In a playground outside a YMCA, Mayra Aguilar rolled purple modeling dough into balls that fit easily into the palms of the toddlers sitting across from her. She helped a little girl named Wynter unclasp a bicycle helmet that she’d put on to zoom around the space on a tricycle.
Ms. Aguilar smiled, the sun glinting off her saucer-sized gold hoop earrings. “Say, ‘Thank you, teacher,’” Ms. Aguilar prompted Wynter, who is just shy of 3 years old. Other toddlers crowded around Wynter and Ms. Aguilar and a big plastic bin of Crayola Dough, and Ms. Aguilar took the moment to teach another brief lesson. “Wynter, we share,” Ms. Aguilar pressed, scooting the tub between kids. “Say, ‘Can you pass it to me?’”
Ms. Aguilar and Wynter are both new at this. Wynter has been in the structured setting of a child care center only since mid-August. Ms. Aguilar started teaching preschoolers and toddlers, part-time, in February.
Why We Wrote This
Finding and keeping educators for America’s youngest learners can be a challenge. In San Francisco, an apprenticeship model is boosting teaching ranks, while also improving access to child care.
It has been life-changing, in different ways, for them both. Wynter, an only child, is learning to share, count, and recognize her letters. Ms. Aguilar is being paid to work and earning her first college credits – building the foundation for a new career, all while learning new ways to interact with her own three kids.
Early educators are generally in short supply, and many who attempt this work quickly quit. The pay is on par with wages at fast food restaurants and big box stores, or even less. Yet unlike some other jobs with better pay, working with small children and infants usually requires some kind of education beyond a high school diploma. Moving up the ladder and pay scale often requires a degree.
What’s different for Ms. Aguilar compared to so many other people trying out this profession is that she is an apprentice – a training arrangement more commonly associated with welders, machinists, and pipe fitters. Apprentice programs for early childhood education have been in place in different parts of the country for at least a decade, but San Francisco’s program stands out. It is unusually well – and sustainably – funded by a real estate tax voters approved in 2018. The money raised is meant to cover the cost of programs that train early childhood educators and to boost pay enough so teachers can see themselves doing it for the long term.
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Some policy experts see apprenticeships as a potential game changer for the early educator workforce. The layers of support they provide can keep frazzled newcomers from giving up, and required coursework may cost them nothing.
“We want it to be a position people want to go into as opposed to one that puts you in poverty,” said Cheryl Horney, who oversees the Early Learning Program that employs apprentices at Wu Yee Children’s Services in San Francisco, including the site where Ms. Aguilar works.
Ms. Aguilar, who is in her early 30s, is paid to work 20 hours a week at the Wu Yee Children’s Services’ Bayview Early Learning Center, tucked inside a YMCA in a residential neighborhood a little under a mile from San Francisco Bay. She works alongside a mentor teacher who supports and coaches her. The apprenticeship covers the online classes that Ms. Aguilar takes a few nights a week. The courses are designed just for her and other apprentices, and are taught live from City College of San Francisco.
After high school, Ms. Aguilar had tried college, a medical assistant program that she quit after a few months. That was more than 10 years ago. When she was enrolling her youngest daughter at another Wu Yee location, she saw a flyer about the apprenticeship program and applied. She is finding this work to be a far better fit: “This – I think I can do it. This, I like it.”
Apprenticeships disrupt status quo
The need for more early educators is long-standing, and in recent years there’s been a push for early educators to get postsecondary training, both to support young children’s development and so the roles command higher salaries. For example, a 2007 change in federal law required at least half of teachers working in Head Start to have bachelor’s degrees in early childhood education by 2013, a goal the program met.
Despite efforts to professionalize the workforce, salaries for early child care workers remain low: 98% of U.S. jobs pay more. In 2022, Head Start lead teachers earned $37,685 a year on average.
Apprenticeships are seen as one way to disrupt that stubborn reality. Would-be teachers are paid while being trained for a range of positions – from entry-level roles that require a small number of college credits, to jobs such as running a child care center that require degrees and come with more responsibility and even higher pay. According to a June 2023 report from the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank, 35 states have some kind of early childhood educator apprenticeship program at the city, regional, or state level, and more states are developing their own programs. U.S. Department of Labor data shows that more than 1,000 early educator apprentices have completed their programs since the 2021 fiscal year. Early Care & Educator Pathways to Success, which has received Labor Department grants to help set up apprenticeship programs, estimates the numbers are far larger given its work has cultivated hundreds of apprentices in 21 states, including Alaska, California, Connecticut, and Nebraska.
Emmanuel Guillén Lozano for The Hechinger Report
These programs can be complicated to launch, however, requiring colleges that will provide specific coursework at off hours, money to pay apprentices, and other layers of support including coaching, computers, or child care for the apprentices.
In San Francisco, Ms. Horney recalled losing teachers to chain retailers like Costco and Walgreens where they found less stressful jobs with more generous benefits. When she arrived in San Francisco to work in the classroom, she was paid $15 an hour. “Now the lowest salary we pay is $28.67 for any sort of educator,” she said, and the wages and apprenticeships are even drawing people from other counties and stabilizing the San Francisco early educator workforce. “It has helped immensely.”
Other parts of the country have seen success with similar initiatives.
The YWCA Metro St. Louis in Missouri, which hasn’t had a single teacher vacancy at the child care centers it oversees for the last two years, credits its apprenticeship program. In North Carolina’s Guilford County vacancies and staff turnover were a problem until recently, but an apprenticeship program for entry-level early educators has kept new teachers on the job.
Elsewhere, there is hope for similar results. In the Oklahoma City area, an apprenticeship program started in 2023 just yielded its first graduate, who worked in a child care center for two years and completed a 288-hour training program. Curtiss Mays, who created the program for teachers at the group of Head Start centers he oversees, was in the midst of trying to hire 11 educators just as the first apprentice earned a credential that allows her to back up other teachers.
Apprenticeship programs can be costly to run, but bipartisan federal legislation to support them has never gained traction. (Advocates note that apprenticeships can cost far less than a traditional four-year college degree.) Labor Department money for organizations that help set up and grow early childhood educator apprenticeships helped increase the number of apprentices in so-called registered apprenticeship programs – ones that are proven and validated by the federal agency. But some of those grants were axed by the Trump administration in May.
In San Francisco, while setting up apprenticeships was as labor intensive as in many other places, the 2018 real estate tax provides a new, and deep, well of money to propel the early educator apprentice effort. The money pays for all of the things that are letting Ms. Aguilar and dozens of others in the county earn at least 12 college credits this year. In two semesters, Ms. Aguilar will have the credentials to be an associate teacher in any early education program in California. Other apprentices across San Francisco, in Head Start centers, family-owned child care programs, even some religious providers, are working toward associate or bachelor’s degrees using the new tax revenue to pay for it.
Emmanuel Guillén Lozano for The Hechinger Report
“It changed their lives”
Long before the ballot measure across the bay in San Francisco, Pamm Shaw dreamed up the forerunner of an early educator apprenticeship program in a moment of desperation.
It was over a decade ago, and Ms. Shaw, who was then working at the YMCA East Bay overseeing a collection of Head Start centers, said her agency was awarded a grant to add spaces for about 100 additional infants. Except her existing staff didn’t want to work with children younger than 3 years old. So Shaw sent notices to the roughly 1,000 families with children enrolled in YMCA East Bay Head Start programs at the time and convinced about 20 people, largely parents of children enrolled in Head Start, to consider the role. She pulled together the training that would qualify the parents to become early educators – 12 college credits in six months.
The education piece, Ms. Shaw realized, was a huge draw. Some of the parents had spent 10 years working toward associate degrees on their own without getting them. Giving them the chance to earn those degrees in manageable chunks – while getting paid and receiving raises relatively quickly as their education advanced – proved a powerful recruitment tool. “It changed their lives,” Ms. Shaw said.
It changed Ms. Shaw’s life, too, and inspired many other apprenticeship programs all over. Her role morphed into fundraising to build out the apprenticeship pipeline. The program, now baked into the YMCA of the East Bay system, reflected the overall early educator workforce: It was made up entirely of women, mostly women of color, some of them immigrants and many first-generation college students. By the time Ms. Shaw retired a few years ago, more than 500 people in the Berkeley area had completed the educator apprenticeship program.
Erica Davis, a single mom, is a success story of the program. When she met Ms. Shaw, she said, she was relying on public assistance and jobs caring for other people’s children, while taking care of a daughter with significant medical needs, as well as her toddler-age son. Ms. Davis was at a Head Start dropping off paperwork for the family of a child in her care when an employee told Ms. Davis her young son might be eligible for Head Start too. He was, and as Ms. Davis enrolled him, she learned about Ms. Shaw’s apprenticeship program. Ms. Davis missed the first window to apply, but as she put it, “I was blowing their phone up. I needed to get in.”
That was 2020. By this spring, Ms. Davis, who is in her early 40s, will have earned her bachelor’s degree from California State University, East Bay. She works full-time at a Richmond, California, Head Start center while taking classes and supporting her kids, now in high school and elementary school. She can afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment, owns a car, and no longer relies on state or federal assistance to pay bills. She’s on the dean’s list, and, she said proudly, she can squat 205.
Emmanuel Guillén Lozano for The Hechinger Report
“I didn’t take my education seriously,” Ms. Davis said of her younger self. “I feel like I’m playing catch-up now.” She is in her element at Richmond Parkway Early Learning Center, reading to children, working on potty training, and leading the kids through coloring-and-pasting exercises. She has even become an informal coach for newer apprentices. The network and family feel of these apprenticeships is some of what helps many succeed, she said. “I have a sad story, but it turned into something beautiful.”
While Ms. Davis said she prefers the flexibility of taking classes at her own pace, other apprentices thrive in the kind of classes Ms. Aguilar attends, with a live instructor who starts off leading students in a mindfulness exercise. That is the same approach to teaching apprentices at EDvance College in San Francisco, which works exclusively with early childhood apprentices, according to its president and CEO, Lygia Stebbing.
The college provides general education classes in reading, math, and science for apprentices pursuing degrees, taught through an early childhood lens. And every lesson can be applied nearly in real time, unlike other paths to degrees, in which in-person teaching experience only comes after many classes, Dr. Stebbing said. Before beginning classes, apprentices get a crash course in using technology, from distinguishing between a tablet and a laptop to using Google docs and Zoom, “so they can jump right into things,” she said.
For Ms. Aguilar, her mentor teacher, Jetoria Washington, is a lifeline who can help her unstick an issue with any aspect of the apprenticeship – in the classes she takes or the classroom where she works. Taking courses online means she can be home with her own kids in the evenings. Earning money for the hours she spends in the classroom means she is not going into debt to earn the credential she needs to find a full-time job. The constellation of support has helped her shift from feeling in over her head to feeling ready to keep working toward a college degree.
Ms. Aguilar has even picked up skills that she uses with her own children, something many apprentices describe.
Now, she sometimes says to her youngest daughter, “Catch a bubble.” That’s preschool speak for “Be quiet.” When a teacher needs the toddlers’ attention, kids hear this phrase, then fill their cheeks with air.
Most of the time, at home and at work, a brief silence follows. Then the kids look up, ready to hear what comes next.
Reporting on this story was supported by the Higher Ed Media Fellowship.
This story about preschool teachers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
