For decades, the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) has enabled states, territories, and Tribes to help families with low incomes afford child care. To ensure CCDF dollars are spent on higher-quality care, most states require child care providers accepting child care subsidies to participate in their quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS). In this analysis, we explore the potential consequences of requiring QRIS participation for the supply and use of subsidized child care. We analyze whether introducing this requirement affects the number of providers, children, and families supported by CCDF funding.
Why This Matters
QRIS has the potential to support providers’ quality improvement and increase the supply of high-quality options available to families using a subsidy, yet QRIS and child care subsidy programs come with participation costs (e.g., administrative and financial burdens). If the additional costs outweigh the potential benefits, providers might be disincentivized to participate in the subsidy program, thus limiting child care choices of families using a subsidy, rather than strengthening them. Policymakers seeking to improve child care quality may benefit from evidence documenting potential unintended consequences of subsidy policies on child care supply and use.
What We Found
Our key finding is that requiring subsidy-accepting child care providers to participate in QRIS did not negatively impact the number of providers accepting a child care subsidy, or the number of children and families using one. In fact, the earliest adopters of this requirement may have seen potential improvements to the number of providers, children, and families supported by CCDF-funded subsidies, relative to what may have occurred had the requirement not been introduced. While it is still possible some individual providers faced pressures in meeting new QRIS requirements, our results offer encouraging evidence that these requirements did not compromise subsidized child care supply.
How We Did It
We used publicly available data and a synthetic difference-in-differences method to estimate counterfactual conditions for states choosing to introduce a QRIS participation requirement in their child care subsidy program.
