Getting to Positive Outcomes for Children in Child Care

Workshop on Child Care Performance Measures
By Beverly Mulvihill, Ph.D. & Sallye Longshore, Ed.S.

Every day, millions of our young children leave home to spend a large part of their day in some type of child care setting. According to a recent report on child care from the Urban Institute, 56% of Alabama children five and under spend 35 or more hours per week in child care. This is well above the national average of 41%. Child care has become an issue of pressing concern for our nation and our state.

At the request of the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services - the Board on Children, Youth, and Families is reviewing current and emerging efforts to establish performance measures for early childhood programs. The Board convened two workshops in which a panel of experts examined lessons learned from performance measurement initiatives in other policy areas such a public health.

The second of the two workshops, held recently in Washington D.C., examined the implications of having performance standards for child care, as well as the challenge of establishing the criteria for those standards. Participants included researchers, practitioners, and policy makers from the fields of child development, child care, early intervention, program evaluation, performance measurement, statistics, and administration. Beverly Mulvihill, Ph.D. and Sallye Longshore, Ed.S., represented the Civitan Coordinating team for the Alabama Child Care Consortium.

Representatives presented innovative state and local strategies from North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and the District of Columbia. These strategies combined collaboration with a multi-pronged approach. Challenges and implications of establishing criteria for assessing the quality of child care services were discussed with several common themes emerging: the need to examine a combined child/program outcome accountability system; the need to establish clear outcomes and assessment instruments that measure the right things; the need to undergird quality prior to assessing programs.

Clearly, there are many issues surrounding getting to positive outcomes for children in child care that involve careful planning and building safeguards into accountability. Assessment needs to be part of a systems approach that includes children, programs and families as accountable.

A workshop summary report will be disseminated to children and family policy makers, practitioners, researchers, and other key stakeholders such as state and local organizations. For further information, please contact Michele Kipke, Director, Board on Children, Youth, and Families, at 202-334-1937 or mkipke@nas.edu, or Drusilla Barnes, Administrative Associate, at 202-334-1945 or dbarnes@nas.edu.