Quality rating and improvement systems (QRISs) are designed to assess, improve, and communicate the quality of early care and education programs. Using administrative data, we investigated whether providers that participated in a county-level QRIS saw increases to their global quality (tier) rating, domain-specific quality ratings, and scores on…

Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems (ECCS) grants help states and communities improve early childhood systems to support child development, equitable access to quality services and supports, and family well-being. Truly interdisciplinary, ECCS promotes cross-sector systems change initiatives that focus on integrating health care, mental health,…

The "Integrated Approaches to Supporting Child Development and Improving Family Economic Security" project was conducted by Mathematica Policy Research and Northwestern University for the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human…

What constitutes quality in early childhood settings, and how can it best be measured with today's widely used tools and promising new approaches? Find authoritative answers in this book, a must-have for high-level administrators and policymakers as more and more states adopt early childhood Quality Rating and Improvement Systems. The most…

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL AREA OF THE PROGRAM WAS READING. THE BOOK LEVELS INCREASED FOR THE CHILDREN. THE LONGER A CHILD WAS INVOLVED WITH THE PROJECT, THE GREATER WAS HIS RATE OF PROGRESS. IN EVALUATING THE ROLE OF THE LANGUAGE LABORATORY, IT WAS EVIDENT THAT A MEDIAN INCREASE OF SLIGHTLY MORE THAN THREE READING LEVELS WAS ACHIEVED. THROUGH THE…

Early care and education can prepare children for school, but while some preschool and child care programs do an excellent job, others are inadequate and some may even harm healthy development. This study focuses on child care center directors to better understand why there is so much variation, and how public initiatives can better help…

An evaluation of a youth and economic opportunities agency's improvement program for preschool children is presented. Objectives of the Head Start program include: (1) Improving the child's physical health and abilities, (2) Helping the emotional and social development of the child, (3) Improving the child's mental processes and skills and…

The first of two reports describing and evaluating the creation and operation of the KLH Child Development Center, Inc., an industry-related child care center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is presented. The purpose of the report is to present the research design for the evaluation of the project and to discuss the expectations of the…

This commentary highlights the work of the Collaborative for Building After-School Systems (CBASS), a collaborative of mature, city and county-wide nonprofit OST intermediaries, to develop and adopt common youth-, program- and system-level measures that are easy and cost-effective for local systems to implement. By agreeing to adopt and publicly…

This is the fourth report of a process evaluation of Palm Beach County Prime Time, Inc., an intermediary organization dedicated to improving the quality of afterschool programs, by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. It covers the 2007-2008 program year, which was the inaugural year of Prime Time's formal Quality Improvement System (QIS)…

High-quality care is essential to the optimal development of young children. While many children attend childcare away from the home for an average of six hours per day, the environment is not necessarily of the highest quality. An assessment of the indoor and outdoor space, curriculum and activities, teacher and child interactions, materials,…

This report covers the third year of Chapin Hall's process evaluation of the Prime Time Initiative of Palm Beach County, Florida, a system-building effort to strengthen the quality of after-school programs in the county. During the past two decades, the after-school field has expanded enormously, partly in response to increasing concern about…

This report is the first annual report under the Nebraska legislature's Quality Child Care Act; it provides information on more than the past year to place the programs and services described in context. The report sought to determine the status of child care and early childhood education in Nebraska, recognizing that the younger the child, the…

It was the contention of the Head Start/State Preschool Program of the Greater Los Angeles Community Action Agency (GLACAA) that a self-evaluation would not be workable or effective unless it was a joint process involving delegate agency staff, parents and central administration staff in all phases. The first phase of the self evaluation process…

This report describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a pilot project by the Studio in a School (SIAS) arts group to place professional artists in six preschools and kindergarten programs in New York City public schools. The SIAS program provided both on-site, hands-on visual arts training of teachers and aides and direct…