Families commonly make decisions about child care and early education (CCEE). CCEE supports children's learning and parents' work and education. Families may use CCEE in a child care center, home, or school setting. They may use a licensed program or relatives, friends, or neighbors to provide care. To support families who are looking for CCEE,…

The COVID-19 pandemic has had major impacts on child care and early education (CCEE) in the U.S. This report describes calendar year 2020 experiences of CCEE centers that were operating in 2019, including changes in their enrollments and their instructional staff. It also describes the extent to which centers received pandemic assistance during…

In 2019, more than 5 million providers cared for one or more children either in their own home or in a child's home. Home-based child care (HBCC) providers are a varied group that includes listed providers and unlisted providers who do and do not receive payment. HBCC is especially prevalent in communities of color, communities with high…

Coaching is a common approach to professional development and support for quality in early care and education (ECE) settings. Coaching is an especially important part of professional development because it can be tailored to meet teachers' and family child care (FCC) providers' needs and can positively affect instructional practices, the quality…

This research brief draws on data from the 2021-2022 Study of Family and Staff Well-Being in Head Start FACES Programs (2021-2022 Study) to examine the strategies programs used to improve staff retention and well-being. Using data collected in spring 2022 after more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, this brief describes the types of…

Partnerships between Early Head Start (EHS) programs and child care providers aim to increase access to high quality, comprehensive services that meet the needs of infants and toddlers from families with low incomes. Quality in early care and education matters. In prior research, high quality early care and education was associated with better…

The 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE) is funded by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) in the Administration for Children and Families. The project team is led by NORC at the University of Chicago. The 2019 NSECE is comprised of four integrated, nationally representative surveys which include: (1)…

The goals of the Implementation and Cost of High Quality Early Care and Education (ECE-ICHQ) are to (1) produce technically sound, systematic measures of the implementation and costs of education and care in center-based settings that serve children from birth to age 5; (2) produce implementation and cost measures to examine the variation in ECE…

Early care and education (ECE) leaders often consider new content, curricula, and models to include in their quality improvement (QI) toolkit. The Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC) centers equity in its approach to engaging staff at all levels in an ECE program. It is a promising approach for center-based ECE programs (with the potential to…

Half of all infants and toddlers receive care in nonparental settings, such as centers and family child care (FCC) homes. On average, infants and toddlers spend more hours per week in care than preschoolers do. Yet infant-toddler care has been identified as lower quality than care for older children, suggesting that professional development (PD)…

Head Start is an essential part of the programs and funding streams that provide early care and education (ECE) services to young children in the U.S. Head Start focuses on supporting children and families with low incomes, but also contributes to the broader effort to expand access to high quality ECE for all young children. Programs and…

This document offers a national picture of selected segments of the early care and education (ECE) market by describing how important attributes of the supply of and the demand for center-based care relate to each other. The document also provides a methodological guide for using newly available data from the National Survey of Early Care and…

This report provides a descriptive comparison of the early care and education (ECE) landscape across rural, moderate-density urban (suburban), and high-density urban areas. The goal of this comparison was to understand whether ECE availability and characteristics in rural areas differ from those in more densely populated communities. We used…

COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization and a public health emergency by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in March 2020 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2020). In the following months, families in the U.S. experienced financial hardships such as job and income loss, increasing food insecurity, and loss of…

Approximately half of all children under the age of three in the United States have a regular child care arrangement (nearly 44 percent of infants from birth to 12 months, 52 percent from 12 to 24 months, and 56 percent from 24 to 36 months; NSECE Project Team, 2015). The percentages of infants and toddlers in center-based care increases with age,…