Browsing by Author "Whitaker, Anamarie A."
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Item Do Early Care and Education Programs Improve When Enrolled in Quality Rating and Improvement Systems? Longitudinal Evidence from One System(Early Education and Development, 2022-08-15) Gomez, Celia J.; Whitaker, Anamarie A.; Cannon, Jill S.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 an observation measure of classroom quality. Research Findings: On average, participating providers increased their overall tier ratings; this pattern was particularly true for providers with lower initial tier ratings. We found more consistent evidence of increases on indicators of structural quality components (e.g., teacher and director qualifications), and limited evidence of improvement on process quality indicators (e.g., measure of teacher–child interaction). This finding suggests structural quality improvements may be driving global tier rating changes. In addition, providers saw average increases on a measure of classroom quality, with larger increases seen in domains that measure classroom organization and emotional support. Practice and Policy: We discuss implications for how QRISs can promote quality improvement for participating providers and suggest avenues for future research.Item The promise and purpose of early care and education(Child Development Perspectives, 2022-07-11) Burchinal, Margaret; Whitaker, Anamarie A.; Jenkins, Jade MarcusEarly care and education (ECE) evolved around two goals: allowing parents of young children to work (the purpose) and promoting early childhood development (the promise). An extensive body of research has examined how ECE promotes child development. A much sparser body of research has studied how ECE access affects families' economic and psychological well-being, particularly from a developmental perspective. These imbalanced literatures have created an incomplete picture of the role of ECE in developmental science, and this gap in knowledge limits the extent to which both the purpose and the promise of ECE can be fulfilled. In this article, we argue that developmental researchers should pay more attention to the parent and family outcomes, processes, and mechanisms that depend on stable, high-quality care (the purpose), and how these downstream cascades influence child development in the short and long term (the promise). While these issues are international, in this article, we focus on the development of and research on ECE in the United States to illustrate how the focus on both the purpose and promise of ECE could expand policies and research in the area.