Three studies chart quality, child welfare

By Andrew Garber

Several studies have been done on the quality of child care in recent years. Here are highlights from three reports:

• A study, published in 1995, looked at about 400 large day-care centers in four states. It was done by researchers at Yale, the University of North Carolina, the University of California and the University of Colorado. Among their findings:
  • ''The level of quality at most U.S. child-care centers, especially in infant and toddler rooms, does not meet children's needs for health, safety, warm relationships and learning.''

  • Small class sizes are a key indicator of quality. ''The staff-to-child ratio is the most significant determinant of quality, even when controlling for other factors.''

  • ''Center quality also increases as the percentage of center staff with a high level of education increases.''

  • ''States with more demanding licensing standards have fewer poor-quality centers.'' The study found that North Carolina had more poor-quality centers than the other states studied. At the time, North Carolina had the least stringent standards of all the states looked at.

  • ''Parents . . . substantially overestimate the quality of services their children are receiving. There is evidence that parents are hindered in assessing care by the inherent difficulty of monitoring service.''

    The study also noted that ''there is little difference in fees between poor-quality and high-quality centers.''

    ''Until parents . . . can easily distinguish good from mediocre and poor-quality centers, and demand higher quality, centers cannot increase their fees to cover the costs of providing better care.''

• A 1994 study looked at 226 day-care homes in three states. The study was done by the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research organization in New York. Among the findings:
  • Only 12 percent of regulated homes provided high-quality care. For unregulated day-care homes, only 3 percent provided quality care.

  • In the states studied, 81 percent of the day-care homes looked at were unregulated and caring for children illegally. The states looked at, however, had stringent thresholds of regulation and required providers caring for more than one to three children to be regulated.

    In Maine, it is legal to care for up to two unrelated children without state permission.

• A recently concluded study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development looked at the intellectual development of children in day-care centers by testing children enrolled at different centers. Among the findings:
  • Children in low-quality child care ''are scoring lower than average on measures of intellectual development,'' said Alison Clarke-Stewart, a researcher at the University of California-Irvine. She worked on the study.

    ''I've always thought that it wasn't surprising that if you sent kids to a place with an educational program, that it should promote their education,'' she said. ''This just supports that.''

  • Overall, children attending day care develop intellectually at the same rate as children who are raised at home by a parent. ''So far we haven't found any big damaging effects of being in child care, and that was a major question of the whole study.'' The study did not look at behavior and emotional development.

    The study's findings are not at odds with research showing that poor-quality day-care situations can hinder a child's development. ''If you wanted to have a child-care system that would optimize children's development, then what most child care provides is lower than that,'' Clarke-Stewart said. ''It is mediocre.''

    ''If you're saying that the baseline is the care that families themselves provide anyway, then child care is only as mediocre as families,'' she said. ''There are as many mediocre mothers as there are mediocre child-care providers.''