Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Accountability Comes to Early Childhood: New Research on Quality Rating & Improvement Systems

(Education)

In recent years, Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) have emerged as a popular policy lever aimed at improving the quality of early childhood programs through quality standards, accountability, and supports. The federal Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC), which competitively allocated roughly one billion dollars to 20 states since 2011, required applicants to design and implement QRIS. Despite strong federal and state commitment to QRIS as a strategy towards quality improvement in ECE, the rapid design and roll-out of states’ QRIS systems has outpaced the research base around measuring and improving quality in early childhood settings. In particular, we do not yet know whether existing rating systems are effectively capturing “true quality” and whether introducing QRIS leads to improvements in quality over time. This panel includes four papers which provide rigorous new evidence about accountability efforts in early childhood and provide insights about the design of quality rating systems. The first two papers address the impacts of QRIS. Bassok, Dee & Latham use panel data from North Carolina, one of the oldest and most developed QRIS in the country, to examine the effect of quasi-random assignment to a lower versus higher star rating on subsequent program quality and enrollment. They provide the first evidence that programs are responsive to the incentives embedded within these accountability systems. Herbst leverages variation across states and time in the quality measures included in QRIS to assess whether these accountability systems have led to changes in the early childhood labor force. QRIS incentive increased professional development, post-secondary degrees in early childhood education, and/or engage in on-going training. This paper provides the first evidence of whether these incentives have led to changes in the early care labor force. The second two papers in this panel descriptively address two salient assumptions essential if QRIS are to lead to quality improvements. First, QRIS systems are predicated on the notion that parents struggle to assess the quality of their child care options and that providing clear information would impact their choices. Bassok, Player & Zagardo leverage a variety of primary and secondary data to investigate parents’ ability to discern the quality of child care settings. They link parents quality ratings of their child’s care setting to measures of the settings structural features (e.g. convenience, location, hours), process quality (ratings of children’s learning environment) and learning outcomes (children’s learning growth during the preschool year) and assess to what extent parents ability to evaluate quality varies across family characteristics and they type of quality considered. Finally, the success of accountability efforts in early childhood rely heavily on the ability to accurately measure quality. Whereas K-12 accountability efforts typically focus on student outcomes (e.g. standardized test scores), early childhood accountability systems typically measure structural inputs (e.g. teacher education, class ratios) and classroom processes (e.g. observations). Hong, Sabol & Burchinal use data from six large studies to simulate QRIS scores and investigate the association between ratings of quality and children’s school-readiness.