The Furture Of Early Childhood Education

The Future of Early Childhood Education
If you ask someone to list for you the most important jobs of our society, teachers always make the list sometimes beating out careers like doctor or lawyer.   Ironically, for a career we value so much, teaching has never been a well paying profession.   But times are about to change. Due to an increasing demand and a fixed supply, salaries for early education teachers are expected to increase within the next decade.   The United States Board of Labor ranks this career as one of the highest paying of the next ten years, with an expected median tenure salary of over ninety thousand by the year 2012.   Even taking into account inflation, working conditions, and different people's preferred lifestyle, it is reasonable to say that a career in early childhood education can provide a very comfortable living.
The law of supply and demand helps us understand how price is set in our society.   It states that if the supply of a good increases, or if the demand of a good decreases, then the price of the good drops.   The opposite is also true, if the supply decreases and the demand increases, than a good becomes more expensive.   The theory of supply and demand is very powerful, and can be applied to many different things.   In this paper, it will be used to explain why teachers' salaries are expected to increase a great deal.   The number of teachers will be the supply, the need for teachers will be the demand, and salaries will be the price that will be affected.

In 2002 there were over two million positions for early education teachers in the United States. Of the teachers in those jobs, "about 1.5 million were elementary school teachers, 424,000 were preschool teachers, and 168,000 were kindergarten teachers"(Outlook). The majority of these teachers worked for the local government educational services, with about ten percent working for private schools. While the majority of preschool teachers are employed by child daycare services....