Chart: ECE teacher and administrative salaries under a values-based budget for California child care

Table 1

ECE teacher and administrative salaries under a values-based budget for California child care

Staff position	How salary is determined	FTE salary
Lead teacher	Salary is based on earnings of California workers in the CPS* category “Elementary and middle school teachers.”	$77,214
Assistant teacher	Salary is set at 60 percent of the lead teacher’s salary.	$46,329
Administrator	Salary is the average of (current) mean salaries for California workers in the OES** categories “Education administrators, preschool and childcare center/program” and “Education administrators, elementary and secondary school.”	$90,575
Administrative assistant	Salary is equivalent to the average salary for California workers in the OES** category “Office and administrative support workers, all other.”	$37,940

* Current Population Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau

** Occupational Employment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics

Notes: FTE is the full-time-equivalent salary for a full-time (40 hours/week), full-year worker. Lead teachers are assumed to have a bachelor’s degree; assistant teachers are assumed to have an associate degree. Lead teacher salary is estimated by first calculating the ratio of median weekly teacher pay to median early educator weekly pay and then applying that ratio to the median hourly wage of early educators in the CPS-ORG. We set the assistant teacher salary at 60 percent of the lead teacher salary based on data from EPI’s data library (EPI 2019b) showing that the average hourly wage of all U.S. workers with “some college” is roughly 60 percent of the average hourly wage of all U.S. workers with a bachelor’s degree.

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) State Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates, California (May 2018) and EPI analysis of Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau

This chart appears in:

Breaking the silence on early child care and education costs: A values-based budget for children, parents, and teachers in California

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