Child Care

Improving Quality Of Child Care

Last Updated Nov 18, 2008 10:55 AM

Data on child care centers from a 1989 GAO survey of 265 early childhood education centers accredited by the National Associate for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) were used in both studies.(4) The survey, administered to program directors via questionnaire, included questions of center characteristics, costs, value of in-kind donations received, staff characteristics and compensation. The survey includes several structural measures that allow the authors to estimate the costs associated with changing the following quality measures: the average number of children per teaching staff member; average number of children in groups of four-year-olds; average education of staff in years; average experience of staff in years; and the staff turnover rate.(5)

The authors find statistically significant relationships between center total cost and structural measures of child care quality. For the adult-child ratio, they find that an improvement in the quality of care achieved by decreasing the average ratio by one, for example from 11:1 to 10:1, is associated with increased costs of roughly 4.5 percent. The authors note that the average center in their data, one with 50 children and an annual per child cost of $6,500, which reduces the child-to-staff ratio from 11:1 to 10:1, faces an increase in annual cost per child of $306.(6) A related measure, average group size, had a small but statistically insignificant effect on total costs.

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