The pay scale for educators is topsy-turvy in this country. Business school professors are paid over four times more than day care workers. Based on the value of their work, it should be the other way around.

Say what? Let me explain my reasoning.

At birth, an infant's brain has about 100 billion neurons. That's about a million times more processors than in a supercomputer. But in a supercomputer, the processors are all linked. When a baby is born, the neurons are not.

What's required, then, to form the super-duper computer we call the human brain is making connections among those neurons. How do we get that to happen? By stimulation in the first three years of life, by the interaction between infants and adults in simple activities such as talking, playing, reading, rocking and singing. And who's doing that stimulation and building the foundation for lifelong learning? Parents, certainly, but around half of all American children are enrolled in day care with paid staff.

In the early years of life, with sufficient stimulation, about a million new connections are made every second. Limited stimulation means fewer connections and less potential for learning. Day care workers, then, play a vital role in unleashing the power of a child's brain. Speaking in business school terms, day care workers have the potential for an awful lot of "value add."

Judith Graham, a human development specialist at the University of Maine, summarizes the research this way: "Early childhood is the time to build either a strong and supportive, or fragile and unreliable foundation." Thus, in the first year of life, babies can make the connections needed to respond to any language, but that capacity is narrowed by the sounds and words they hear. By age 5, a child's brain has reached 90% of its adult size.

If the foundation isn't made in those first years, a baby starts out at a disadvantage. How many potential great inventors, novelists, artists and researchers never fulfill their destiny? For that matter, deprived kids have lower chances of going to college and getting a highly paid job. Good day care is a good investment, too. According to an article by professors Garett Jones and W. Joel Schneider, raising children's IQ by a single point raises their living standards by 6.1%.

Let's compare the value added by a business school professor to that of a day care worker. A business school professor is at best polishing the jewel first discovered and tended by the early childhood educators who came before them. The fact their students can come up with successful marketing programs, understand a profit-and-loss statement and run a successful startup is in no small part due to the foundations built by early child care.

In the United States, an average day care worker is paid $28,520 per year. An average business school professor makes a median salary of $130,498. One professor at a well-known university tells me that B-school professors can easily earn double or triple that from consulting done for outside businesses. I doubt day care workers are offered the same opportunity.

In fact, low wages undermine the quality of early learning programs. A report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services acknowledges that "high-quality providers and educators are the single most important factors" in high-quality early education, but goes on to say "too many individuals within the early learning workforce earn low wages — sometimes at or near the Federal poverty line." Unsurprisingly, the report finds that where providers earn higher wages, the children "spend more time engaged in positive interactions and developmentally appropriate activities with peers and teachers, which contributes to healthy development."

My daughter lives in upstate New York. Her son's day care provider recently cut back its hours by more than 20% due to a staffing shortage. I'll bet if the day care workers there were paid what business school professors earn, the problem finding high-quality staff would disappear.

The entire situation is ass-backward. Day care does a bad job and half of all American kids suffer. Business school professors do a bad job and what happens? An old boss of mine who founded a Fortune 500 company thought B-school taught the wrong values to its students, but we'll put his argument aside for another time. Suffice it to say that without the foundation to express oneself well and to form meaningful personal relationships, an MBA isn't worth much.

What if the best and brightest were attracted to working in day care? What if they earned $130K per year? Any business school professor would tell you it would be a good investment.

In Keith Raffel's checkered past, he has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started an award-winning internet software company and written five novels, which you can check out at keithraffel.com. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard. To find out more about Keith and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at creators.com.

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