The United States is facing a child care workforce crisis that cannot be solved by wishful thinking or by relying on a pipeline that does not exist. Families need more child care now, programs need staff now, and policymakers need a realistic workforce strategy now.
One of the most practical and proven steps we can take is to formally adopt the Child Development Associate (CDA) credential as the national entry-level credential for child care professionals.
This is not a radical idea. In fact, it is a return to what has already worked in the two highest-quality early childhood systems in the country—Head Start and the military child care system.
Head Start originally built its professional framework around the CDA, recognizing it as a meaningful, competency-based credential grounded in child development practice. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) military child care system, widely regarded as one of the highest-quality child care systems in the country, continues to use the CDA as a foundational credential for its workforce.
These are not marginal programs. Head Start serves nearly 800,000 children annually, and the DoD system serves another 200,000 children. Their use of the CDA sends a powerful signal: competency matters when caring for young children and must be at the core of efforts to improve the system nationwide. Caring for young children is skilled work. It requires the ability to:
- Support early learning and development
- Build responsive relationships with children and families
- Maintain safe, healthy environments
- Manage classrooms and daily routines
- Apply developmentally appropriate practices in real time
The CDA is designed around these competencies. It assesses what educators can do, not just what they know. It is an approach far better aligned with the realities of child care than purely academic coursework. If we want a workforce prepared for the day-to-day demands of child care, competency-based credentials provide just that.
Degrees matter, but they cannot be the only door into the profession. College degrees absolutely have value, particularly for leadership and long-term career advancement.
But as an entry-level requirement for the entire child care workforce, degrees present too many serious challenges.
Linda SmithFirst, we don’t have enough degree-holders to meet current or future child care demand. Degrees take time, often years—time families and employers do not have. They cost significantly more, creating barriers for individuals entering a historically low-wage profession. Finally, they are largely knowledge-based, not performance-based.
Requiring degrees as the primary entry point narrows the pipeline precisely when we need to widen it. It also risks excluding experienced caregivers, career-changers, and providers from different backgrounds who bring critical skills but cannot afford or access higher education immediately.
A CDA requirement would establish a national floor of competence, create consistency across states, provide a foundation for a professional identity, and expand the workforce pipeline responsibly. Adopting the CDA as the entry-level credential does not mean lowering standards—it means aligning standards with reality. It would support quality improvement without delaying access and allows public investments—training funds, wage supports, scholarships—to be more effectively targeted.
A Practical Step Toward a Stronger System
States are trying to expand child care capacity in the middle of a staffing crisis. Nationally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 160,200 child care worker openings each year on average—mostly driven by turnover and exits. And researchers continue to document that the child care sector’s recovery from the pandemic has been uneven and fragile, with jobs fluctuating month to month and many local markets still struggling to hire and retain staff.
Economist Chris Herbst’s research finds a “consistent picture” that today’s child care workforce is relatively low-skilled and that workforce “quality has declined over time,” using measures such as schooling attainment, wages, and cognitive test scores.
This matters because it reframes the problem: we don’t just need more educators—we need a structure that stops the erosion of qualifications and creates a credible, portable professional baseline. The CDA is one of the most practical tools we have to do that because it is built around demonstrated competency, not just accumulated credit hours.
The child care system will not stabilize unless we address the workforce supply head-on. We cannot “degree our way out” of this shortage in the short term, and families cannot wait years for new educators to enter the field.
The CDA offers a pragmatic, evidence-based solution that has been proven in Head Start and the DoD system, is centered on competency, accessible to a varied workforce, and compatible with long-term professional growth.
If we are serious about strengthening child care, supporting families, and building a sustainable workforce, the CDA should be the entry-level standard nationwide—with clear pathways forward, not barriers at the door.
If states want more child care supply and better quality, reform has to do two things at once: (1) create a realistic entry point into the profession, and (2) set a clear, competency-based floor that protects children and supports programs.
A practical way to accomplish both is to ensure that every classroom has at least one CDA credentialed educator—and to treat the CDA as the entry-level credential for the broader workforce. This approach is not theoretical. It’s consistent with how some of the most respected child development systems built their workforce and with what the labor market will actually support.
A new national goal—one CDA credential per classroom—would be ambitious, measurable, and achievable. It would set a floor for competence where it matters most—inside the classroom. It could support mixed staffing models, with new entrants working alongside a CDA mentor or lead, and it would expand the supply of early educators without pretending degrees can be produced overnight.
States can pair the requirement with a reasonable phase-in timeline and use quality set-aside dollars from the Child Care and Development Block Grant and other public financing supports (scholarships, paid release time, coaching) so programs aren’t punished for a workforce shortage policymakers already know exists.
Herbst notes that in an ideal world we’d directly measure multiple dimensions of skill (including traits like communication and patience), but in practice, policymakers rely on imperfect proxies like schooling and wages. The CDA is one of the few widely recognized credentials that pushes the field closer to practice-based standards—what educators can do with children and families in real settings.
Degrees remain important—especially for leadership and long-term advancement—but they are slower to scale, more expensive for workers, and often more knowledge-based than performance-based. The CDA can serve as the baseline professional credential, with clear pathways to degrees, specializations, and leadership roles over time.
The Bottom Line
The child care staffing crisis is not going to be solved by raising barriers that the workforce cannot clear. Neither can we ignore the evidence that qualifications are slipping over time.
Licensing reform should do what effective professional systems do: set a competency-based baseline that is achievable at scale and build upward from there. Requiring one CDA-credentialed educator in every classroom is a smart place to start. It worked for Head Start, and it worked for the military.
Linda Smith is the director of policy at the Buffett Institute, with a specific focus on military, rural, and tribal child care, early childhood financing, and engaging the business community in child care initiatives nationwide.