Studying the Implementation of DC's Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund: Technical Documentation for Year 1 Early Educator, Home Operator, and Center Director Surveys. Research Report

Early childhood educators play essential roles in providing stable and high-quality child care for young children and supporting their development and growth. As is also true nationwide, historically low wages in the District of Columbia have led to challenges in compensating and retaining qualified early childhood educators, and in turn, building quality child care systems from which families benefit. In 2022, the District of Columbia passed legislation to tax the wealthy, generating revenue to increase compensation for early educators working in the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE)-licensed child care programs. The first of its kind nationwide, the Pay Equity Fund represents an innovative, long-term, and sustainable strategy for addressing early childhood educator compensation. This technical report documents the steps the Urban Institute and OSSE took to design and administer a set of surveys to learn more about the opportunities and challenges wage supplements offered child care employers and early educators in the first 1.5 years of implementation (FY 2022 and FY 2023). The authors begin by describing the survey development process, survey administration procedures, response rates, and characteristics of the target population (i.e., the set of educators identified as potentially eligible for the Pay Equity Fund, based on administrative data) and the survey sample (i.e., the set of educators who submitted a valid survey response). This is done once for the Early Educator and Home Operator Surveys, and then once more for the Center Director Survey. These steps are presented separately, given different sampling frames and different constructs of interest across samples, and then the steps taken to weight, clean, and analyze survey data are described. The report concludes by summarizing demographic information for each of the survey samples.