Early care and education is a complex industry that is driven both by elements of a public good and the private market. Its public missions are to provide high-quality care and education to children and to enable parents to work and contribute to the larger economy. Some providers operate entirely on parental fees, while others use a combination of philanthropic and public funding sources to balance budgets. The industry includes private, public, and nonprofit entities, as well as non-licensed care providers outside the formal market structure, and each of these are working to varying degrees toward goals of profit, safety, education, and quality.
Given this complex environment, key early care and education leaders and policy makers in Colorado, including Early Milestones Colorado, the Colorado Department of Education (Office of Early Learning and School Readiness), and the Colorado Department of Human Services (Office of Early Childhood), created the Transforming the Early Childhood Workforce project as a public-private partnership to develop and test sustainable approaches to strengthening the early childhood workforce in the state. As part of this effort, they wanted to better understand how the early care and education sector functions within Colorado's economy, while also exploring the factors that influence how the industry operates and the effect of those operations on the industry's labor force.
The report is organized around these core topic areas:
1. Describe the role of the early care and education sector in Colorado's economy
2. Explore the cost of early care and education in Colorado
3. Explain the implications of low wages and turnover in Colorado's early care and education industry
4. Identify the extent to which Colorado's early care and education sector operates as a market-based industry
Links (below) to:
Key Takeaways (2 pages)
Executive Summary (5 pages)
Full Report (63 pages)