The Listening to Teachers Study: Towards a More Equitable Post-Pandemic Early Care & Education System in New York City. Technical Report

This is the summary report for the second year of the Listening to Teachers Study which asks how early childhood educators in New York City (NYC) have been faring through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The study's purpose has been to seek deeper understandings of what NYC's early care and education (ECE) workforce has experienced during the Pandemic to inform decision-making about the city's future ECE systems by raising issues for reflection and action-oriented discussion. The study has followed a multistage, exploratory-mixed methods design, incorporating: (1) ongoing consultation with ECE stakeholders to incorporate questions of interest to them -- and their reactions to emerging findings;(2) a survey focused on understanding nuances in the workforce and how these might relate to well-being and coping (June 2021, n=663); and (3) in-depth interviews with racially minoritized educators, given the Pandemic's disproportionate effects on communities of color (Spring 2022, n=28). These data were analyzed through an iterative, constant comparative method that combined descriptive and inferential statistics with mixed deductive-inductive analysis of open-ended survey questions and interview transcripts. Among the key findings: (1) 86% reported being affected by 5 or more (of 11) economic, health, social, and emotional stressors; (2) 32% had a household income below $35K -- in New York City; (3) FCC professionals far more frequently worked with infants and toddlers than other survey contributors; were weathering more economic stresses; and reported significantly higher rates of suffering and struggling; (4) 61% reported not feeling burned out in June 2021, but the odds of program leaders indicating potential burnout were 1.7 times higher than all others; (5) Support from supervisors and system representatives (e.g., coaches) reduced the odds of someone reporting potential burnout; and (6) The odds of those identifying as Black, Indigenous, or Other People of Color being in leadership positions were less than their white colleagues. It is important to note that these findings are limited to those who contributed to this study and should not be applied to all of NYC's early childhood educators; however, the totality of findings raise important questions about systemic issues moving forward, among these: What is being done to support the workforce's holistic well-being? In particular, what is in place to sustain program leaders and family child care professionals? What is the status of wage equity efforts? What is being done to nurture diversities in the workforce? What more can be done? [Additional support for the report from the New York Early Childhood Professional Institute and the New York City Early Childhood Research Network.]