If President Joe Biden wishes to implement his plan for universal pre-K education, it will require a lot more teachers.
New data reflect the immense amount of hiring that schools would have to do to fulfill Biden’s vision of universal pre-K in the United States.
Between 40,000 and 50,000 new teachers would be required to enroll 70% of the U.S.’s 3- and 4-year-old population, according to an estimate from the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. School districts nationwide would need to hire an estimated 5,000 teachers a year to meet these demands within the next 10 years.
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Hiring alone is not the only problem facing teachers. “A larger problem is that about half the teachers of the 5 million children currently enrolled need some additional education to complete a BA degree with specialized training in early childhood, about 125,000 teachers,” NIEER argues in its fact sheet.
Based on the average spending of $12,500 per child per year, the cost to employ these teachers would end up around 70 billion annually, reports NIEER. That is $50 billion more than the federal government spends on students currently.
School districts across the U.S. are canceling school days due to teachers experiencing fatigue. There are also reports of teacher shortages, an issue that existed before the COVID pandemic strained most school systems.
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While some states such as New Jersey have begun enacting their universal pre-K programs, President Joe Biden has pushed for universal pre-K through his 1.9 trillion dollar American Families Plan in April. The proposed plan continues to struggle to gain momentum in Congress.
NIERR estimates that 6% of 3-year-olds and 36% of 4-year-olds were enrolled in a state-funded program during the 2019-20 school year. While 44 states have some form of state-funded pre-k education programming, they are often limited in space due to funding issues.
