Too few families have access to high-quality early learning opportunities in the United States. Research has shown that challenges with the early childhood care and education (ECCE) workforce, such as teacher shortages (driven by extremely low wages), are major contributing factors. Many ECCE programs have turned families away because they were understaffed, leading children to miss out on vital early learning opportunities and families to struggle to find child care needed to work.
Still, too often, state leaders looking to address those challenges confront data limitations that interfere with their ability to respond. In fact, many states lack the data needed to answer even the most basic questions about their early childhood workforce. This makes it difficult to diagnose problems and evaluate investments and initiatives.
This brief highlights how Virginia developed LinkB5, a statewide ECCE longitudinal data system. LinkB5 has vastly expanded the state’s capacity to answer key questions about its ECCE workforce and to monitor quality and access. For state leaders frustrated by the challenges of making decisions about a fragmented ECCE system—where standardized data can be hard to come by—we believe that LinkB5 could be a model to consider.
The development of LinkB5
For the past six years, the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) has partnered with the University of Virginia to develop a data system to support of the state’s ECCE quality improvement initiative. The initiative began during the pandemic, supported by pandemic recovery funds. When LinkB5 began as a 2019 pilot, only 557 sites participated. In the years since, in response to a state law passed in 2020 that mandated participation, LinkB5 scaled up to include all publicly funded birth-to-five sites in the state.
As of 2024, LinkB5 annually captures detailed information about teachers, enrollment, and quality for over 3,200 sites and 11,000 classrooms across ECCE sectors. This includes Head Start/Early Head Start programs, school-based public preschools, and center- and home-based programs that accept child care subsidies.
Below, we describe four types of questions Virginia’s data can now answer to illustrate the potential benefits of this type of system.
1. Who is in Virginia’s ECCE workforce?
The fragmented, multisector nature of ECCE means that most states lack comprehensive information on the demographics, educational background, experience, and compensation of the ECCE workforce. LinkB5 changes that, providing information on each of the nearly 23,000 ECCE teachers working in Virginia as of fall 2024.
As displayed in the first column of Table 1, Virginia’s early educators are a diverse group. Fewer than one-in-three have a college degree, and about one-in-five are in their first year of teaching. ECCE educator characteristics are also highly variable across sectors. For instance, in child care centers, which serve the most Virginia children, teachers are much more likely to be women of color than their counterparts working in school-based public pre-K programs. Lead teachers working in child care centers also are much less likely to hold at least a Bachelor’s degree (relative to lead teachers in other programs).
There is a wide range of hourly wages across sectors—from $16.78 for lead teachers at child care centers to $32.62 at school-based public pre-K. Assistant teachers in centers have the least experience and lowest pay. These patterns suggest different policy solutions may be needed across ECCE sectors and roles.
2. How prevalent is teacher turnover across ECCE programs in Virginia?
State leaders looking to stabilize their ECCE workforce should have a basic understanding of their state’s baseline level of instability. As far as we are aware, Virginia is the only state that can track this for all publicly funded ECCE teachers.
Figure 1 shows the percentage of Virginia early educators who left their site from fall 2023 to fall 2024. It shows that about one-in-three lead teachers and 38% of assistant teachers employed at a publicly funded ECCE program in fall 2023 left their position within a year. Annual turnover rates were highest among teachers in child care centers, particularly assistant teachers who are paid the least.
3. Do year-over-year turnover rates differ by teacher or site characteristics?
While Figure 1 highlights important differences across sectors and roles, there could be important differences within sectors and roles, too, based on teacher and site characteristics. For instance, maybe teachers with more education, or those with higher pay, are more likely to stay at their sites year over year. LinkB5 has this information.
In Figure 2, we examine differences in 2023-2024 turnover rates for lead teachers at Virginia child care centers, disaggregated by years of ECCE experience, hourly wage, and education level. Teachers with a year or less of experience in ECCE and teachers earning below the median wage ($16.00 per hour) have considerably higher turnover rates than more experienced and higher-paid teachers. There are not major differences by teacher education levels.
4. How do state-level patterns vary across regions?
Finally, Virginia is a diverse state, and overall trends at the state level may mask important regional differences. Regional ECCE leaders are particularly interested in understanding the workforce challenges in their own communities. LinkB5 makes it possible to identify differences in ECCE workforce stability at the regional and local levels. To aid regional and local decision-making, we have used LinkB5 data to create publicly available interactive data tools that allow users to review data for particular regions or localities. These local data highlight large differences in ECCE year-over-year workforce instability across Virginia communities, suggesting that some areas may benefit more from state workforce supports than others.
Comprehensive ECCE data systems are needed for effective policymaking
Early educators are the key driver of both ECCE quality and ECCE access. Without a stable teacher workforce, children and families cannot reap the benefits of ECCE. Stabilizing ECCE requires large public investments in compensation for early educators, which states are starting to make. Coupling those investments with systemwide workforce data is essential for designing good policies and evaluating their impact.
Virginia’s investment in the design, development, and ongoing use of LinkB5 means they will be able to monitor ECCE workforce stability. The state will be able to track changes in turnover across time, which is critical for answering questions about whether specific policies or investments lead to desired improvements. And starting next year, they will be able to accurately track turnover both across years and within years, which is the type of turnover that likely impacts young children most. This data system makes Virginia well-positioned to evaluate the impact of their novel workforce policies, including a teacher pay incentive, increased subsidy reimbursement rates to cover the true cost of care and unprecedented bipartisan investments in ECCE.
Through collaboration across state agencies, researchers, regional partners, and ECCE sites, Virginia’s example shows that it is possible to address the ECCE data deficit even within the fragmented ECCE landscape—and that doing so can help design, refine, and evaluate policies.
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