There’s a massive child-care worker shortage and the market can’t fix it

In one important way, child care mirrors the rest of the economy: Raising compensation works. A study of child-care teacher turnover in Louisiana in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, found more than 44 percent of teachers in private child-care programs leave every year, nearly all exiting the profession altogether (by comparison, about 16 percent of K-12 teachers leave each year, half just going to a different school). However, for the better paid Head Start teachers and the yet-better paid public preschool teachers, turnover was only around a third and a quarter, respectively.