An early childhood center director in Washington re-draws the weekly menu to contend with the rising cost of food. A home-based provider in Arkansas stays up late crunching the budget numbers, stretched thin between food and health insurance. A provider who watches children of her friends, family members and neighbors has a sleepless night worrying about if the growing children have enough to eat.

Discussions have long swirled around children’s food insecurity, most recently peaking with the paused Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the food stamps program. That program is reinstated, though its requirements are changing by the end of next year.

Now, a new study has found that children’s caretakers, too, are struggling with hunger more than ever.

According to a survey from the RAPID Survey Project at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, more than half (58 percent) of child care providers surveyed experienced hunger in June 2025 — which is one of the highest percentages the organization has seen since it began collecting data in 2021. Some respondents – including the providers from Washington and Arkansas mentioned previously – shared personal experiences with hunger, such as those mentioned above.

“I think most people think we’re in a very prosperous country and with hunger, there’s something of a mindset around it of abject poverty,” says Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center for Early Childhood and founder of the RAPID Project. “But we’re starting to talk about these issues as a canary in the coal mine; there’s signals it’s starting to spread to a much wider swath of population.”

The latest findings are a bump from June 2021 to May 2025, when an average of 44 percent of the surveyed child care providers reported experiencing hunger. The spike, while alarming to Fisher, was not surprising. The cost of groceries is rising, and there have also been cuts to programs that provide food for food banks.

“It’s likely people are seeking free food where it’s available, but that is becoming harder and harder to access,” Fisher says, adding his son, who runs a food bank in rural Washington state, has seen an increased demand.

“Food insecurity” is defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a household’s access to adequate food. The RAPID Project considered a respondent “hungry” if they experienced at least two of the five food insecurity scenarios:

• If the food you bought went bad, could you not afford to replace it?
• Can you not afford to eat balanced meals?
• Did you or other adults in your household ever cut the size of your meal or skip meals because there wasn’t enough money for food? If yes, how often did this happen?
• Did you ever eat less than you felt you should because there wasn’t enough money for food?
• Were you ever hungry but didn’t eat because there wasn’t enough money for food?

Poonam Gupta, a research associate at the Urban Institute in the Tax and Income Supports division, says while “hunger” is an immediate condition, the usage of the “food insecurity” label showcases a longer-term issue.

“Even if you’re not currently hungry in the moment while taking the survey, you can still be food insecure,” she says.

The reported food insecurity spanned across all types of child care providers. Fisher said center-based directors had the lowest rates of food insecurity among the group, followed by home-based providers, with center-based teachers and providers of family, friends and neighbor care seeing the highest rates.

“There’s been a ton of reporting on how broken the child care system is and a lot has to do with low wages,” he says. “So it’s not surprising it’s across the board.”

Gupta added early childhood education teachers, and other low-income workers with hourly wages, are in a particularly tough spot because of the instability that comes with weekly schedules.

“A lot of attention is paid in general to the low-income workforce, but folks that have non-traditional or inconsistent hours tend to be at the highest risk,” she says. “There’s a type of instability in not being able to predict when your hours are. And if you’re an early childhood education provider and have children of your own, it’s difficult for you to afford child care and even more difficult to meet the work requirements to get SNAP benefits.” The program requires recipients to work at least 80 hours per month.

Early childhood care providers’ schedules can be particularly volatile, where workers can get sent home if, for example, not enough children are in attendance on a given day.

Hunger is widespread for children and adults, with 1 in 4 households experiencing food insecurity in 2024, according to the Urban Institute. But Fisher and Gupta believe the general public isn’t well aware of hunger among adults. They pointed out that most efforts — both from organizations and in research projects — largely focus on children’s food insecurity.

“I think the images they show perpetuate these ideas that the people who are hungry are in an extreme margin,” Fisher says, rather than the reality that much of the general public is at risk for going without adequate food.

The issue points to an irony at the heart of how child care works in the U.S. Child care costs families more than ever, with Child Care Aware of America finding that parents in most states pay more for child care each month than for rent or mortgages. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average pay for a child care worker is below $12.25 per hour. Child care workers with a college degree get roughly $14.70 per hour.

Gupta estimates that food insecurity, including among early childhood care providers, will get worse. Upcoming changes to SNAP are slated for October 2026 and include an increased age limit and removing exemptions for veterans, those experiencing homelessness and those aging out of the foster care system. According to 2024 data from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California at Berkeley, roughly 43 percent of child care workers receive some form of public assistance, including SNAP and Medicaid.

“If anything, we only expect this to get worse in the coming year because of all the disruptions being made, mainly to the SNAP program,” she says.

This story was published by a Voices of Change fellow. Learn more about the fellowship here.

I’ve attended my share of professional development sessions as an educator. Too often, I’ve walked away asking the same question: Is this really how we expect teachers to learn?

I still remember one session on trauma-informed teaching held in a school cafeteria. The tables and attached seats were too small for most of us, while the lights hummed overhead. For two and a half hours, the facilitator read from an endless slide deck about the importance of connection and empathy. There was minimal context building, limited discussion and no reflection. By the end, the facilitator smiled and said, “Now you are all trauma-informed teachers!” I think my eyes rolled so far back they almost stayed there.

Sitting and listening to someone talk for 45 to 60 minutes is not learning, let alone two and a half hours. My body knows it before my brain does. I get restless, my mind drifts, I check the time and take a walk to refill my water bottle. In that first hour, disappointment sets in fast.
Minimal conditions for adult learning have become the norm. I used to resent that; now I fear it. Because the longer I sat in those breakout rooms, the quieter I became. My curiosity dulled, the topic’s urgency faded and I started doing what was expected: showing up, signing in and leaving seemingly unchanged. That terrified me. I could feel myself becoming the kind of learner I never wanted my students to be. Even the most dedicated teachers can wilt in the wrong conditions.

And here’s what often goes unspoken: teachers already give so much of their time to these sessions, spending hours after school on professional days and during planning periods. That investment deserves more than compliance-based sessions that leave teachers unchanged or walking away with a checklist of “next steps” that never take root.

After experiences like that, I find myself returning to familiar questions: Why do we accept for ourselves what we would never accept for our students? What if we taught students the way we teach teachers? We’d call it ineffective, parents would complain and administrators would intervene. Yet, the same approach is accepted for teachers’ professional development: lecture-heavy, one-size-fits-all and compliance-driven. I knew better for my students and kept accepting less for myself. That contradiction began to haunt me.

As a high school English teacher, I built lessons around engagement, differentiation and relevance so students could connect learning to their lives. They deserved instruction that met them where they were and balanced support with challenge. When it comes to teaching teachers, we need the same shift — from professional development done to us, to professional learning created by, for and with us.

A Different Way Exists

I remember one of the first times I felt what real professional learning could be. Around 2013, when Edcamp was spreading across schools, my administrators used this format for one of our PD days. These grassroots “unconferences” turned the familiar model upside down. There were no pre-approved presenters or hour-by-hour agendas. Teachers built the schedule on the spot and moved freely between conversations. If one wasn’t helpful, you left and found another. The emphasis was on curiosity and choice.

I led two sessions that day: one on digital tools for learning and another on equitable grading. I didn’t stand in front of the group; I sat in the circle. We tested tools in real time, pried into long-held grading beliefs and argued about what being fair really means in high school grading. What I remember most wasn’t the content but the energy in the room and the buzz of teachers thinking, building, disagreeing and learning together.

It was the first time I realized how much trust professional learning requires: trust in teachers’ intelligence, instincts and creativity. We talk so much about empowering students, but rarely about empowering teachers. Edcamp, brief as it was, made me wonder what would happen if we trusted educators the way we expect them to trust their students.

That lesson deepened through the Rhode Island Writing Project at Rhode Island College, where “teachers teaching teachers” wasn’t a slogan but a practice. During the summer institute, I joined a community of educators from across the state. We wrote together, shared feedback and listened, really listened, to each other’s classroom stories and the complex and messy overlap between personal and professional life.

That summer changed me. I saw what it meant to honor teacher knowledge, and to treat professional learning as a dialogue, not delivery. It ruined me, in the best way. Once you’ve experienced learning that is alive, reciprocal and demanding, it’s hard to sit quietly again while someone reads from slides.

But here’s what I know: those moments were rare. Outliers.

Most professional development since that summer has looked more like paperwork than pedagogy. Neatly packaged, disconnected and efficient to a fault. For many educators, PD is still something that happens to them, not with them. I’ve seen what that does. It breeds cynicism and convinces brilliant teachers that their professional growth is optional, even disposable. Novice and veteran teachers alike found ways to get through or get by during especially disconnected sessions. Not out of defiance, but self-preservation.

As a district administrator, I find myself in a very different position where I receive more structured opportunities for professional learning than I ever did in the classroom. I attend multi-day workshops on leadership frameworks, statewide coaching institutes and even regional conferences focused on instructional design. They’re well-planned, reflective, energizing and respectful of participants’ needs. Nothing like the one-off PowerPoints teachers sit through during the school day or after school.

That contrast is hard to ignore. It reminds me just how uneven our systems can be. The higher up you go, the more development you’re offered; the closer you are to students, the less you get.

I carry that discomfort with me every day. I think about the teachers in sessions I once led or attended who expressed their skepticism and tiredness of being told what to value or what new requirement to add to their already stacked list of classroom responsibilities. My job now is to make sure the professional learning I help design never repeats that pattern — that it respects their time, their expertise and their humanity. I don’t want them to feel the quiet resignation I once did.

This problem runs deeper than any one district or leader. A recent report from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University affirmed Rhode Island’s commitment to investing in professional learning. The report highlights state-level efforts such as expanding instructional coaching, building in common planning time and fostering cross-district collaboration. These are the supports I wish I’d had years ago.

The report also reminded me of what I’ve seen firsthand: resources and structures only work when the design honors teachers’ time and trust.

How We Teach Teachers

How we design professional learning makes visible the value we place on teachers. When PD is treated as a formality, the message is that teacher growth is optional. But when it’s treated as authentic learning, the message is clear: adult learning matters, and investing in teachers is investing in students.

If we want professional learning that serves educators and the students they teach, we must move beyond seat time and toward structures that honor teacher expertise and foster continuous improvement. The elements of strong professional learning aren’t mysteries; they mirror the same principles of good teaching.

A few approaches that work include teacher-led inquiry cycles that invite educators to identify problems of practice and design solutions together; offering choice and voice in sessions that make learning relevant and personalized; building in time for application and reflection; and creating job-embedded opportunities where teachers can learn in context alongside their colleagues and students.

The future of our profession will be defined by what we choose right now and whether we can model the kind of learning we say we want for our students.