In the past several decades, advances in brain science have suggested that the learning that occurs in the first few years of a child’s life lays the groundwork for a productive adulthood. The expansion of preschool is one of the few topics where both Republicans and Democrats in Congress find common ground; while lawmakers don’t always agree on how programs should be funded or structured, the belief that good early-childhood education can help prevent later gaps in test scores and graduation rates from emerging between poor and well-off children is widely shared.

Yet most early-childhood educators still make so little money that they are eligible for public benefits, according to a new report from the U.S. Education Department and Health and Human Services. Childcare workers, nearly all of them women, earn less than tree trimmers and pest-control workers, hairdressers and janitors.

“It’s an unjust situation,” said Marcy Whitebook, the director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California at Berkeley, who has been studying early childhood for four decades.

[For more of this story, written by Emily Deruy, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...ree-trimmers/487025/]