Facts In Action

The first of several reports on the cost and quality of early care and education in Massachusetts indicates that, on average, the Commonwealth provides early care and education programs that are comparable to or of higher quality than those of other states, that lower-income families are less likely to have access to high-quality care, and that workforce issues - such as teacher education- have an important impact on the quality of care provided. The study, funded by the Massachusetts Department of Education and conducted by the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and Abt Associates, looked only at center-based, full-day, year-round programs for preschool-aged children.

Researchers drew a random sample of centers from across the state and measured quality using the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R), a widely-used tool for measuring the quality of the classroom environment, activities, and teacher-child interactions. The study looked at ECERS-R scores in relation to factors that the state can most easily regulate, such as child-to-staff ratios, group size, and the educational levels of teaching staff.

The findings of the Cost/Quality study show that in Massachusetts:

• Full-time early care and education for preschoolers is comparable to or better than that in other states. The average ECERS-R score for Massachusetts was higher than scores for the four states involved in the 1995 Cost, Quality, and Outcomes Study (NC, CT, CO, and CA). The report's authors suggest that the Commonwealth's relatively strict child care center regulations and quality improvement programs such as the Department of Education's Community Partnerships for Children are having a positive effect on the quality of care in the Commonwealth.

• The quality of early care and education provided in preschool classrooms varies considerably. Less than half of the classrooms observed in the study provide care that meets the ECERS-R standards for developmentally-appropriate care and more than two-thirds of classrooms were rated as less than good quality on the Language-Reasoning section of the ECERS-R. This is particularly significant because, in other studies, children who receive more language stimulation have shown more advanced cognitive and language development, which are linked to later school success.

• Centers staffed for more hours by teachers rather than less-qualified assistants, those with lower child-to-staff ratios, and those that employ better-educated teachers provide higher quality care and education. Classrooms in centers with more highly educated teachers provided higher levels of age-appropriate stimulation and displayed a higher level of staff attention and engagement in the children's activities. Center directors reported that maintaining quality in their programs was complicated by the lack of qualified personnel to replace teachers that left their programs. This suggests that even centers with a commitment to improving the quality of care they provide can have difficulty achieving this goal.

• Higher quality programs were more likely to be NAEYC accredited. Overall, 35% of the centers in the study are NAEYC accredited. Of the centers rated as good or better, 43% are NAEYC accredited; only about 25% of centers rated as below good are accredited.

• Labor is the single largest component of child care center costs, and labor costs are strongly associated with the quality of early care and education. The average center spends 72% of its budget on labor. Non-labor costs, such as rent/mortgage and food were found to be unrelated to the quality of a center. The graph below illustrates how quality, as measured by ECERS-R, increases as expenditures increase.

• Low- and moderate-income families are less likely to have access to quality full-day preschool programs. Centers that serve predominantly low-income or low/moderate income families had poorer quality space and furnishings, poorer supports for parents and staff, and offered children poorer language-reasoning activities. In centers where 75% or more of the children come from families that earn less than $30,000/year, only 10% of the staff had at least a two-year college degree. Among centers serving moderate to high-income families, that figure was 61%.

LEGEND: The ECERS-R rates classroom quality on a seven point scale: 1=inadequate, 3=minimal, 5=good, and 7=excellent.

This graph shows that as programs spend more on labor, ECERS-R ratings increase - for instance, a classroom must pay 40% more in labor costs in order to surpass the ECERS-R benchmark for "good" early care and education (a rating of 5) than classrooms that did not meet the good benchmark. 6 falls directly between "good" and "excellent"

Although the Cost/Quality study was not designed to evaluate the merits of certain regulations or policies over others, it does provide a snapshot of the current state of early care and education in Massachusetts. The findings support what many people have suspected - that when it comes to the quality of a child's early care and education, you get what you pay for.

Source:
The Cost and Quality of Full-Day, Year-round Early Care and Education in Massachusetts: Preschool Classrooms, N. Marshall, C. Creps, N. Burstein, F. Glantz, W. Robeson, and S. Barnett, Wellesley Centers for Women and Abt Associates, 2001.

For more information:
contact: Center for Research on Women, The Wellesley Centers for Women, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481, or call (781) 283-2500. The Executive Summary of the report is available online at: www.wcwonline.org/pdf/executivenm.pdf.

Facts in Action, February 2002