ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF CHILD CARE SUBSIDY ON PROGRAM ACCESS AND QUALITY: EVALUATION PLANNING

Oklahoma Department Of Human Services, Oklahoma City OK

Investigators

Abstract

The project, Assessing the Impact of Child Care Subsidy on Program Access and Quality: Evaluation Planning, aims to lay the foundation for future evaluative work that will contribute to knowledge about the efficacy of early care and education (ECE) programs, including child care subsidies, in achieving recent federal goals and priorities such as increasing access by low-income families to high-quality ECE programs and promoting the healthy development and school readiness of children served. The 2016-2018 Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) State Plan for Oklahoma details the state's implementation steps to address the requirements included in the 2014 reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Act. For the most part, the state already meets many of the Act's new requirements through existing services and programs. However, there are aspects of the Act that will require changes in state policy and/or additions to existing services. Additionally, there are existing policies and initiatives that, in the past, did not have sufficient capacity to be rigorously evaluated. This Phase I project will support planning and development of evaluation work that will lay the foundation for assessment of key aspects of Oklahoma's CCDF subsidy program. These key aspects, to be assessed in Phase II, include understanding features of access (e.g., how parents learn about and access programs; patterns of program use by children; coordination and collaboration across ECE programs available to low-income children), as well as supporting quality improvement (e.g., possibility of developing a self-assessment tool for quality monitoring and improvement). In this context, for this Phase I project we will establish a researcher-practitioner partnership with nationally recognized early childhood researchers at Georgetown University (Objective 1); examine how parents use information about subsidized programs to select care (Objective 2); explore possibilities for supporting providers as they self-assess program quality to promote continued quality improvement (Objective 3); and refine a data system to describe where subsidy recipients receive care, what alternatives they considered and, for the non- recipients, which alternatives they actually pursued among the other ECE programs listed above (Objective 4). Accomplishing these objectives will endow the Lead Agency with the expertise, partnerships, systems, information, and deliverables needed to prepare a competitive application for Phase II project funding, to implement the research plan.