Raising wages for early educators emerges as key to solving Massachusetts child care crisis

Harvard economist Jeffrey Liebman highlights that boosting pay for early childhood educators could expand access, address underfunding, and stabilise Massachusetts’s struggling child care sector amid rising costs and shortages.

Harvard economist Jeffrey Liebman has put a hard number on a problem many Massachusetts families already know too well: child care is scarce because the system is underfunded, not because parents do not want it. In research presented last year, Liebman found that 89% of the 1,000 Massachusetts mothers he surveyed would use formal child care if they could afford it, yet only about half currently do. The findings point to a market that is failing both families and providers, with low pay for early educators sitting at the centre of the breakdown.

The scale of the mismatch is stark. Harvard Kennedy School says Massachusetts spends about $3,700 per child on early education, compared with roughly $20,000 per child on K-12 schooling. Liebman’s analysis argues that this funding gap leaves the state with too few available places and, in many cases, lower-quality care than families need. The Boston Globe reported in February that child care costs in the state are rising faster than wages, and that nearly 74% of full-time, year-round working parents cannot afford centre-based care under the common affordability benchmark of no more than 7% of family income.

Liebman’s prescription is counter-intuitive but straightforward: raise wages for early educators. The argument is that better pay would help recruit and retain staff, allowing more classrooms to open and more children to be served. In that view, higher wages would not make care less affordable over time but would instead expand supply in a market where too few workers and too few slots have become mutually reinforcing shortages.

That is why advocates say the debate needs to shift from blaming individual families to confronting the structure of the system itself. Sarah Siegel Muncey, president and co-founder of Neighborhood Villages, wrote that the research brings a complicated problem into sharper focus by showing how low teacher pay can destabilise the entire child care market. The broader lesson from the Massachusetts data is that affordability, workforce pay and public investment are inseparable: without more money, the state is likely to keep producing too few places for too many families.