Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS)--a strategy to improve families' access to high-quality child care--assess the quality of child care programs, offer incentives and assistance to programs to improve their ratings, and give information to parents about the quality of child care. These systems are operating in a growing number of…

Relations between early child care and adolescent functioning at the end of high school (EOHS; M age = 18.3 years) were examined in a prospective longitudinal study of 1,214 children. Controlling for extensive measures of family background, early child care was associated with academic standing and behavioral adjustment at the EOHS. More…

Katherine Magnuson's research focuses on the well-being and development of economically disadvantaged children and their families. In the first half of this brief Magnuson pulls together scholarship on the effects of poverty and inequality on children, especially from infancy to age five. Her scope goes beyond the social sciences to include new…

The field of early care and education is continually seeking to determine factors that contribute to the overall quality of the education for young children. Individual characteristics of teachers, including education level, have been associated with classroom quality. Program demographics, including turnover rate for teachers, also have had…

The study explores the relationship between child care program administration, organizational climate, and global quality. The recently developed Program Administration Scale (PAS; Talan & Bloom, 2004) was utilized in the study. Both program administration and organizational climate were found to be positively correlated with preschool…

More children than ever are in care centers, and child care experiences of infants and toddlers are believed to have a powerful and lasting impact on children's well-being. A team of researchers from the FPG Child Development Institute created a study to examine the effects that transitions have on children's behavior and observable stress when…

Although the FPG Child Development Institute's primary mission is to generate new knowledge, this research is in the service of a higher goal: child and family well being. This goal is distilled in their tag line: "Advancing knowledge, enhancing lives." This phrase is not just a tag line--it encapsulates 40 years of striving to be an…

This brief is based on the 61-page report of the same name. This paper, commissioned by the Brookings Institution, studies the emergence of the mixed delivery model, in which pre-kindergarten is delivered in community-based settings and schools. It describes findings of a state survey CLASP conducted to understand the policy choices,…

Smart Start is an early childhood initiative in North Carolina designed to build a statewide system of coordinated services for children from birth through age 5 and their families. At the heart of the program are 82 public-private nonprofit partnerships representing North Carolina's 100 counties, each sharing the mission of promoting school…