Low pay, meager benefits, poor morale, and high turnover impact the daily experience of many early childhood educators in the United States. While public spending in early childhood education has substantially increased in recent years, it has mainly fueled expansion, not quality enhancement to help programs attract, compensate, and retain well-educated teachers and administrators. While state policy makers and decision makers have been busy instituting research-informed program standards that increase teacher education requirements, the educational attainment of teachers working in community-based early childhood programs has dropped. That is, the field has a rapidly evolving knowledge base about what constitutes best practice but a workforce that is, for the most part, ill-prepared to put that knowledge into practice. In this article, the author discusses the rising standards and declining staff qualifications in early childhood education.