An Evaluation of Maryland's Early Educator Retention Bonus Program, ECSTRA
What We Do
Young children thrive when they have stable and engaging relationships with their caregivers. Yet early educators are among the lowest-paid workforces in the United States, which likely contributes to high turnover rates in childcare settings. To address both turnover and compensation challenges in the early childhood education (ECE) workforce, state and local governments are increasingly considering approaches to improving early educators’ compensation, including through retention bonus programs. In 2023, MSDE piloted the ECSTRA Program as a potential policy strategy to help stabilize its ECE workforce. ECSTRA directed American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds directly to eligible early educators who remained in their same childcare sites and roles for an up-to-8-month period via retention bonuses.
IRB-SBS #5536
Project Information
Project Team: Allison Atteberry
Project Status: Active
Project Sponsor: Maryland State Department of Education
A research team at the University of Virginia is conducting a study of MSDE’s ECSTRA Program alongside the program’s implementation. The primary goal of the research study is to explore the relationship between ECSTRA bonus offer amounts and site turnover reduction. To accommodate the financial constraints given limited ARPA funding, the ECSTRA Program used a lottery-based approach to fairly allocate the limited opportunities to participate in the program and at each bonus level. Because of the way MSDE implemented the pilot program, researchers had a unique opportunity to use a rigorous randomized controlled trial design to estimate the causal effects of ECSTRA bonus offers on early educator turnover.
To supplement the study of ECSTRA’s effects, the research team also administered an online Baseline Survey to a large sample of early educators just before the ECSTRA Program began (August/September 2023), as well as an online Follow-Up Survey two months after the ECSTRA Program ended (August 2024).
Findings
A preliminary report finds that the ECSTRA program modestly reduced turnover rates by about 1.7 points. But the ECSTRA program had considerably stronger effects for early career educators and educators with lower wages at baseline. Among those in the first five years of their career, ECSTRA bonus offers reduced 8-month turnover by 9.1 points (from 19.8% to 10.7%)—a 46 percent reduction in turnover. Lower-wage educators experienced a 31 percent reduction in turnover.