quarter of the state’s children in one age group, the data here also suggest that New Jersey needs to extend policies that would raise teacher qualifications and compensation throughout all of its early childhood education programs.