Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) are accountability systems aimed at improving the quality of early childhood settings. One of the key assumptions of QRIS systems is that providing families—particularly low income families— with user-friendly information about ECE options and their quality will lead parents to make better choices about their child’s early education and that in turn this would lead to improvements in learning and school readiness.  The logic model of QRIS rely heavily on the assumption that parents have a difficult time assessing the quality of ECE options. 

There is some support for this assumption in existing literature.  Surveys that ask parents to assess the quality of their own child’s care arrangement show that parents rate nearly all aspects of their child’s ECE arrangement very highly.  A handful of existing studies have compared parents’ ratings of care quality to observer ratings of the same measures (Cryer & Burchinal, 1997; Mocan, 2007) and found that parents substantially over-estimate the quality of their child’s care arrangement relative to outside observers and that correlations between parent and observer ratings are modest. Mocan (2007) maintains that parents, particularly single parents or parents with lower levels of education, are unsuccessful in evaluating the true quality of ECE arrangement and suggests the provision of information on program ratings (such as the external assessors measures) as a potential policy solution for addressing this “information asymmetry.”

While this is true, it may also be the case that parents define quality in ways that are quite distinct than typical QRIS.  For instance, parents may be more focused on practical features of QRIS (hours, location, transportation, services provided) rather than child-centered features (learning environment, teacher warmth). The goal of this paper is to assess whether parental satisfaction with their child’s care setting is associated with a broader set of quality measures than previously considered including (1) practical/convenience features; (2) observed classroom quality; (3) children’s learning gains on cognitive and behavioral measures. 

We leverage data from two large surveys of parents in Louisiana (one covering a sample of parents across 5 parishes, and one targeted at all parents whose children received publicly-funded child care or preschool in Orleans.)  We are able to link these data to measures of teacher-child interactions as measured by the CLASS observational tool, structural measures based on surveys of program directors and directly-assessed measures of children’s learning across diverse outcomes.  Like other studies, our surveys indicate very high overall levels of satisfaction, although we do find variation in parental satisfaction both across program types and across families.  A strength of the current study is that we observe multiple parent surveys per classroom. Our preliminary results show that parental satisfaction aggregated to the classroom level is associated with various measures of quality. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study to examine whether parents’ evaluations of child care quality is related either to practical features of quality or to children’s learning trajectories.  Policy implications for the design of QRIS will be discussed.