Compensation All early childhood programs should provide staff equitable salaries and benefits commensurate with their qualifications and job responsibilities. Affordability High-quality early childhood programs should be available to all families who want or need their service at a price that each family can afford. The goal must be to ensure high-quality programs and affordable access without relying on the hidden subsidy of an early childhood staff inadequately compensated. These inequities must be addressed, with additional resources targeted toward providing assistance to low-income families. Because current measures of what families are spending relative to their income reflect prices that typically do not allow programs to recruit, retain, or equitably compensate staff, simply addressing the current inequities is insufficient to ensure that all families have affordable access to good programs.
More research is needed on the issue of affordability.
Accurate calculations of affordability must reflect the full cost of quality, including equitable compensation. Neither affordability nor qulity, including adequate compensation, can be sacrificed if the needs of the nation's children and families are to be met. A number of steps must be taken to reach this goal, including a systematic review and immediate improvement of any policies or practices that exert pressure to keep costs unreasonably low. Such policies include permitting large numbers of children to be cared for by one adult, requiring minimal or no professional preparation, restricting public payments for service to rates that fail to reflect actual costs of good service provision, exempting certain types of providers from regulation, and failing to adequately enforce existing regulatory requirements. In addition, parents and the public need a clearer understanding of the importance of children's early years in shaping all later development and learning and the influence of the quality of early childhood settings on children's development.