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Review materials on validating child care market rate surveys and collaborations in child care and early education across state, local, and program levels.

Guidance for Validating Child Care Market Rate Surveys Project (September 2008)

Child care market rate surveys describe prices that are set in the open market by child care providers. The 1998 federal Child Care and Development Fund Final Rule requires states, territories and tribes to conduct a market rate survey within 2 years of their currently approved CCDF plan. Great variation exists in the costs, methods, and utility of market rate surveys across the nation.

The Guidance for Validating Child Care Market Rate Surveys project is a study of the ways states currently conduct market rate surveys, methods to validate market rate survey findings, and the effects of child care subsidies on the larger child care market. The study is funded by the federal Child Care Bureau and is being conducted by Oregon State University, University of Minnesota, and the National Center for Children in Poverty. The three objectives of the project are:
 

  • Objective 1: Describe key elements of market rate survey methods, policies, and practices in order to capture current practice of states, tribes and territories, and to refine the proposed research design for validating market rate survey findings.      

  • Objective 2: Evaluate the effect of using various samples and methods on validity, market representation, and cost effectiveness in producing child care market rate findings at the level of community and state, territory, or tribe.      

  • Objective 3: Explore the effects of subsidies on child care prices in different policy environments.


All materials from the project are available here. These include: a discussion of The validity of child care market rate surveys, (PDF 146K) by Arthur Emlen; the first report from the three-year study titled Practices and policies: Market rate surveys in states, territories, and tribes; the study's second report Tribal child care and development fund grantees: Market rate surveys and other child care practices and policies; the third report Study of market prices: Validating child care market rate surveys; and Dataset generated by the project. Also available are summaries of the project Advisory Committee Meetings: Summary of the First Advisory Committee Meeting (PDF 208K), Summary of the Second Advisory Committee Meeting (PDF 149K), and Summary of the Third Advisory Committee Meeting (PDF 127K), which generated recommendations on guidance to states, territories, and tribes growing out of issues identified in the study's third report.
In September 2008, Research Connections hosted a series of five interactive Webinars that examined the challenges to producing accurate price findings with child care market rate surveys based on the findings from the Guidance for Validating Child Care Market Rate Surveys research project.

The recorded webinars are accessible for viewing, listening, or download (various formats).

Collaborations in Early Care and Education (May 2010)


In May 2010 the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) hosted the meeting Collaborations in Early Child Care and Education: Establishing a Framework for a Research Agenda. Invited experts  discussed  how collaboration in early care and education across the state, local, and program levels are increasing in their scope and complexity, and the difficulties in measuring the effectiveness of collaboration processes and collaboration outcomes.  An overall goal of the meeting was to build a framework for researching and evaluating collaborations in early care and education.

Meeting Summary
View the presentations from this meeting:

Webinar on Collaborations in Early Child Care and Education

On April 6, 2011, Research Connections held a webinar on the topic of Collaborations in Early Care and Education This webinar highlighted why collaboration is important, what the research says about how to establish effective collaborations at the state and city level, and how to evaluate the outcomes of these collaborations. Using a 'Theory of Change' model as a concrete framework for both creating and evaluating collaborations the webinar provided examples of a state-wide collaboration (Maryland) and a city-wide collaboration (Philadelphia). The webinar built on the May 2010 roundtable organized by OPRE that brought together researchers and state- and local-level policy makers to construct a framework for research and evaluation regarding collaborations in early care and education.

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