Assessing the Quality of New England’s Child Care Workforce

Editor’s Note: For more information on this Muskie School study, contact Erin Oldham at 207-780-5838.

Key players from the six New England states have joined together to form the first regional partnership focused on improving the quality of the early child care and education workforce. According to child care providers throughout New England, the problem of attracting and retaining qualified workers has reached crisis proportions.

The New England Workforce Partners for Early Care and Education (NEW Partners) will inventory and analyze data on the status of the child care workforce in New England. The NEW Partners project, administered by the Institute for Child and Family Policy of the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine in collaboration with the Associated Day Care Services of Boston, MA, will convene child care administrators from state governments, child care providers, parents, researchers, policy makers and the business community from across New England.

The study is funded by a major grant awarded by the Child Care Bureau of the Administration for Children, Youth and Families, Department of Health and Human Services. The grant, made under the Bureau’s Child Care Policy Research Partnerships initiative, is for $300,000 in the first year, with the possibility of funding for two more years at the end of the grant period.

National studies have found that a stable, qualified early care and education staff is the most important predictor of quality and that low provider qualifications and high staff turnover can have a harmful effect on children’s development. Yet despite the sense of urgency about this problem, there is a lack of available data on the child care workforce at the local and state level. As a result, it is difficult for policy makers to tailor solutions to the particular demographic and economic characteristics of their own communities and it is even harder to assess whether the policies they do adopt have the effect they intended.

NEW Partners hopes to address this data gap, broaden knowledge of the child care workforce and, in the process, create a model for regional data collection and analysis that can be used to address a broad array of child care issues in other regions of the country. Should the project receive multi-year funding, NEW Partners plans to further analyze the impact of policy reforms in New England. This analysis can then be used to inspire and inform new initiatives to help raise the status of the child care workforce and improve the quality of care children receive.

Other members of the partnership are the United States Association of Child Care (USA Child Care), a national membership organization of child care programs that serve low income children and the Alliance for Children's Care, Education and Support Services (ACCESS), a provider-based grou promoting improvements in Maine's child care system.