The Effects of Accountability Incentives in Early Childhood Education: Evidence From Tennessee

• In Event: 1-216 - Holding Early Childhood Education Accountability Systems Accountable: Findings from Classroom, State, and National Level Analyses

Integrative Statement

As research has found that high-quality early childhood experiences can produce short and long-term benefits that far outweigh their costs, researchers and policymakers have increasingly focused on ways to measure and improve quality within the early childhood sector. In an effort to improve the quality of early care at scale, nearly all U.S. states have recently adopted Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS). These accountability systems give child care providers and parents detailed information about program quality, and create both reputational and financial incentives for providers to improve. However, we know little about whether these accountability reforms operate as theorized, as only one study that we are aware of has examined whether these systems can be effective either in incentivizing improvement among providers or affecting decisions parents make about where to enroll their children (Bassok, Dee, & Latham, 2017).
The current study examines Tennessee’ Star Quality Child Care Program, one of the oldest and most well-established QRIS in the country. We leverage a regression discontinuity design embedded within Tennessee’s QRIS to examine the effect of quasi-random assignment to a higher vs. lower quality rating. Specifically, child care providers are discontinuously likely to earn a higher rating if they score above a specified score on the Environment Rating Scale (a continuous observational measure of quality). This means providers of comparable quality are assigned different ratings depending on where they fall relative to this threshold score (Figure 1 illustrates this “first stage” relationship among center-based providers). We leverage this discontinuity to estimate the effect of a higher vs. lower rating on future program quality, enrollment, and likelihood of closure.
We use a 15-year panel that dates to the start of Tennessee’s QRIS in 2000. These data contain all licensed child care providers in the state, and include open/close dates, enrollment, capacity, auspice, and provider street addresses. The data also contain multiple indicators of quality that are collected as part of Tennessee’s QRIS.
Similar to Bassok, Dee, & Latham, (2017), we examine the effects of higher vs. lower star ratings on subsequent program quality and subsequent enrollment. However, we extend upon this previous work in several important ways. First, we examine these questions in a new state context, examining a different statewide QRIS with a different set of embedded incentives. Second, in contrast to previous work which examined improvements on an omnibus measure of quality, we use item-level quality indicators to examine specific dimensions of quality on which providers improved. Third, we consider the effects of an accountability system on both center-based providers and family child care centers, the latter of which were not included in previous work. Finally, our unusually long panel allows us to examine these effects across a 15-year period, much longer than has been examined previously. This work contributes much-needed insight into the effects of an early childhood policy that has expanded rapidly, but without much empirical support.

Authors

• Daphna Bassok, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Thomas Dee, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Scott Latham, Stanford University
  Presenting Author