Overview
The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) has five primary goals: (1) to allow States flexibility to develop child care programs and policies that best suit the needs of children and parents within the State; (2) to promote parental choice to empower working parents to make their own decisions on the child care that best suits their family's needs; (3) to encourage States to provide consumer education information to help parents make informed choices about child care; (4) to provide child care to parents trying to achieve economic self-sufficiency; and (5) to assist States in implementing health, safety, licensing, and registration standards established in State regulations. Among the expected long-term outcomes of the CCDF are: 1) improved employment and self-sufficiency outcomes for parents; and 2) increased availability of high quality care for low-income working families.
Since 2000, Congress has appropriated about $10 million per year of CCDF discretionary funds to be used for child care research and evaluation. These funds have supported projects that add to our knowledge about the efficacy of child care subsidy policies and programs toward achieving the two targeted long-term outcomes of the CCDF.
The Child Care State Research Capacity cooperative agreements have three main goals:
- To improve the collection, analysis, and interpretation of CCDF data. Improving data collection, analysis and interpretation is essential for providing research-based evidence to inform policy and programmatic decision-making at the State and local levels. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2007, topics of particular interest are: 1) helping low-income working parents maintain employment and achieve self-sufficiency, and 2) improving the quality of care available and utilized by low-income working parents and at-risk families to support parental outcomes and child well-being.
- To develop or improve analytic linkages with other State and local data systems (e.g., CCDF and TANF). Building data capacity across programs that serve similar families is important for understanding the interactions between programs including coverage, gaps in services and the cycling on and off programs. Such linkages can inform how to best direct multi-program policies most efficiently to support the needs of low-income families and children.
- To encourage collaboration among State policymakers and research institutions. States are expected to establish or expand a child care research, analysis and coordinating function, either as a unit within State government or through a contractual relationship with an outside research organization or university. Because most States do not have the resources to conduct detailed policy research, these projects encourage partnerships between researchers and State lead agencies to most effectively conduct the child care policy research critical for making program decisions.
The project period is 9/30/07-9/29/10 and the point of contact is Susan Jekielek. Ask a Question.
Grantee
Grantee:
South Carolina Department of Social Services
The goal of this research project is to leverage the state of South Carolina’s current data system and build its research capacity to better track South Carolina’s children and their families. Specifically, this project will create a child-based database for the Child Care Licensing Operating System which will house data on children in child care; develop a system of linked data sets from multiple service providers that captures key data about families and children under the age of 6; and investigate the impact of the Child Care and Development Fund on improving the quality of child care available to and utilized by low-income working parents and at-risk families.