Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Educational Studies

Sub-Department

College of Education

First Advisor

Angela C. Baum

Abstract

High quality in early care and education is critical for children in their early ears and has a lasting benefit through their lives. Research in various fields such as education, medicine, psychology, economics. has provided evidence of positive outcomes for children who have been exposed to safe, rich, and engaging environments in their early years through high quality early care and education. The baseline of child care quality is providing protection for children by establishing regulations on health and safety areas such as response to disease, fire and other building safety, injury, abuse and neglect, adequate supervision, and developmentally appropriate activities. In child care, this protection is secured by the child care licensing agency in charge of monitoring on-site health and safety practices through annual unannounced inspections. Other agencies involved in quality are the State Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R) agencies in every state who provide a wide variety of services to help child care programs meet state licensing compliance requirements as well as improve the quality of a program, thereby leading to positive child outcomes. This study uses a quasi-experimental design to analyze the effect of CCR&R services on child care programs’ compliance with state licensing regulations as well as the severity levels of the deficiencies cited. Longitudinal administrative data from licensing regulation records and the technical assistance database are used to examine whether CCR&R services have a significant effect on the number and severity of licensing deficiencies in child care programs during their annual reviews.

Rights

© 2018, Wenjia Wang

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