33 research outputs found
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Putting the Pieces Together: New York Early Learning Program Data Systems
Data collected by state and local agencies on young children and the programs serving them have enormous potential value. Families, service providers, policymakers, researchers, advocates and others can use these data to better understand children's needs, improve access to services, strengthen services, enhance the efficiency of services, and understand the short- and long-term impacts of services. In New York, as in most other states, this potential has gone largely unrealized. Early childhood data have typically been maintained in silos by agency and service — and sometimes by region — frustrating efforts to draw comprehensive, point-in-time pictures and comparisons. Usually, too, data have not been available longitudinally, hampering ability to follow children and services over time. All too frequently, data systems are under developed and fail to collect all the data that is needed for research and policy and program decisions. Recently, however, momentum to link early childhood data across agencies and across time is gathering in the states. A few pioneers — including Connecticut, Maryland, and Pennsylvania — have begun to integrate data systems for their state-funded prekindergarten and child care subsidy systems — linking child, program, and personnel databases. These states are also looking to develop linkages with other systems, notably health. Earlier, several states — including Wisconsin, South Carolina — built "data warehouses" to store, link, and provide access to historical data on services to children and adults. Federal actions are stimulating this movement. State Early Childhood Advisory Councils, established under the Head Start Reauthorization Act of 2008, are charged with developing recommendations for "establishing or improving core elements of the State early childhood system, such as a statewide unified data collection system." Statewide Longitudinal Data System grants, begun in 2001, at first focused on elementary and secondary education, but more recent grants, like New York's that began in 2010, include links to preschool data. Further, as a condition of receiving State Fiscal Stabilization Funds through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, all state education agencies have committed to build statewide longitudinal data systems to follow individual students from pre-school, through K-12 and postsecondary education, and into the workforce. Also, states successful in the Race to the Top education grant competition, including New York in 2010, had to show "significant progress" toward development of longitudinal P-20 data systems. A consortium of national organizations, the Early Childhood Data Collaborative, has convened to help states build, link, and use early childhood data systems. One of the Collaborative's first efforts has been to articulate a set of key policy questions that a well-crafted early childhood data system can help answer. Their initial questions focus on early care and education data, while anticipating subsequent links to data on other services. This report represents an important first step to help New York answer these questions through a coordinated early childhood data system
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Toward a National Strategy to Improve Family, Friend, and Neighbor Child Care
Family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) child care is a widely used form of care for young children in the United States, particularly for children birth through age 2. It accounts for 46 percent of the hours these youngest children spend in nonparental care. Thirty-three experts from a range of research, policy, and practice organizations came together for a symposium on FFN care on November 2, 2005 entitled: Improving Family, Friend, and Neighbor Care: Toward a National Strategy. (See Appendix B for a participant list.) This symposium report outlines the picture of current FFN research, practice, and policy that emerged and identifies next steps to strengthen all three areas. A major step that would support practice, policy, and research alike is to increase public awareness of the widespread use of FFN care by families of all economic levels and ethnicities. The goals of the symposium were to: Review research, policy, and program issues related to improving the quality of family, friend, and neighbor care for children from infancy through school-age. Develop a set of recommendations for state and federal action, and foundation and other private sector initiatives to improve policies, expand research, and improve programming for young children and their families using FFN care. Supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the A. L. Mailman Family Foundation, and the Rauch Foundation, the symposium was organized by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) of the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University and held in Baltimore, Maryland. Welcomes were extended by Ruth Mayden (Casey Foundation), Luba Lynch (Mailman Foundation), Daphny Leveille (Rauch Foundation), and Lee Kreader (NCCP)
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School-Age Child Care Arrangements
School-age children spend time in an array of care arrangements. The most common nonparental after-school arrangements are center- or school-based programs, relative care, and self-care
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Features of Professional Development and On-site Assistance in Child Care Quality Rating Improvement Systems: A Survey of State-wide Systems
Quality Rating Improvement Systems (QRIS) are now operating state-wide in 18 states. An additional 13 states are implementing QRIS in selected regions or as pilot initiatives. While highly varied in their specific features, these systems all use a set of interrelated strategies that aim to raise the quality of early care and education programs. These strategies include quality standards that programs must meet to obtain ratings at different levels, financial incentives for programs to meet quality standards, and assistance to help center-based programs and homebased providers improve the quality of supports for children's well-being and early learning. As these systems increase in number across the states, ongoing examination of their characteristics and impacts can inform efforts to strengthen them. This report presents findings from an interview study that investigated features of the professional development and on-site assistance available to center-based staff and home-based providers who participate in states' Quality Rating Improvement Systems
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Infant and Toddler Child Care Arrangements
What care arrangements do American parents make for their infants and toddlers while they are at work, school, or otherwise unavailable to provide care themselves? Research findings that respond to this question come from two recent nationally representative surveys: the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort, and the National Survey of America's Families (NSAF), 2002. Additional research helps answer a second, related question: What factors influence the types of care arrangements made for this country's children under age 3
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Infant and Toddler Child Care Quality
With over half the nation's infants and toddlers in regular, nonparental child care, the quality of that care is a priority concern for policymakers. Many studies show that high-quality child care supports the positive social, emotional, and cognitive development of young children. The research summarized in this policy brief identifies factors that tend to predict higher quality within arrangement types—family child care, center care, and relative care—and describes the range of quality found in each type. Although different studies measure child care quality in different ways, many researchers group quality measures into two categories, structural and process. Both examine factors that support the responsive and reliable relationships with caregivers so essential for the healthy development of infants and toddlers. Structural measures—child-staff ratio and group size, caregivers' general education and specialized training, their tenure and income—look at aspects of arrangements that support positive child-adult relationships and child development. Process measures directly examine children's experiences, including caregivers' interactions with the children—their attention, warmth, and responsiveness. Though less direct, structural factors are less costly for researchers to study than process factors, which require direct observations. Unlike process factors, structural factors can be regulated by policymakers. Many instruments are used to measure quality in infant and toddler child care arrangements (see the Resources Section for a list of frequently use ones). Most are designed to examine the global quality of child care arrangements—producing a composite rating based on observations of routines, practices, facilities, and equipment—and utilize both process and structural measures. Some are more exclusively composed of process measures. Researchers continue to develop new measures and instruments in this young field of inquiry