Effects of the Great Recession on Early Education Availability and Quality: Evidence from North Carolina

• In Event: 2-102 - Equal Access to Early Care and Education for All? A Look at Diverse Child Populations

Integrative Statement

Early childhood education (ECE) programs play a crucial role in supporting children’s and families’ well-being in American society. ECE programs, particularly when they are high-quality, are an important context for many young children to develop skills important for later academic and social outcomes (Phillips et al., 2017). For families, availability of ECE programs affords parents opportunities to pursue employment and continued education (Sabol & Chase-Lansdale, 2015). The landscape of ECE providers in the United States comprises both publicly- and privately-operated programs, serving children in center- and home-based settings to meet families’ diverse family management needs.

ECE providers’ ability to serve families and provide children with sufficiently quality ECE is supported by a combination of government funding and fees from privately paying families. This then begs the question: In times of economic downturn, such as the Great Recession of the late 2000s (hereafter “the Recession”) when unemployment rates were high (Danziger, 2013) and both families’ spending and government budgets were substantially reduced (Campbell & Sances, 2013), what happens to the availability of ECE programs?

Existing literature has suggested that family structure and processes’ were negatively affected following the Recession, and that family stress associated with income instability may have had negative consequences for children’s development. Yet with the exception of media accounts highlighting individual programs’ economic hardships (Raskin-Zrihen, 2011), no study has documented these changes across an ECE system. This literature gap is concerning, given the potential consequences of reduced ECE availability and quality on families’ processes and children’s opportunities for high-quality learning experiences, during a period already hypothesized to have had detrimental effects for children (Kalil, 2013).

This study uses an Interrupted Time Series design (e.g., Bernal et al., 2017) to evaluate the effects of the Recession on ECE availability (cumulative number of programs and capacity), take-up (enrollment by age group), and quality (ratings from 1-5 stars). Data come from monthly program-level enrollment reports for the full population of licensed center- and home-based ECE programs (n=7,988 unique centers and n=9,146 homes) operating in North Carolina from 2005 to 2012 (i.e., 96 months). Because all licensed programs are tracked, these data are uniquely equipped to detect changes in availability across the diverse landscape of ECE programs. The state determines funding and seat allocation at the county-level, thus data are aggregated to construct a county-month panel.

Preliminary results show that growth in the number of centers available to families within their counties slowed, and even reversed, around the arrival of the Recession, and that capacity among centers became harder to fill (Table 1). In contrast, capacity across homes declined, and a greater proportion of these slots were filled over time. While this might suggest that the availability of homes buffered disruptions among center-based programs, I also observe disproportionate drops in the availability of homes rated highly on quality (Figure 1), which may have important implications for families relying on these home-based programs and the types of learning opportunities children in these settings received during the Recession.

Author

• Justin Brian Doromal, University of Virginia
  Presenting Author