Child Care and Development Fund, Report to Congress for Fiscal Years 2004 and 2005
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FY 2004 AND FY 2005 RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Beginning in FY 2000, Congress authorized the Bureau to spend $10 million annually in CCDF funds for research, demonstration, and evaluation. Research priorities in FY 2004 and FY 2005 were identified after a careful review of the current status of knowledge and evidence. The research agenda responds to the needs of States for research-based evidence that will inform policy decision-making and implementation of the CCDF program at the State and local levels.
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The Child Care Bureau’s Research Priorities CCB seeks to address the questions that are most relevant to Federal, State, and local community policymakers. These questions include:
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CCB’s research projects involve sophisticated research methodologies, including quasi-experimental and experimental designs. Several national evaluations have been launched to examine variations in State child care policies and explore promising approaches to child care provider training. In addition, CCB is investing in efforts to increase State capacity for research and data analysis, support doctoral students working in child care research, and improve research quality and usefulness through the Child Care Policy Research Consortium and Child Care and Early Education Research Connections. Collaborative relationships with other Federal agencies and national organizations are being strengthened, and many studies now involve partnerships that bring together diverse constituencies and research interests. The following provides an overview of CCB’s research initiatives in FY 2004 and FY 2005.
Child Care Policy Research Consortium
During FY 2004 and FY 2005, CCB continued to expand its national Child Care Policy Research Consortium of grantees and contractors. The purpose of this consortium is to help CCB increase national capacity for sound child care research, identify and respond to critical issues, and link child care research with policy, practice, and consumer demand. As part of its responsibility to foster child care research and dissemination of research findings, in collaboration with CCB, the Consortium sponsored annual meetings in FY 2004 and FY 2005 and increased the participation of State-level Administrators and research staff in these meetings. Members of the consortium participated in panel discussions, workshops, and poster board sessions to explore current issues facing researchers and policymakers.
As a result of the Consortium’s activities, child care researchers across the country are working in collaboration with policymakers and practitioners on studies that are timely and interdisciplinary. Members work to develop improved consensus about child care data definitions, measures, and methods. They also are creating longitudinal datasets from child care subsidy systems, regulatory information systems, resource and referral systems, and other key sources. Finally, members are producing new studies that examine interrelationships among programs and their effects on families and children, as well as some that replicate existing studies in different States and communities.
Child Care and Early Education Research Connections (www.childcareresearch.org)
Research Connections is a Web-based, interactive database of research documents and public use data sets for conducting secondary analyses on topics related to early care and education. The project is a cooperative agreement between the Child Care Bureau, the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at Columbia University, and the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. In FY 2004 and FY 2005 the project focused on populating the site with thousands of child care and early education research materials and datasets for secondary analyses; provided data workshops on the use of archived datasets containing important variables on child care and early education; and produced research summaries and briefs on topics relevant for policy decision-making.
Child Care Policy Research Grants
CCB has funded 34 Child Care Policy Research Grants to study a broad range of issues highlighted by policymakers and investigators in the field. In FY 2004 CCB funded 10 new child care policy research grants addressing a variety of child care policy topics, including:
- School readiness outcomes and how they relate to the quality and extent of child care children receive;
- Provider, market, community, and subsidy policy factors that shape the quality of child care;
- Development, implementation, and evaluation of quality ratings of child care facilities;
- Survey of methodologies used by States, Territories, and Tribes in conducting market rate surveys, validation of diverse methodologies, and rate-setting policies;
- Child care workforce issues, such as provider participation in the child care subsidy system, including faith-based programs; and
- Strategies States and communities implement to improve their child care services and systems, including collaboration and coordination with Head Start programs and the child welfare system.
(See appendices for descriptions of new child care policy research grants awarded in FY 2004.)
Evaluation of Child Care Subsidy Strategies
In FY 2001, ACF contracted with Abt Associates Inc. for a multi-State, 10-year study to evaluate the impact, implementation, cost, and benefits of four child care subsidy strategies. These evaluations will expand the knowledge of subsidy policies by assessing causality through experimental design. One evaluation in Illinois is testing the impact of alternative eligibility policies (different income eligibility limits and recertification periods) on parental employment. Another evaluation in Washington is testing the impact of differential copayment schedules on parental employment. A third evaluation in Massachusetts is testing whether training family child care providers to implement an early childhood curriculum has an effect on caregiving practices and children’s school readiness outcomes. These three evaluations are ongoing and continued to make progress through FY 2005.
In FY 2005, the fourth child care subsidy strategy evaluation was completed. This study, called Project Upgrade, was an experimental evaluation of the effects of training child care providers to implement three early language and literacy curricula in centers serving low-income and subsidized preschoolers conducted in Miami-Dade County, Florida. The study reported statistically significant effects of two of the three curricula in changing teacher practices and in supporting children’s language and literacy outcomes. Outcomes were measured through classroom observations and child assessments related to school readiness. Additional findings from the study are highlighted below.
- Within 6 months of training all three language/literacy interventions produced significant impacts on teacher behaviors and interactions with children that supported their language and literacy development; within a year of training these impacts were generally more pronounced, and there were significant impacts on the number of classroom activities that involved literacy, and on literacy resources in the classroom.
- The intervention had significant positive impacts on teacher behavior. These impacts were generally stronger for teachers whose primary language was Spanish than for their English-speaking counterparts.
- Two of the three interventions had significant impacts on all four measures of emergent literacy outcomes for children: definitional vocabulary; phonological awareness; knowledge and understanding of print; and the overall index of early literacy. The impact of the two effective interventions was much greater for children in classrooms with Spanish-speaking teachers then for children in classrooms with English-speaking teachers.
- The two interventions that had impacts on child outcomes brought children close to or above the national norms on three of the four measures of emergent literacy outcomes for children. The impacts represented between 4 and 9 months of developmental growth, depending on the outcome. The effects of the interventions were substantially larger that those found on similar measures in the Head Start Impact Study and more closely resemble the effects of school-based prekindergarten programs.
- There was a small but significant relationship between teachers’ educational attainment and some aspects of their behavior with children before the intervention. The effect of the training and ongoing mentoring provided as an integral part of the interventions was to eliminate this effect. That is, as a result of the training and mentoring, less-educated teachers looked remarkably similar to their better educated counterparts in the extent to which they provided activities that supported literacy. Consequently, the impacts of the interventions on child outcomes were not affected by teachers’ educational achievement.
State Child Care Data and Research Capacity Projects
The State Child Care Data and Research Capacity Projects assist State CCDF Lead Agencies in developing greater capacity for policy-relevant research and analysis. In partnership with research organizations, the grantees design more effective child care policies and programs with identifiable outcomes for children, families, and communities. The primary goal of the projects is to create a statewide research infrastructure to better understand child care needs, services, and outcomes for families in the context of social, economic, and cultural change. In FY 2004, CCB funded continuations of three grants originally funded in FY 2002.
Child Care Research Scholars
Since FY 2000, CCB has funded doctoral candidates to conduct dissertation research on child care issues. In FY 2004, five new scholars were awarded grants. Six scholars were awarded grants in FY 2005, bringing the total number of funded scholars to 29. New scholars examined several questions, including:
- Which workplace factors enable parents to cope with child care?
- How are child care decisions shaped by race/ethnicity, class, and community contexts?
- How effective is the use of technology in connecting providers with resources?
- What are the effects of quality, stability, and multiplicity of care arrangements on children’s social-emotional adjustment and school readiness?
- How does publicly available information about quality influence parents’ child care choices?
- What is the impact of provider literacy levels on child language?
- How cost-effective are child care subsidies?
- What is the role of Tribal child care programs in serving children from birth to age 5?
Nearly all scholars from the first four waves have completed their dissertations, and several have been published in peer-reviewed journals.
Evaluation of Promising Models and Approaches to Child Care Provider Training
In FY 2003, CCB, in collaboration with the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), awarded two 4-year cooperative agreements to a consortium of seven academic institutions along with their partners in State and local agencies and community organizations. The consortium under the project name “Quality Interventions for Early Care and Education (QUINCE)” is evaluating the effectiveness of two onsite child care provider training models and assessing outcomes related to caregivers’ knowledge, skills, and practices, as well as children’s early learning and literacy. The lead organizations for this effort include the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the Center for Health and Education at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. FY 2004 and FY 2005 funding supported the 2nd and 3rd years of the project.
Child Care and Early Education Estimator
In FY 2003 and FY 2004, CCB contracted with the University of Maryland Foundation to support the development of a statistical modeling tool to determine the participation rate for families receiving child care subsidies and the cost to government for these benefits. This model integrates information from a variety of data sources about CCDF eligibility and the use of subsidized child care. The project was funded and guided by the Child Care Bureau; the ACF Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE); and the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE).
Interagency Research Efforts That Support Good Start, Grow Smart
During FY 2004 and FY 2005, CCB actively supported interagency research initiatives with the U.S. Department of Education. For example, CCB partnered with the National Center for Education Statistics to fund questions on school readiness skills of preschool-age children in the 2005 National Household Education Survey: Early Childhood Program Participation. Also, in collaboration with OPRE, CCB funded observations of child care quality in a subsample of care settings used by the children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), a U.S. Department of Education survey. The observations of quality were conducted when the children were 24 months and 48 months of age. In addition, through the Interagency Workgroup on Good Start, Grow Smart (GSGS), CCB partnered with the U.S. Department of Education (Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs, and Institute for Education Sciences) and other HHS offices (ASPE and National Institute for Child Health and Human Development), as well as OPRE and Office of Head Start within ACF, to coordinate research priorities and activities in support of GSGS.