Adam Batista teaches infants at a child care center in San Francisco. He says without a recent pay boost, he would have had to leave the profession.
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Libby Rainey
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LAist
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Topline:
A San Francisco initiative has substantially boosted wages for more than 2,000 early childhood educators. One preschool teacher received a 50% raise overnight. Three years after the city's pay program launched, those involved say it's been transformative. Some educators said the additional pay is keeping them in their jobs, and making a future in the profession viable.
Why now: The city's move takes aim at a pervasive problem: Despite child care being prohibitively expensive for families, early childhood educators are chronically underpaid. Experts say this leads to relentless teacher turnover.
How'd San Francisco do it? The new program would have been impossible without one simple yet elusive ingredient: money. In 2018, city voters approved a ballot proposition establishing a commercial property tax to increase middle and low income families' access to child care and raise wages for the workforce.
Why it matters: San Francisco's approach is becoming a model for other cities and counties, including in Southern California.
Read on ... to learn more about San Francisco's approach.
Overnight, preschool teacher Ana Medina's paycheck went from around $26 to $39 an hour.
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San Francisco gave child care workers a massive raise. Is it a model for LA?
It wasn't a mistake. The 50% pay bump was part of a San Francisco initiative to pay its early childhood educators substantially more money, raising wages for more than 2,000 educators, many of them by an average of more than $12,000 a year.
" Looking at my paycheck, I was just like, 'Oh my God.' I couldn't believe it," Medina said. "I had to call my mom. It was a big change."
Three years after the city's pay plan launched, those involved say it's been transformative. Some educators said the additional pay is keeping them in their jobs, and making a future in the profession viable. It's also becoming a model for other cities and counties, including in Southern California.
It takes aim at a pervasive problem: Despite child care being prohibitively expensive for families, early childhood educators are chronically underpaid. Experts say this leads to relentless teacher turnover.
The pay boost has kept Medina at the San Francisco child care center where she works with children and families at risk of homelessness, despite a long commute from Hayward every day. It's also allowed her to start saving more.
Adam Batista, a San Francisco teacher for kids as young as 3 months old, said when he transitioned from working retail to early education five years ago, he was making around $20 an hour. Now he makes $33.
" I don't think I would be in the same field if I didn't get that pay raise," he said.
How did San Francisco raise child care provider pay?
In 2018, city voters approved a commercial property tax to increase middle- and low-income families' access to child care and raise wages for the workforce.
San Francisco distributed $46 million of stipends or salary bumps to early childhood educators who work for city-funded programs in 2023. Ingrid Mezquita, the director of San Francisco's Department of Early Childhood, estimated the city provides financial support for about 65% of San Francisco's licensed providers, including those at centers and those who run daycare out of their homes.
The ballot proposition that allowed for these investments — called "Baby Prop C" — was just the latest in a series of voter-approved measures in San Francisco to bolster early childhood education. San Francisco became the first city to establish a children's fund back in 1991, dedicating part of the budget to children. The city has twice renewed that effort. Then in 2004, San Francisco voted for another measure that established a universal preschool program.
" This does not happen overnight," said Margaret Brodkin, a child care advocate who led the first fight in 1991. " It was decades of work and, and it's been incremental improvements."
Judy Zhu is a teacher's assistant in San Francisco who works one-on-one with children with special needs.
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Libby Rainey
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LAist
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How does higher pay improve early education?
These major investments in early childhood wages make San Francisco an outlier, but experts say paying more is critical to creating a strong child care system.
According to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, nationwide almost all other professions — 98% — make more money than child care teachers. In California, as of 2022, the median pay for a child care worker was $13.67 an hour. Preschool teachers made $17.66 an hour, compared with a median wage of more than $41 an hour for elementary and middle school teachers.
Early childhood educators were nearly five times more likely than K-8 teachers to live in poverty.
Mezquita with the Department of Early Childhood said the San Francisco initiative is focused on bringing early childhood workers up to the same level as public school teachers.
“Besides being a social good, we do have this very ambitious goal of getting to universal access" to child care, she said. “But it has to be based on a livable wage. You don't create goals without ensuring that the people who are actually creating that system and supporting that system are also not short-changed.”
Anna Powell with the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment compared San Francisco's efforts with Washington, D.C., which recently raised pay for early educators and saw a bump of nearly 7% in child care employment.
"That's great, because you can't increase the availability of care if you don't increase the number of people working in the sector," Powell said.
What's the political momentum around child care pay?
San Francisco's investment in child care has become a model for other California communities, according to researchers and advocates in the state. The political momentum for local efforts is building at a time when federal funding for programs like Head Start is under threat, and as California’s long-standing tobacco tax for early childhood programs declines.
Last year, Sonoma County passed a sales tax to support child care resources. In Southern California, Pomona passed a measure in November requiring the city to designate at least 10% of the city budget for children's services and programs including child care.
Valeria Guerra is an early childhood educator in San Francisco.
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Libby Rainey
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LAist
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Brodkin, the long-time child care advocate, founded an organization called Funding the Next Generation that helps communities put their own child care initiatives on the ballot.
She said building political pressure is key to success — and that takes time.
" You have power in this state to do something, and there's so many benefits of using the ballot," she said. It's "a way to educate people, a way to create a force in a community and create visibility and to create a sustainable change."
Brodkin said one challenge for a place such as Los Angeles, compared with San Francisco, is size: L.A. County has nearly 10 million people; San Francisco's population is just more than 800,000. Regardless of where these ballot measures pop up, she said they take time to succeed. Alameda County passed a sales tax in 2020 to fund early education and care after voting down a similar proposition in 2018. As of March 2025, those funds still had not been used due to a legal battle.
" It's a long journey," Brodkin said.
For Adam Batista, who teaches infants and toddlers in San Francisco, he hopes the political pressure will lead to a new understanding of what it means to be an early childhood educator in the first place.
" There definitely needs to be a societal shift of looking at early childhood educators, not as like glorified babysitters, but as actual teachers," he said. " People should be getting paid the amount of work that they put into it."
