Requiring Preschool Teachers to Earn a B.A. Would Hike Costs for Parents

A key piece of the massive “Build Back Better” legislation under consideration in Congress is the institution of “universal, high-quality, free, inclusive, and mixed preschool services” funded by the federal government but administered by the states — with strings attached. For example, the bill would require that “at a minimum, [States] requir[e] that lead teachers in the preschool have a baccalaureate degree in early childhood education or a related field by not later than 7 years after the date of enactment of this Act.”

This requirement doesn’t seem to address the challenges about pre-K, including lack of childcare options and childcare workers. Parents want a safe and loving place to take their children. Is the government creating a solution for that, or more barriers?

The strongest argument for the policy might be the fact that several states already have some such requirement on the books for state-run preschool systems, and nothing is obviously apocalyptic. There is a sort of patchwork across the states with many requiring a college degree, some requiring it for only some of the state-run systems, and some having no requirement — or no state-run program at all.

And there’s certainly a lot of partisan diversity in the different state policies. States like New York, Texas, Hawaii, and Alabama all require such degrees already. But states like Florida, Massachusetts, Arkansas, Arizona, and Oregon do not require a degree.

But that would miss the fact that preschool demand is in fact a crisis subject for many parents who are in the market for it. Wisconsin, which requires bachelor degrees for some programs, has had a well-documented shortage of preschool teachers prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Washington, DC, which adopted the policy, is already the most expensive place for infant care in the country.

So, in addition to the lack of a groundswell of demand from parents that their children’s preschool instructors have four years of college behind them, there is a surprising dearth of even popular advocacy for the policy. But if support for this stringent universal provision is hard to track down, affordable preschool can be even harder to find.

And what will the effects of a policy like this be? Liberals seem to wish that this requirement will elevate cost while other stipulations (about how programs must “at a minimum, provide a living wage for all staff of such providers”) will enlarge the talent pool by attracting more workers. But it is impossible to ignore the effects of restrictions on supply, however benignly they are presented: fewer people will be able to work in child care and preschool. (And the grandfathering provisions of the bill are no answer to this, since they merely stagger the restrictiveness over a few years.)

And this rule is part of a framework that doubles down on a vision of public education that people are increasingly rejecting: the idea of government funding systems instead of students. So in addition to the oppressive economics of the idea, it is bad educational policy.

But to circle back to the motivation for this rule: why must preschool teachers have college degrees? Why would liberals in the House push a requirement that removes options from job seekers in the middle of a labor shortage and makes more scarce a crucial good that is already too hard to come by?

The Washington Examiner reported that “Lindsey Burke, director of the center for education policy at the Heritage Foundation, called the proposal a ‘gift to the colleges of education, which would see an influx of individuals who would now need bachelor's degrees to be preschool teachers, even though the job requirement hasn't changed.’”

That seems like a plausible reason, especially since much of the support for this requirement (such as there is) seems to come from professionals in those careers: a former Dean of a School of Education, the Director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, an Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education and Care, plus the odd New York Times correspondent.

But regardless of the exact motivation, the clear bottom line is that this is a bad policy idea. The visible groundswell from parents is demand for more accessible child care (whether directly funded by DC or not), not that too few preschool educators have college degrees. The people who care deeply about that resume line item are the same interested professionals who would benefit from the credentialing process.

As Burke summarized, “Requiring BAs for preschool teachers would dramatically increase the cost of preschool, create barriers to entry into the profession, and would not improve the quality of early education and care.” Congress—and individual states—would be foolish to pursue this restriction.

Noah Diekemper is a senior research analyst at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.