High-quality early childhood experiences shape children’s readiness for school as well as their later life outcomes (Campbell et al., 2012; Schweinhart et al., 2005). At the same time, the early childhood education and care (ECEC) landscape is marked by low and inconsistent quality (Barnett et al., 2010)—a reality that may have costly private and public ramifications. For this reason, the past two decades have seen heightened investment in strategies to improve access to affordable, high-quality early learning opportunities, including substantial increases in state and federal funding, the introduction of more stringent regulations for licensed care settings and the emergence of Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS), which incentivize quality improvement through increased accountability (Bassok & Loeb, 2015).
Recent early childhood quality improvement efforts also emphasize the need to build cohesion across the fragmented early childhood landscape, which ranges from full-day pre-kindergarten programs to neighbors watching children in home-based settings. Nevertheless, formal and informal ECEC arrangements still face starkly different requirements and funding streams and are characterized by large differences in quality (National Association for Regulatory Administration, 2008; Pianta, Barnett, Burchinal, & Thornburg, 2009; Wrigley & Dreby, 2005). Relatedly, children’s cognitive outcomes at school entry differ substantially across sectors, with children who attend formal programs, including childcare centers, Head Start, and pre-kindergarten, consistently outperforming peers in the informal sector on academic outcomes (Bradley & Vandell, 2007; Loeb, Bridges, Bassok, Fuller, & Rumberger, 2007).
One plausible explanation for the differences in outcomes across sectors is differences in quality. Given the extensive research base demonstrating the importance of ECEC quality (Yoshikawa et al., 2013), this hypothesis is compelling. Surprisingly, however, there has been little empirical investigation of this relationship. Few studies have examined (1) how much ECEC sectors vary with respect to quality or (2) to what extent variation in these environmental factors mediates the relationship between ECEC sector and child development.
In this paper we document the magnitude of quality differences between and within sectors using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), a nationally representative study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) that tracks 14,000 children from infancy in 2001 through kindergarten entry. We explore a wide range of characteristics ranging from safety measures to caregiver credentials, time spent on learning activities and externally conducted observations of process quality. We contrast the formal and informal sectors first, looking separately at programs serving toddlers and those serving four-year-olds. We then probe variation within the formal sector, comparing childcare centers, Head Start, and pre-kindergarten. Finally, we assess the extent to which systematic differences in quality predict differences in child outcomes across sectors.
Although the dataset we leverage in the current analysis is now a decade old, and the early childhood landscape has changed in important ways over that period, it is the largest and most current dataset available with detailed measures of quality for both preschoolers and toddlers. It thus allows us to address several limitations inherent in earlier studies and provide new evidence on the link between ECEC sectors and child outcomes.
