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Dr. Kristin A. Moore: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Self-Sufficiency Research Clearinghouse
(SSRC) Webinar on Early Care and Education, presented by Katherine A. Magnuson, the SSRC
Inaugural Emerging Scholar. As I said, I am Kris Moore and I am going to do a very quick
introduction to the SSRC, together with my colleague, Dr. Kristine Andrews.
Overview of the SSRC
Dr. Moore: The SSRC, as I think most of us know, is a virtual library. It now has over
1,900 items in it and it is growing steadily. It is designed for researchers, practitioners,
and policymakers, and it includes a number of interactive features. It depicts “Events
and Conferences” on the home page. There is an option to “Make a Linkage” with
the stakeholder organization around a particular topic, this is located under “Stay Connected.”
There is also “Talk About It” also under “Stay Connected” where you can initiate
a dialogue with others on self-sufficiency topics. And there is “MySSRC,” an individual
page for SSRC users that will be tailored to the interests of a particular user, which
is currently under development.
The SSRC takes a broad approach, not only in terms of stakeholders and functions, but
in terms of its substantive focus. There are 12 topic areas, and resources on these topics
are included as they pertain to self-sufficiency. For example, on assets there would not be
information on stocks among wealthy people but there would be information on building
assets for lower income families and individuals.
And, of course, there is the Emerging Scholar feature, which my colleague, Kristine Andrews,
will describe.
Emerging Scholar Selection Criteria
Dr. Kristine Andrews: The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation is interested in
publicizing the work of Emerging Scholars who are researching topics related to self-sufficiency.
Scholars will be featured quarterly on the SSRC Website, and the criteria for selecting
Emerging Scholars is as follows. One, the scholar must be in graduate school or hold
a graduate degree. We are seeking early career individuals, usually 1 to 5 years of experience,
but no more than 10 years of experience. We look for individuals who are currently doing
research on self-sufficiency issues related to one of those 12 substantive topic areas.
And finally, someone who is conducting high quality research that fills a knowledge gap
or addresses an issue that warrants greater visibility.
Katherine A. Magnuson, Emerging Scholar
Dr. Andrews: We are pleased to introduce this quarter’s featured Emerging Scholar, Dr.
Katherine A. Magnuson. Katherine Magnuson is an Associate Professor of Social Work at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Associate Director of the Institute for Research
on Poverty. She received her Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern
University’s School of Education in 2002 and completed a Post-doctoral Fellowship at
Columbia University’s School of Social Work.
Dr. Magnuson’s research focuses on how to improve the wellbeing of low-income families,
with a particular emphasis on improving the school readiness and school achievement of
poor children. Her work examines how socio-economic disadvantage affects family wellbeing as well
as how public policy and programs affect families and children. She has published empirical
research in the top developmental psychology and education journals and has translated
research for numerous policy and practice audiences.
A few items from her recent work are highlighted here, however several selected publications
have been made available via the Emerging Scholar link on the SSRC Website.
I am going to turn it over to Kris to review a few logistics on asking questions during
a Webinar, and then we will hear from our invited guest speaker, Dr. Magnuson.
Ask A Question!
Dr. Moore: Please feel free to submit questions throughout the Webinar through the Question
and Answer feature on the bottom right side of your screen. This is in the WebEx program.
Questions will be collected and answered after Dr. Magnuson’s presentation. If we run out
of time, questions will be answered and the questions will be posted on the SSRC Website
along with other Webinar materials after the event. And now we will turn it over to Dr.
Magnuson.
Early Care and Education: Self-Sufficiency Implications for Parents and Children
Dr. Magnuson: Thank you very much, Kris, and the rest of the SSRC team. I am honored to
be recognized as an emerging scholar in the area of self-sufficiency, and I am also delighted
that I am able to share some of my own work today as well as a body of work that has been
done by a much broader set of scholars. I also want to acknowledge that I am Associate
Director at the Institute for Research on Poverty, one of the three federally funded
poverty research institutions in the country. And one of our missions is both the dissemination
of poverty research and the training of the next generation of poverty scholars, so it
is a particularly nice synergy that I can meet both goals with this Webinar.
Early Care and Education (ECE): Background
Dr. Magnuson: What I want to talk to you today about is Early Care and Education and its
role in creating self-sufficiency for low income families. During this, I want to set
some background for my discussion today. For many of you who are perhaps familiar with
the field of Early Education and Child care this may be well-trodden ground, but I want
to offer these thoughts before I start because I think it is particularly important for how
we think about Early Care and Education. The first is to remind folks that there is really
no meaningful distinction between caring for young children and educating them. And, that
is, that in any program in which children are being cared for, they are being educated.
And in any program in which children are being educated, they are also being cared for. So
sometimes people mistakenly think about – they will often use the word daycare as child care,
but preschool as education, or some such distinction. And it is not only not true, but it does not
have a meaningful separate identity. So when I am talking today about Early Care and Education,
I really want us to think about the broad set of programs in which children are cared
for.
That said, Early Care and Education has historically served at least two purposes. I am sure there
are more than two for many people. But the first is to support parental employment. We
are a nation in which, as I will say a few more words about in a few minutes, parental
employment is high for both mothers and fathers and contingent on the ability to have other
people care for one’s children. The second point is that Early Care and Education has,
for a very long time, been recognized as a way to support children’s early learning.
So it is not only about supporting parents’ employment, but it is also about helping children
develop in healthy, optimal ways, both in terms of school readiness, in terms of health,
and other important domains in life.
What I am going to be discussing today is a set of arguments that relate to the point
that access to high quality and low cost Early Care and Education has the potential to improve
both parents’ employment outcomes and their self-sufficiency, as well as children’s
development and their later self-sufficiency. So it has the potential to affect both generations’
self-sufficiency. But we have some emerging evidence that such potential to positively
affect both generations may not be currently realized. And I will circle back to that argument
as we move through the talk.
Graph: Percent of Families Where the Mother is Employed
Dr. Magnuson: Just a few more points on how many parents really are in the workforce.
So I have taken this graph from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics and I will give them
credit for the work. This graph is tracking parents’ rate of employment over time, and
it is maternal employment specifically. It is going from 1994 as the start through 2010.
What you will see in these graphs is it splits it also by age of child, so the two blue lines
are looking at parents who have children of school age, so between age six and 17. And
you will see that rates of employment for this group has been bouncing somewhere between
70 to 80 percent, and have been higher during periods of economic boom or lower periods
of unemployment, and have declined in recent years, likely as a result of the recession.
What you will also see, however, is that for children in these brownish and orange bars,
for parents who have children under six years of age – and this is a group for which the
child care demands are quite high because they are not in school – there are high
rates of maternal employment. So even among married couples it is about 60 percent or
nearly 60 percent of mothers with children under age six are employed outside the home.
And you will see that for single mothers there has been a particularly large increase in
employment, especially during the late 1990s, likely as a result of changes in policy as
well as a booming economy during that time period in which they also have been employed
outside of the home.
Early Care and Education (ECE): Background
Dr. Magnuson: This is simply to make the point that non-parental care is both normative and
prevalent. So many children, particularly small children, are in non-parental care,
40 percent of infants, so children under one year of age, and by the time children are
four years old, at least 74 percent of four-year-olds are in some form of regular non-parental care.
I also want to make the point, in emphasizing how many mothers are working, that suggests
a need for non-parental care, but I also want to make the point that many parents who are
not working nonetheless use non-parental care, preschool, and other forms of child care.
So it is not only used by parents where both parents are in the labor market or mothers
are in the labor market.
Dr. Magnuson: Now, as a country, we have a seemingly vast array of “choices” for
Early Care and Education, and if you could see me, which I realize you cannot, you would
see I was using air quotes. And I do that to recognize that there are many possibilities
that parents can select from, so there are different modes of care. People receive care
from babysitters, from relatives, from in-home family daycare providers, from a large range
center-based program including things like Head Start, pre-kindergarten programs run
by local school districts, many for-profit and not-for-profit center-based programs.
So there is really quite an array of possibilities, but in selecting care and in making child
care choices most families face many important and binding constraints. So despite the potential
of many options, often costs – and I will say a word more about this in the next slide
or two – cost is quite high and can be prohibitive for many options.
Access, so even if options exist, they may not be available to a particular family. So
there may be a limited number, for example, of infant center-based slots within a community
or there may be very few – they may not have access to relatives to help with care.
Many child care providers, particularly those that are center-based, only operate during
traditional business hours. So often they will open a little early in the morning, but
something like 7:30 to 5:30. For parents that have rotating schedules and/or work non-standard
hours, finding a care provider that has the flexibility to handle those hours can often
be quite challenging.
And then, of course, all parents have preferences about what they think is most important in
selecting a care provider, and sometimes they may prefer one or another type of care but
not be able to align those care preferences in the face of all of the constraints that
they face.
So it is worth noting that there are many options for parents, but that these are not
unconstrained options. And with any particular circumstance or community, there are important
constraints that shape parents’ “choices” – again in air quotes – about what type
of care arrangement they use.
The Cost of Child Care
Dr. Magnuson: I do want to say a word about the cost of child care. Again, many of you
may have familiarity with the field so this is not at all news to you, but for people
who haven’t actually paid for it recently or stopped and thought about it, news flash,
child care is quite costly. One of the things that I think is important to realize is that
it is costly because it is fundamentally the cost of labor. We have yet to figure out what
the technology is that would enable us to reduce the labor needed to provide child care,
and it really is the human interaction and the care that one person provides that is
critical to child care. So for that reason, and all of the labor costs, it ends up being
costly.
I pulled data here from the National Association for Child Care Resource and Referral Agency
reports on the cost of care just to actually give people hard numbers because I think it
is important. They do surveys of care providers and come up with and rank states in terms
of the median cost of care. Just keep in mind that median means that it is at the 50th percentile,
so half the providers cost more than this number and half cost less. For the cost of
infant care, for center-based care, it is $9,100 a year and $6,900 for family-based
care. Four-year-olds tend to be slightly less costly because you need slightly fewer people
to provide care to the same number of children. You are at $7,600, this is the median state
average, and $6,200 for family-based care.
So, again, I do not have to tell you this represents quite a bit of money for anyone,
but even more so for low income individuals. Right? It is hard to imagine a family at near
poverty level of $20,000 being able to spend even the lowest amount of $5,200 for family-based
care for a child who is not yet in school. That would represent at least a third of their
income.
Quality of ECE
Dr. Magnuson: I want to say a few words about the quality and how to think about the quality
of Early Care and Education because I am going to talk a bunch about quality as my arguments
develop. First I want to say that actually you could probably ask about 15 different
Early Care and Education scholars what they think markers of a quality program are or
a quality experience, and you will get some areas on which they disagree, but probably
if you dig a little deeper the specifics would be very different. People have different ideas
about what quality is and that is even more so true when you start to talk about providers
and parents. That said, I think there are some general things to note about what the
quality of Early Care and Education is. And the first is, as I said before, that really
what Early Care and Education is about is it is about caring for and educating children.
What that means is that the quality of interactions between caregivers and children, and between
the children and the environment that surrounds them, is really the critical dimension to
think about in terms of the quality of an Early Care and Education setting.
So markers or hallmarks or characteristics of a high quality setting would be warm and
responsive interactions with caregivers, the provision of developmentally appropriate stimulating
materials and learning opportunities -- obviously for children under 12 months of age or infants
it is going to be quite different from what that would look like for four and five year
olds, but in both cases you want to provide children with opportunities to explore their
environment and learn things from their interactions with their environment. And then it is really
important not to forget that there is a set of safety and health related practices that
are going to be important no matter what type of setting you are in, and that is everything
from making sure that there are not physical things in the environment that can fall on
a child, to making sure that there are appropriate hand-washing practices.
Once you start to describe the interactions within a child care setting or a child care
and early education setting that is high quality, you can sort of think about a detraction from
that. Well, if I was trying to look at the outside from a program on paper, how would
I start to think about what are the things that facilitate those positive interactions?
So researchers sometimes make a distinction between those process indicators of quality
and structural indicators of quality. And the structural indicators of quality are things
that are important in thinking about in terms of a program because they increase the chances
that there are going to be more warm and responsive interactions, more learning processes, and
better safety and health within a setting. So for structural indicators, people talk
about things like caregiver education, particular training and credentials within the area of
early childhood, they talk about staff and child ratios, so having more staff and fewer
children is usually a good thing because it allows caregivers to provide additional attention
or larger amounts of attention to children, and then the use of best practices and provision
of other services. So here, having ways in which parents are formally engaged in Early
Care and Education settings, having ways in which children are screened for developmental
problems, and a range of other practices that are thought of as being particularly good
for children. So that is somewhat of a long discussion but it is just sort of to prime
you to think about how do we think about quality within early care and education settings as
I launch on to talk more about it.
Graph: Share of ECCE Workers With At Least Some College Education
Dr. Magnuson: I mentioned Early Care and Education is a highly labor-intensive area to work in,
and we know something about the quality of those Early Care and Education workers. I
have taken the data from a paper by Daphne Bassok which I will recommend to people related
to the characteristics of the Early Care and Education workforce over approximately the
past 20 years. So again, starting in the early 1990s and going to 2010, and what you will
see is a suggestion for why costs of early education are going up. So this is tracking
the percent of workers that have at least some college education. In blue is the percentage
for home-based workers, so people that are working in people’s homes or in-home family
care. In red is for center-based workers. And you will see that there has been an increase
in the percent of workers in each sector that have at least some college education, although
it has been a particularly large increase among home-based workers.
Graph: Mean Hourly Earnings of Full-Year ECCE Workers by Sector
Dr. Magnuson: And the next graph, which I just turned to, is looking at their average
mean hourly earnings. So the first thing to note is that, despite the labor intensity
and what I would argue is necessary high skill to produce high quality care, wages in general
are low for these positions. Again, probably not news for many of you on the phone. But
you will also see that wages have been going up both for home-based workers, but also for
center-based workers. These are adjusted so these increases in pay are not reflecting
inflation, they are actually reflecting changes in hourly wages.
Cost, Access & Quality
Dr. Magnuson: So because Early Care and Education – I think I have made the case that it is
pretty expensive – it is important to recognize that parents are indeed price sensitive. And
this is particularly true with respect to the use of center-based care. I will come
back to this point in a few minutes, but we know that parents choose lower cost care and
often will choose informal or in-home care relative to center-based care because of its
cost. Which is to say when there are mechanisms and policies that reduce the cost of center-based
care, parents are more likely to move into that mode of care.
We also know that even within a particular type of care, so even looking within center-based
care or within home-based care, that generally higher quality care does cost more because
it is labor intensive and because you are paying for people’s labor. That is one of
the reasons. And yet, we also find that national studies find that only a small proportion
of the care that is available to parents of any mode is high quality. So typically if
you are looking at national data, at most you will see that 20 percent of care is looking
in the high quality range of care. And this is using standardized measures that look across
a number of dimensions of care.
That said, in order to promote parents’ access to care and to quality care, the federal
government has been providing funds to states through the Child Care and Development Fund
(CCDF) now for – I guess we are coming up on 15 to 20 years. The federal government
provides a range of guidelines that states are able to work with to craft their own child
care subsidy programs for low income individuals. Probably most relevant for the rest of the
discussion is that subsidies are typically conditioned on employment, as one might expect,
so working parents and sometimes parents who are attending school are able to access these
subsidies, and they typically only cover the number of hours that someone is employed,
with some additional hours for commuting and transportation, and thus and such. A small
portion of the CCDF is also set aside for state quality improvement initiatives. I do
not know what it is in the most recent round but it has typically been something like 4
percent.
The federal government and state governments have also undertaken other types of initiatives
to increase access, particularly to preschool programs, so programs most often for four-year-olds.
Thinking about the Head Start program, which is granted directly to providers to provide
early education, and then pre-kindergarten programs, which are typically financed through
local school districts or state education funding.
Finally, I do not want to leave off the table that the federal government also provides
money to middle class families to help with child care costs through the Dependent Care
tax credit, in which up to $6,000 for two children, $3,000 for one child, are available
for a tax credit for cost of care. So that is not the amount of the credit, that is the
amount of money that could be spent that would be eligible for a credit.
Subsidies Support Parental Employment & Earnings
Dr. Magnuson: I am going to focus most of my comments for the rest of the Webinar – although
I am happy to take questions on those other programs – I am focusing most of my comments
on thinking about the subsidies that parents have access to, low income working parents
have access to, and how that affects self-sufficiency. So the first thing in this is confirming that
research can find it to be true. What should not be a great surprise is that, in fact,
when parents are able to receive child care subsidies or access subsidies, it does indeed
reduce the cost of care, and that, in turn, promotes parents’ employment. So when you
are looking at outcomes such as, “Are parents who have access to child care subsidies more
likely to be formally employed outside the home,” the answer is yes. And often, not
surprisingly, the data shows that mothers do have the largest child care costs, those
for young children for which it costs more, and those with more children. Right? So, obviously,
the costs are higher if you have more than one child or two children. Those are the populations
for which child care subsidies have the largest effect on promoting employment.
Now, in some ways we might think of that as the most mechanical effect. Right? So you
have to be employed to get the subsidies, it just makes sense that having subsidies
would lead to greater employment. But in order to really hone in on the ideas about self-sufficiency,
you want to think about whether the program is also going to have, for lack of a better
word I’ll call “***-on effects.” Meaning is it going to have effects beyond that very
important but yet somewhat mechanical effect? So in the long run, is it going to promote
better employment down the road, not just when they are specifically receiving a subsidy?
There have been two ways to look at this. So, one, is to look at the extent to which
child care subsidies might reduce work disruptions. The idea here is that if you have access to
a child care subsidy and you are able to put your child in a regular or a more formal type
of child care early education setting – so, again, think about using a center-based care
program relative to a neighbor or a relative – the use of a more reliable child care
arrangement is going to reduce the number of work disruptions that are going to occur
from child care. In other words, being able to access child care subsidies is going to
be able to keep people in a job longer because they are less likely to have to miss work
to take care of their children. And informal types of care arrangements are less reliable
and more likely to fall through, and there is less likelihood of having a backup.
Research has also found that there are fewer child care related work disruptions when families
are using child care subsidies. That has potential positive impacts by building people’s employment
tenure.
This brings me to my final point, which is that there has been research most recently
by Yoonsook Ha who has found that the use of child care subsidies is associated with
significant increases in earnings, and this is over and above just being employed or not
employed. So what she did is actually used administrative data from here in Wisconsin
and she was able to look at 5 years worth of subsidy receipt and patterns of subsidy
receipt, and then look at whether that predicted earnings in a subsequent year. So not even
while they were necessarily receiving child care subsidies. And what she found is that,
compared to not using subsidies at all, those that used subsidies for between 7 and 24 months
– and that was the high end of the subsidy use spectrum – had 35 percent higher earnings
the year after they were being observed using child care subsidies. That is even after controlling
for how long they had been employed. So it is to suggest that child care subsidies are
likely to have important effects on self-sufficiency through building earnings through this employment
and job tenure.
Use of Child Care Subsidies Increases Quality of Child Care
Dr. Magnuson: So that is sort of dealing with the parent side of the self-sufficiency generation
or the parent generation with respect to self-sufficiency. Now I want to talk a little bit more about
the child side of the equation. One of the things that we do know, and what I have sort
of been alluding to, is that the use of child care subsidy also increases the quality of
child care that children experience. In large part that is because we know, particularly
for preschoolers but also for children of all ages, parents tend to substitute center-based
care for informal care in the presence of a subsidy. To put that another way, when parents
have access to child care subsidies which drastically reduce the cost of child care,
they are more likely to use a center-based care option.
We know that during the 1990s, in which there were large increases in child care subsidy
funding largely to promote parents’ employment during changes to welfare reform, that this
increase in child care subsidy funding was directly linked to increases in low income
children’s enrollment in center-based care. So with the work that I did with Marcia Meyer
and Jane Waldfogel, we found that there was a 15 percentage point increase in the enrollment
in center-based care for low income three- and four-year-olds, and at least half of this
appeared to be due to the increased funding for child care subsidies.
Now, it turns out that, on average, center-based care tends to be of higher quality than informal
care. And because parents switch from using informal modes of care to center-based care
in the presence of subsidies – and again, that is a general pattern, it is not one-to-one
correspondent, so it increases the odds that parents select it, not the necessity that
they do select it – but because center-based care tends to be of higher quality, we see
that subsidies thus generally improve the quality of care that children experience.
Another way to put that is that in the absence of changing modes of care, simply looking
at the type of care within a type of care, so children who are in center-based care,
those receiving subsidies and those that are not receiving subsidies, you do not see differences
either within center-based care or within home-based care. However, it becomes particularly
complicated in thinking about what that means, especially when you are thinking about it
in terms of center-based care because there are other forms of center-based care in which
parents are not receiving subsidies in the sense that they are not receiving particular
subsidies through the Department of Health and Human Services type subsidies, but they
may be receiving subsidies because they are in a Head Start program or in a publicly funded
pre-kindergarten program. So it is a little complicated to know what is being compared
to what. When you find that there are differences in care, it does not mean that you are comparing
parents who are paying to parents who are not paying. I just wanted to offer that bit
of clarification.
High Quality, Center-Based Care is Linked with Child Outcomes
Dr. Magnuson: Generally, also from the field, we are well aware that high quality center-based
care is linked with better child outcomes. Now, I could have given, for another audience
perhaps, a whole Webinar on how we know that low income children have lower levels of school
readiness and that these lower levels of school readiness translate to persisting disparities
in school outcomes and achievement. In general, we know that low income children are at risk
of not doing well in school. And it turns out that of the policy tools that we have
available or program tools that we have available for boosting low income children’s early
school success and school readiness, that a year or two of high quality Early Care and
Education or preschool is the most effective tool or policy that we have. On average, looking
at children who attend preschool for a year or two, we find that children’s school readiness
improved by somewhere between two to four months. So they come in already ahead of their
peers compared to children who have not had access or who have not attended enriching
preschool programs.
And, more importantly, there have been a few studies that have really been able to track
children over time. So now you have to realize that these studies were done back in, at the
latest, in the 1980s so that the children in the programs can age long enough that you
can see how they do as young adults. But multiple programs have found that a year or two of
enriching, high quality early childhood education before children enter school not only boosts
their short-term school readiness when they are entering school, but that it has long-run
effects on education, high school completion, college attendance, later earnings in the
labor market, and it also reduces their propensity to engage in criminal activity and to receive
welfare benefits as adults. Now, in part, that is because there are mechanisms that
we know that are linking that transition into school and that early school readiness to
these later outcomes, but it also could be that they are achieving other aspects of kids’
behaviors and health early on that persist over time to affect multiple dimensions of
their early adult and later adult outcomes.
Using Child Care Subsidies to Improve Child Outcomes: A Missed Opportunity
Dr. Magnuson: So, you would think that I was setting up a really nice story in which by
providing these child care subsidies, which are moving children into higher quality care,
that we have this double *** for the buck type of effect where we are improving parents’
self-sufficiency and improving children’s self-sufficiency. And, unfortunately, the
emerging literature on the effect of child care subsidies on children’s outcomes do
not seem to be portraying that type of nice story. In fact, it looks like these child
care subsidies might, in fact, be missing an opportunity to improve child outcomes.
So there has been a host of studies and there are some additional studies that are not quite
published that are coming out that suggest that children who are receiving care and whose
parents are getting child care subsidies are not doing better than children who are not
getting child care subsidies. So, in general, some studies are showing negative effects
of child care subsidies on kids’ outcomes, including their cognitive outcomes, achievement
outcomes, as well as their health, and others are suggesting that the effect may be neutral;
that is that it is neither helping nor harming children’s outcomes. And I want to say,
as I just commented, that in many ways this is surprising. Right? I could have set up
a story in which the program is operating, providing *** for a buck, and this is what
I want to focus the rest of my discussion on.
Why Does Subsidy Use Not Result in Better Child Outcomes?
Dr. Magnuson: So why is it that we are missing out on this opportunity to really have a positive
effect on both generations? I think the most likely explanation is that what we know about
the patterns of the use of child care is that people are using these subsidies typically
for a very short period of time, and that they are using them in multiple spells. So,
on average, the median length of subsidy spell – and these are taken from people analyzing
two specific states, and no doubt it varies across states, but there is no reason to think
the states that have been looked at are unique. So, on average, the median spell of subsidy
length is between 3 and 7 months, and their patterns are churning. And by churning, what
I mean is that people received subsidies for a short period of time, they have a period
where they are not receiving subsidies that may be equally as short, and then they begin
a new spell of subsidy receipt.
So why are the spells so short? Well, it looks like our best research, it is not a guess,
but the best that we can get out from the data is that subsidy spells most often end
because of employment loss. As I noted, child care subsidy is linked to meeting work requirements,
and when individuals lose employment and do not quickly regain it, they become ineligible
for child care subsidies.
The other thing to note in recent work that I have done with Yoonsook Ha is that we also
now know that the instability in child care subsidy translates into instability in child
care providers. So someone who is receiving child care subsidies and is in a particular
care arrangement, they then experience a spell of lack of subsidy, they lose their child
care subsidy, and it is not typical for them to be able – if they get another subsidy
– to be able to go back to that first provider. So typically each spell of subsidy results
in a new arrangement or a new provider.
So one explanation for why subsidy is not resulting in better child outcomes is that
while a year or two of high quality child care is particularly beneficial for children,
this pattern of changing providers – even if they are of high quality – but changing
providers every few months is not going to be good for children. If you think back to
what the hallmarks of quality are, which is that warm, responsive, consistent relationship
and good interactions, that often takes time to develop and the interruptions of a relationship
are unlikely to be beneficial for children.
Another explanation would be perhaps it is not the instability in the provision of care,
but perhaps the quality of care is really better than they would otherwise experience
but still not good enough to produce positive outcomes. We do know from the national data
that a relatively small proportion of programs and care settings are of high quality. So
if we could really ramp up the quality, perhaps that would enable subsidies to have a better
effect.
Finally, another explanation that is out there in the literature, which I am slightly less
persuaded by, is that what child care subsidies do is support mothers and families in low
wage employment, and that in itself ends up being detrimental to low income families.
Mothers are more stressed when they are in these low wage jobs, they are less able to
be available and warm and responsive to their own children, and that in and of itself has
a negative effect, child care setting aside. I am a little bit hesitant to embrace or be
persuaded by this argument in part because we have had a host of studies about the effects
of transitions into low wage work and they have not found the same set of findings that
would support that. So, in general, they do not find negative effects.
Policy Implications
Dr. Magnuson: I want to stop with policy implications. I want to argue that our current policies
are doing a far better job of supporting parental employment than they are in promoting positive
child development or children’s subsequent self-sufficiency. And here is the missed opportunity.
We know that there is the potential that if we could improve children’s school readiness,
we might well see long-run effects on later outcomes and better self-sufficiency. So I
want to argue that in thinking about the child care subsidy system, we should think about
how better to support stability in high quality early childhood and education programs. One
way this is being thought of, at least in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is thinking about
moving away from it purely as an employment support and starting to think about scholarships
or other ways that will support children and provide stability in child care when the parents
themselves may have unstable employment.
Finally, we should also consider how to improve program quality as part of the explanation,
and I think there is some work coming out that is suggesting that one of the best ways
to think about program quality improvement is through professional development, as well
as making sure that the subsidy system is partnering well with other early childhood
education programs, such as Head Start and pre-kindergarten programs. I will now turn
it over to Kris Moore and start to answer questions and comments.
Questions?
Dr. Moore: Great, thank you very much. That was a really informative talk, and we have
some questions accumulating. One question is: Do you have thoughts about what quality
of care is good enough for children and parents?
Dr. Magnuson: This is a great question, and the researcher that you should try to track
down because she has published quite a bit about this is Peg Burchinal. What data is
starting to look like is that I think for a while there was a hope that – and many
others have worked on this as well, so I know the Administration for Children and Families
(ACF) is interested in this question and has contracted I believe with Child Trends, and
I am not going to start to name names of people there because if I miss someone’s name I
will feel badly about it, but I know Child Trends has been doing some good work on this
as well. So my understanding or read of this literature – and absolutely I will find
a way to go to the talk about it and post the references and articles that I am picking
up so that you can actually read them and make your own conclusions – my read is that
while we had all hoped that research would be able to sort of pinpoint some minimum standards
that, if we could put in place, we would see real improvements in children’s learning
and wellbeing, that has not proven to be the case. There is not a clear “here is at best
what we need.” In fact, some of the work is suggesting that improvements really at
the high end of the quality spectrum is what is most needed to promote children’s learning.
So that said, I think anyone in the field would also – speaking out of both sides
of my mouth – would also say that settings in which safety is not secured, in which there
are health problems, that there are some minimum levels that you really should worry particularly
hard about.
Dr. Moore: Thank you. There is a question about the duration of subsidy receipt. Are
there studies that contrast the effects for short subsidy receipt compared with longer
subsidy receipt?
Dr. Magnuson: There are two ways to think about this question. Right? So I could think
about this question in terms of parent self-sufficiency. So does longer subsidy receipt tend to have
better outcomes for parents than short subsidy receipt? But then also in terms of kid outcomes.
And I will answer both of them. So it is much clearer I think in the adult earnings and
employment, it does show particularly (unclear) shows that longer periods of receipt are associated
with better earnings outcome. And, again, this is even after – this is not in the
same concurrent period, but in a subsequent period earnings look better. In terms of child
outcomes, one of the things that I think as a field and as researchers, I get excited
to think about lots of opportunities for what we could do with data. And as longitudinal
data systems within states are coming on board as people are finding ways to link administrative
data such that it has more information about child outcomes, I think there are lots of
opportunities. I have not seen the research that is able to do a really good analysis
of whether receiving child care subsidies for a longer period of time might result in
better child outcomes relative to other kids and/or relative to receiving it for a particularly
short period of time. Whoever asked this question was obviously following the arc of my logic
quite well, because if instability is the issue, you would expect to see just that – that
promoting stability in subsidy receipt would result in greater stability in placement in
ECE settings, and if that setting was sufficiently high quality and even maybe if it wasn’t
particularly high but good enough quality, then we would see positive outcomes. So I
think that is exactly one of the next important research steps to figure out.
Dr. Moore: Is there research on subsidy receipt and college attendance, post-secondary attendance?
Dr. Magnuson: That is a great question. Is there anything more specific about it? I can
take that in about four different directions, so I do not know…
Dr. Moore: That was the question.
Dr. Magnuson: Okay, so you can think about it in a couple of ways. Is there evidence
to suggest that child care subsidy receipt promotes college attendance? My read on this,
I have done some earlier work that actually looked at patterns of moms returning to school,
low income mothers who returned to school and that effect on children, and in the process
of studying that I sort of delved into the weeds as to which states allow child care
subsidy support for which particular types of education. The states have different definitions
of what will meet work requirements. I have not seen anything that specifically links
the access to child care subsidies to moms’ ability to continue their education. It is
part of a more broad question about the role of what the work requirements are and how
that affects the types of choices that people make for how they are going to spend their
time when they are receiving support.
Dr. Moore: What do you see as the gaps in our current research or understanding in this
area?
Dr. Magnuson: I think there are several things that I would point to. And when I say gaps,
it is both research gaps, but I think also a broader appreciation by policymakers and
potentially – maybe less so people on the ground, but a combination thereof. So I think
one important gap is really trying to (audio drops out) the multiple sources of data that
we gather there, but are not easily blended together to answer questions. So thinking
about the fact that states track data about child care subsidies and other systems, like
educational systems, and have systems to collect data on how children are doing. To me, it
seems like a great disservice to everyone that we are not able to link these sources
of data and really push to understand what are the patterns and how are they affecting
children in terms of their learning and in terms of how the stability or instability
arrangements are affecting kids’ growth and development. So there is much more fine
grained information to get at understanding why it is that these child care subsidies
are not having a more positive effect on kids’ outcomes. I also think we need to wrap our
heads around how complicated things are on the ground, both for families but then also
for programs. So the idea that kids who are receiving child care subsidies may well be
in a Head Start program, may well be also in a pre-kindergarten program, and there are
lots of intersections across the field in terms of braided funding, differing standards
across programs. So just getting a greater sense and appreciation for the interaction
of multiple programs, and here I am thinking only about within Early Care and Education,
but then how it overlaps. And I have all sorts of hand movements here that you all cannot
see. But how that is overlapping with other systems. Right? So thinking about how that
might intersect with systems related to Child Protective Services, systems about TANF or
welfare benefit receipt. So a better set of understanding the ways in which the programs
are interacting within children’s lives and how there might be other missed opportunities.
Dr. Moore: And another question that we received that goes beyond programs and systems. The
listeners ask: Are there things that are linked to low income households that influence child
outcomes? What are some of them? Suggesting residential instability as an example of one
of those things.
Dr. Magnuson: Yes, absolutely, and there is some great work, for those of you who are
interested in this stuff, there is some really compelling work by Gary Evans who is pushing
social scientists to think beyond the immediate family even, and think about the sources of
instability and environmental pressure on these families. So thinking about things like
noise pollution, air pollution, there are many things that impinge on the lives of low
income children that may hamper their ability to succeed or reduce the likelihood that they
will, and all of them will intersect to some extent with how parents think about arranging
Early Care and Education. I think one of the things that comes really clearly both when
you read research about low income families and child care and when you actually talk
to families about child care decisions is how difficult their decisions are. Almost
every parent has a strong, strong protective urge to help their children grow and develop,
and when you are really facing limited resources to spend and the set of options does not feel
good, it can be a very hard thing to figure out. How far am I going to go? Am I going
to drive my kid half an hour, despite the fact that I already work 10 hour days, and
I know that is going to tire them out even further? But I can get into a better quality
provider that is half an hour away. I know my car is not reliable. Do I go with that
arrangement even knowing that there is a great likelihood that someday I may end up having
to miss work because my car is not working and I cannot get the kid to the child care?
Or do I pick someone who I know down the street but, you know, I think she really does not
provide enough interaction with the kids. I am worried my kid is going to sit and watch
TV. When you start to talk to families and read interviews of families that have really
had to make these difficult decisions, you realize that this is one piece of their larger
package of trying to really make their lives work and make their children’s lives better.
And it really sort of brings home the importance of supporting them and making the decision
that is right for them.
Dr. Moore: Do you happen to know how many people who are eligible for child care subsidies
actually receive them? And are they the more advantaged of those who are eligible?
Dr. Magnuson: These are all wonderful questions, and that is another one. And this is particularly
(unclear) because this is a really hard thing to figure out. Who is the universe of people
who are eligible to receive child care subsidies, both by virtue of having incomes below the
particular threshold, but then also by meeting the work requirements? So early estimates,
you can find estimates that say something like 17 to 24 percent of eligible families
actually received the subsidies. But I actually like to layer on another important criteria,
which is, of these families then, who is also not getting essentially subsidized child care
through another mechanism? Right? So you do not want to think about a family who is eligible
for the child care subsidies but whose child is enrolled in a full day Head Start program
as being eligible, but then not a recipient. I mean they are an eligible non-recipient,
but they also do not have the need for it. So some work by Anna Johnson that was using
a recent birth cohort study of children came up with a number that about 30 percent of
children – and I think this was slightly older children, so I am thinking it is at
maybe 36 months of age, so around three, maybe slightly older – 30 percent were eligible
for subsidies but not receiving any form of subsidized care. So about 30 percent. Now,
one reason why people might not be using subsidized care is that they have been able to set up
work schedules with a partner or another family member so they do not need it. In other instances,
we know that states carry waiting lists, so they may well be in great need of that support,
but not be able to access it because it is not an entitlement, they are too far down
on the wait list.
Dr. Moore: One last question because we are in our final minutes. Do you have a high priority
policy recommendation for the policymakers in the audience?
Dr. Magnuson: I would really encourage them to think about ways in which they could re-think
the eligibility requirements and potentially give people a greater cushion, such that if
they lose employment, that the child care eligibility or the child care subsidy is not
immediately, or even relatively quickly, pulled. The economy that we are in, it takes people
longer – or it has been taking people longer to find re-employment if they do move a job,
and I think the ability to maintain a slot with a child care provider might be particularly
important in promoting the ability of these early care settings to be beneficial to children.
It is complicated and I know states are really feeling the economic pressure, and so I know
even in my own home state of Wisconsin, for example, they are looking for ways to spend
less. So, for example, if a kid is sick, providers are not getting subsidies for the days that
they are not there. Nonetheless, I think thinking about it more from a perspective of how can
we promote stability within Early Care and Education settings might be an important way
to look at that.
Dr. Moore: Thank you very much, and thank you for a wonderful discussion for the first
Emerging Scholar Webinar. Everyone is encouraged to continue to ask questions. They will all
be answered through the Website. And thanks to everyone for attending. So long.
Questions and Answers from the December 6, 2012 Emerging Scholar Webinar
featuring Katherine Magnuson, Ph.D.
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Transcript of the December 6, 2012 Emerging Scholar Webinar
featuring Katherine Magnuson, Ph.D.
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