Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s child-care program is, on its surface, a plan to substantially boost the availability of quality, affordable child care.

The focus of news stories so far, rightly, has been on two elements — the amount of subsidies provided to families, and the $700 billion cost, over a decade, of the Warren plan, funded by her controversial wealth tax.

Also read: What Elizabeth Warren is promising in her ‘Universal Child Care’ plan — and how she’ll fund it

But a look at the details, even before it’s turned into an actual bill, show that it would also have an impact on teacher pay across the country, and affect state and local government finances.

Warren’s plan calls for an expansion of federal funding — beyond Head Start and military programs — for early learning programs. The numbers her office provides, based on a study conducted for it by Moody’s Analytics, suggest that participation in such programs would expand to 12 million children from 6.8 million. Put another way, only 10% of kids would be left with no regular child-care arrangement, down from about one-third today.

Key to her promise of not just providing care but high-quality care is the provision that compensation be comparable to that of similarly credentialed local public school teachers.

That’s a huge shift!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 1.22 million child-care workers across the country, earning an average of $22,290 per year. Compare that to kindergarten and elementary school teachers — of whom there are 1.57 million, earning $56,900 per year, according to the BLS.

It’s of little wonder, then, that both the teachers and the state and municipal government workers unions immediately endorsed the Warren plan.

Now, it’s also the case that child-care workers aren’t credentialed to the same degree that elementary teachers are, so the wording of the legislation will be important. But central to the Warren plan to improve day-care quality (and studies show that quality is not particularly good at the moment) is to draw on better-paid talent, and not just rely on training programs.

At the same time, the teaching profession is one of the most exposed to the wave of baby-boom retirements, further compounding what could become a scramble for talent.

Think what the Warren plan could do to state and local budgets, who fund the lion’s share of U.S. educational expenditures. Nationwide, about a quarter of state and local government spending is on elementary and secondary education.

Depending on one’s perspective, setting off a scramble for talent for teachers might be a good thing, particularly in a crowded Democratic presidential field. It also could create an unfunded mandate for state and local governments.