TKW Consulting

Encouraging high-quality child care

Every day in Wisconsin, about 163,000 children under age 6 are in some form of regulated child care. Of those, about 59,000 have their child care fees subsidized by the state at a cost of over $300 million a year.

The magnitude of those numbers, as well as solid evidence that the quality of child care makes a big difference in both the future well-being of those children and the future health of the economy, has caused an increasing number of policy-makers and community leaders in Wisconsin to ask whether public funding for child care should be linked to quality, as it is in many states. Is it time to incentivize high quality in child care settings by tying public dollars to quality criteria?

The Public Policy Forum is in the midst of a multiyear research project to provide insight into that question by evaluating the costs and benefits of high-quality child care. As a starting point, we conducted surveys of parents and child care providers in southeastern Wisconsin to determine their perceptions of the quality of care. Our survey results highlight the nuances inherent in the definition of child care quality.

Child care quality comes in two modes: process and structural. Both are considered necessary for the best outcomes for children in care. Process quality captures the interactions between the child and caregiver. As the “secret ingredient” in overall quality, it consists of intangibles like nurturing, love and patience. Structural quality, on the other hand, is more like a recipe or list of ingredients that can and should be measured for “nutritional” content, such as the child-to-teacher ratio, the educational attainment of the caregiver or the appropriateness of activities available to the children.

In child care, just as in fine cuisine, having a great recipe doesn’t guarantee a good end result — structural quality alone isn’t sufficient. The process quality, the skill with which the recipe is followed, will determine the outcome.

Unfortunately for policy-makers, judging child care quality is like reviewing a restaurant by reading a recipe. Only parents can give child care the true taste test, so we asked parents their perceptions of the quality of their providers. The good news is they report high satisfaction with their current providers, based mainly on the warmth and lovingness of the providers. Thus, process quality in our region seems high.

However, these same parents demonstrated a lack of knowledge about child care regulations and accrediting standards, indicating they may not be aware of the optimal structural qualities to seek in a provider. In other words, parents seem to be judging quality based more on taste than nutrition.

Our provider survey shows that providers see little reason to strive for accreditation when parents do not seem to know it is of value. Cost also was a factor in determining whether providers sought additional professional development and training.

The message we took from these surveys is that while the process quality of southeastern Wisconsin child care providers is satisfactory to parents, parents are not as concerned about structural quality. Providers are therefore in a tough spot if they want to make structural quality improvements.

If the product is a private good, then this market failure should not bother policy-makers. But if child care is a public good, this market failure is a problem for society and the economy as a whole. There is much recent economic research that would support an argument that child care is a public good — it employs wage-earners and supports the productivity of working parents, and, if high quality, improves outcomes for many children.

The providers themselves indicate the most obvious remedy: Make structural quality improvements more affordable. This could be done by any number of financial incentives for providers. This type of strategy was proposed by Gov. Jim Doyle in past state budgets but was rejected by lawmakers.

High-quality child care can be a strategy for improving school readiness and preparing low-income children for success later in life. To get the child care recipe wrong in southeastern Wisconsin would do more than leave a bad taste in parents’ mouths. It could stunt the future growth of our region, as well as our children.