Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The Child Care and Development Block Grant Act of 2014 requires that states develop and implement strategies to increase the supply and improve the quality of child care services. In Minnesota, recent policy initiatives such as expansion of the Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) and funding for early learning scholarships for children who attend high quality programs are intended to improve access to high quality early care and education, particularly for children in low-income families. The overall goal of this paper is to analyze how changes in Minnesota’s ECE policies and funding have changed families’ access to high quality care.

In this study we first develop new measures of access that combine information on distance, prices, and quality ratings to measure the tradeoffs families must make when choosing care. The data include information on all licensed ECE providers in Minnesota over a five-year period, including location, enrollment and capacity by age, prices, and quality-rating for providers participating in the QRIS. ECE providers include child care centers, Head Start and Early Head Start programs, licensed family child care providers, and public pre-kindergarten programs. To approximate the residential locations of children, we use data from the U.S. Census on the number of families with young children in each census block group. For each residential location, the distance to the nearest (in travel time) provider of each QRIS quality level and nearest unrated provider was calculated. This measure allows families to cross boundaries (such as city or county lines) in order to access care. We characterize the family’s set of child care opportunities in the formal marketplace by the joint distribution of provider characteristics (price, available slots, QRIS quality rating, age groups served, etc.) and distance from the family. Each family faces a different set of options, which may change over time. By analyzing and comparing the set of options facing different families over time, the study assesses variation in access to high-quality care. We use descriptive, exploratory analysis to compare how distance, price and quality interact for families in different regions of the state, and by community income level and child age.

Preliminary results show that parents face a premium (in terms of combined travel cost and weekly price of care) of 30% to access more highly rated (market-based) providers for care for a preschool-age child.  Providers with higher ratings are both farther from home and have higher prices on average. The premium is considerably higher for infants (close to 60%). We leverage variation in the timing of policy and funding changes across the state to understand how these changes have impacted families’ access to high quality care. The family-centered measures of ECE supply developed in this study provide a foundation for understanding families’ differential access to quality care and for understanding how policy interventions, such as public funding through subsidies and scholarships, affect the choices available to different families.