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Early Childhood Topics
- Head Start/Early Head Start
- Early Care & Education Settings
- Home Visiting
- Early Childhood Education Practices
- Studying Children in a Multicultural Society
- Clients
At a Glance
Funder:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation; Administration for Children and Families
Project Time Frame:
Webinars
Project Publications
Evaluating Child Care Quality Rating Systems
Quality Rating Systems (QRS) are tools to assess, improve, and promote quality in early child care and education. The tools can be used by parents in selecting child care, by providers as a benchmark to achieve better quality care, and by programs as an accountability measure for funding.
Statewide or local child care Quality Rating Systems are in place in 22 states and under consideration in many others. While system attributes vary widely, they all attempt to bring accountability to the large public investments made in early child care and education. QRS activities include one or more of the following:
- Supporting parents’ awareness of and use of quality information to select care
- Rewarding child care settings that achieve increased levels of quality
- Supporting professional development of the early childhood workforce
- Expanding supply of quality programs, particularly those serving low-income children
- Increasing children's school readiness and success
As QRS policy and program practice becomes more mainstream, states and municipalities that adopt these methods need support in determining the most useful ways to build and evaluate models. Mathematica's assessment involves gathering, analyzing, and organizing information to inform each piece of the QRS logic model. We are also helping states better understand the full picture, the interactions that can occur, intended and unintended consequences of policy and implementation.
The study's goals are to:
- Develop a compendium on QRS, providing descriptive and comparative information, as well as evaluation evidence
- Conduct an in-depth, comparative multi-case QRS study
- Conduct a comprehensive secondary analysis of QRS components, using data from existing systems
- Produce an analytic paper that synthesizes and evaluates the information gathered
- Develop a toolkit that provides resources to states regarding best practices in the evaluation of QRS
Webinars
"Effectively Using QRIS Data and Research to Inform Program Design and Management: Sharing New Tools and State Experiences" (November 2011)
Webinar recording | PowerPoint presentation (PDF)
Project Publications
"The Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) Evaluation Toolkit" (August 2011)
"Defining and Measuring Quality: An In-Depth Study of Five Child Care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems" (August 2011)
"Child Care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems: Approaches to Integrating Programs for Young Children in Two States" (August 2011)
"Measuring Quality Across Three Child Care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems: Findings from Secondary Analyses" (August 2011)
"Effective Evaluation of Quality Rating and Improvement Systems for Early Care and Education and School-Age Care" Research-to-Policy, Research-to-Practice Brief (June 2011)
"Compendium of Quality Rating Systems and Evaluations" (April 2010)
State Profiles (April 2010)
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