Getting to Positive Outcomes for Children in Child Care A Summary of Two Workshops (2001) / Chapter Skim
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2. Overview of the Workshops
2. Overview of the Workshops
Pages 6-24
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From page 6... ...
Workshop participants emphasized the need for the voices and views of the early childhood field to be heard as performance measures are rapidly taking hold. As concerns about accountability for use of public funds in early childhood programs have increased, a variety of objectives and assessment strategies have emerged such as those for school readiness.
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From page 7... ...
Because there is no overall system of child care, the workshop necessarily focused on specific parts of the child care universe as a starting point, extrapolating lessons from experience with programs such as Head Start, center-based programs, and licensed family day care homes. Clearly these programs involve only a small proportion of children in care, with many more in informal child care by relatives, friends, and neighbors.
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From page 8... ...
(See Chapter 4 for a discussion of Head Start and Early Head Start.)
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From page 10... ...
This heightens the likelihood that the results will be useful for several goals including accountability, program and system improvement, and continuing support and funding for enhancing quality in early childhood programs. INVOLVING STAKEHOLDERS Several states represented at the workshops, including Maine and Oregon, have involved stakeholders throughout the process, from goal development through the creation of performance measures.
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From page 11... ...
In Oregon a similar approach was used, but most of the discussions and work toward developing standards were performed at the community and program levels and communicated to state level officials. Workshop participant Bobbie Weber, of Linn-Benton Community College, said this was unusual, since many states tend to focus on a top-down strategy, where state officials form the guidelines and communicate those standards to cities, towns, communities, and programs.
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From page 12... ...
Participants differed in their views about whether and how to hold programs accountable for achieving desired results for children (see Box 2-31. A Child Outcomes Perspective Workshop presenter John Love, of Mathematica Policy Research Institute and a lead researcher on the national evaluation of the Early Head Start program, raised a number of questions to be addressed in considering a system that encompasses not only process measures but also child outcomes: · What outcomes do child care programs hope to achieve?
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From page 14... ...
Some common measures include optimal peer interaction, positive social development, positive affect, advanced social skills, and more complex play behaviors. For example, in Hawaii, children should be well taken care of while they thrive physically and develop positive relationships, age-appropriate knowledge, an appreciation for diversity, and receptive language.
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From page 15... ...
Department of Health and Human Services, aims to help states increase their capacity to serve children with disabilities within accessible, affordable child care programs. States chosen to participate in the Maps project are required to assemble a state team of at least 15 stakeholders that includes families of children with disabilities, child care providers, child care state administrators, Head Start representatives, and early intervention and preschool spe
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From page 16... ...
In meeting the needs of children with disabilities, workshop participant Lynette Aytch, of the Frank Porter Graham Center at the University of North Carolina, said it is important to focus efforts not only on the child but also on his or her family. The major challenge in determining quality practices for children with special needs is that it includes a very broad range of settings and services.
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From page 17... ...
Asa Hilliard, of the Department of Education Policy Studies at Georgia State University, encouraged the child care community to broaden its attention to culture beyond simply tallying the numbers of minority children enrolled in programs. Hilliard called for greater flexibility in establishing performance measures for programs that serve children from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and cautioned against the notion of "one size fits all." He said that any assessments that are developed should have built-in sensitivities to language differences and recognize that measures of what is developmentally appropriate may differ according to a child's culture.
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From page 18... ...
National standards have become the basis for a national accreditation program for after-school programs, run by the National School Age Care Alliance. These standards are based on an instrument developed at Wellesley College, called Assessing School Age Program Quality (Seligson, 19971.
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From page 19... ...
His research employed the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) , which measures the quality of child care centers on a scale of 1 inadequate level of care to 7 excellent care (Harms and Clifford, 19801.
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From page 20... ...
Cost, Quality, anti Outcomes Stutly Richard Clifford ofthe Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described the Cost, Quality, and Outcomes Study, begun in 1993. The first phase involved more than 400 child care centers in Los Angeles County, California, Front Range, Colorado, Hartford-New Haven, Connecticut, and the Triad Area, North Carolina.
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From page 21... ...
Do regulations affect the availability of child care slots? Do families use more child care because they're more confident about safety and quality or less child care because regulations may have raised the price of care?
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From page 22... ...
The study found that 42 states conduct background checks for early childhood center employees, and 40 states conduct background checks for family daycare homes. Most regulations generally apply to licensed providers.
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From page 23... ...
Further research is also needed on the cost of high-quality care. Some participants also felt that there were inconsistencies in the ways in which funding is allocated and suggested that policy makers at the federal level help those at the state level to better understand the available funding sources.
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From page 24... ...
Most notably, participants differed about whether to emphasize careful delineation of child outcomes and expectations in child care or to focus on delivery of programs and services. Throughout, participants were keenly aware of the difficulties of attributing child outcomes to child care given the diversity of settings children are in and all the other influences on their lives.
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