Child Care Resource Service of Georgia will help parents choose quality child care facilities for their children and help child care providers improve and maintain their quality of service to parents and children living and working in Georgia.  Currently, there is no clear path for providers to help them achieve higher levels of quality; and no clear mechanism in Georgia to help parents choose a quality child care for their children.  Research on current child care facilities in the U.S. has found inconsistent quality of child care facilities, with only 14% of the child care programs rated as good quality, while 40% to 60% provided poor or mediocre quality, unlikely to foster children’s developmental needs.  Alarmingly, 20% of the child care facilities were rated as “poor to harmful.” Parents in Georgia have no consumer guide to help them distinguish the level of quality of specific child care facilities.

Market Analysis/The Need for a Quality rating System

Approximately 68 percent of all children 3-year-olds, 78 percent of all 4-year-olds, and 84 percent of all 5-year-olds in the United States receive some type of child care outside their home on a regular basis, which translates to more than 6.8 million preschoolers in child care (West, Wright, & Hausken, 1995). According to the U.S. Department of Education, 46 percent of U.S. kindergarteners begin at-risk for failure; and children living in poverty start school at least one year behind their peers.  In Georgia, there are approximately 473,833 children under six years of age who are in need of childcare as there parents work; many of these children live in poverty.  In 2006, 264,016 families in Georgia lived below the poverty level. While 65,400 of these families lived at least 200 percent below the poverty level.  This equates to approximately 986,000 children under the age of 18 living 200 percent below the poverty level in Georgia (National Childcare Information Center, 2007).

Over the past decade, researchers have examined the quality of child care in the U.S. and the outcomes of child care quality. They found that children who attended higher quality child care centers performed better on measures of both cognitive skills (e.g., math and language abilities) and social skills (e.g., interactions with peers, problem behaviors) in child care and through the transition into school. High quality child care continues to positively predict children’s performance and social skills well into their school years. These children were rated higher in thinking, higher attention skills and sociability skills. Children who have traditionally been at risk of not doing well in school are affected more by the quality of child care experiences than other children. The quality of child care classroom practices was related to children’s cognitive development, while the closeness of the child care teacher-child relationship influenced children’s social development through the early school years. In summary, quality child care is important for all children, but especially important for children at-risk.  What may be more important is that these effects of quality child care are long-term (University of North Carolina, University of Colorado, University of California at Los Angeles, and Yale University, 1999).

Several research studies suggest that parents and researchers sometimes have conflicting views about what aspects of a child care program are associated with quality.  Parents seem to pay little attention to the structural indicators of quality such as regulatory status and caregiver training. While parents said they valued the process characteristics measured by the researchers, they consistently overestimated the quality of care their own children received. That is, parents and researchers agreed about what was important in a child care setting, but the two groups saw the same settings differently. Parents perceived care as high in quality while, on average, researchers rated the quality as mediocre. These differences between parent and observer quality scores were greater for aspects of care that parents were unable to observe, such as nap time, or for aspects that they valued more highly.

The inconsistency in ratings of care suggest that parents are not well-informed consumers and do not accurately judge child care quality. These studies findings suggest that it cannot be assumed that parents will purchase high-quality child care simply because they want the best for their children. In addition, high-quality child care costs only a little more than mediocre care, so parents cannot use the cost of care as an indicator of its quality. Even parents who are willing to pay more for child care have no assurance that their extra dollars will purchase higher-quality care.