Q&A: Improving Parent Choice in Early Education

The report begins by pointing out that parent choice is always articulated as a core value of our early education system, but the reality is that choices are often limited for parents and hard to exercise. What factors account for this lack of choice in early education?

Unlike K-12 schooling, early education isn’t treated as a public good. That means we don’t insist that it be available for free to everybody who wants it. In some cases there just aren’t enough early education opportunities to go around; too many families live in “access deserts,” where the potential demand far exceeds the actual supply. In other cases services are available, but families can’t access them easily due to cost or restricted eligibility -- or they don’t want to because of low quality.

One theme of the report is just how difficult it can be for parents to have access to data needed to figure out which early education program is best for their child, which they qualify for, and which programs have availability. The report highlights “coordinated enrollment” as one potential solution to help make this process easier for parents. What is coordinated enrollment and how would it work in an ideal situation?

The ideal coordinated enrollment approach may vary from community to community, as needs will vary. But in an ideal situation parents would have a centralized resource where they could see what services are available to them – and by “available” we mean not just what services are operating in the community, but key characteristics of those services to better inform parent choice. Parents would then be able to connect directly to preferred services and enroll their child. Automation can help with this process, but it also takes a lot of human time and energy to bring together providers, organize information, and engage and support parents through the process.

What are some of the factors that make establishing a coordinated enrollment system so challenging for local or state governments to set up and operate?

One big factor is lack of capacity. Community level early childhood systems are terribly under-resourced, so they don’t have the capital or expertise necessary to stand up an effective system. Early childhood services are fragmented and diverse, and family needs vary widely -- and both are constantly changing due to shifts in market forces, changes to government programs and priorities, and other factors. This dynamic increases the time, skill, resources, and incentives necessary to entice providers to participate in a coordinated enrollment system, as well as to help parents navigate the system. In the communities where families are most likely to need help, the resources available to help them usually aren’t enough given how challenging the work is.

States have invested large sums of money into quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS) that are designed to provide helpful information to families about provider quality, but the report makes the case that QRIS are not yet living up to their potential. What are the current shortcomings of QRIS and how would you recommend they be addressed?

QRIS are intended to be at the heart of a cycle where providers think it’s a fair description of their value, and parents think it’s a good description of what they’re looking for in a program – both of which make it easier to match demand and supply. In addition, an effective QRIS supports providers to improve quality over time. Those ideas are self-reinforcing: the more parents use a QRIS, the more providers view QRIS participation as critical, all of which ideally creates a virtuous cycle.

QRIS hasn’t lived up to this promise for many reasons. One has been the “I” has been so weak. Providers might be more interested in improving quality if QRIS resources were more material and persistent. But to date support for improvement hasn’t had enough sustained horsepower to make a difference.

As for parents, the lack of choice we talked about earlier can be a big factor here. If there’s only one affordable program in your geographic area, then it might not matter to you what its quality rating is. If parents don’t have multiple options, then a system for comparing among those options isn’t that meaningful. Other parents have more choices, but providers in higher-income neighborhoods often have very little incentive to participate in a QRIS, and that lack of coverage further undercuts the system’s overall effectiveness.

To improve QRIS we would start by increasing resources to help providers improve; reorienting the incentives and marketing of QRIS to help establish adequate market coverage; and leveraging private sector expertise to overhaul the technology and information management required to create a “virtuous cycle” of parent and provider use.

The report lists several other recommendations for how state government can help the early learning market function more efficiently. Can you summarize a few of those recommendations?

One thing we’re really pushing is for state governments to be thoughtful about their role. Early childhood is a complex ecosystem, and in many states there are multiple different divisions of state government playing a role in that ecosystem. Moreover, states are operating without much good information, or the analytic capacity to make sense of the information they have. So states need to get much better at operating within a dynamic market, which requires new kinds of human capacity – and leveraging best practices in emerging technology.

Building up that support infrastructure at the state level can make things a lot easier at the community level, and in turn for parents. This state role is particularly important in the lowest-income communities, where the need for help is greatest and the resources to provide that help the hardest to come by.

Is there a role for the federal government to play in helping guide and fund state efforts to support parent choice in early learning?

States have for many years struggled to develop the capacity to support communities effectively. The federal government has shown an admirable and bipartisan willingness in the last decade-plus to support state efforts to build that capacity – through the stimulus, the Early Learning Challenge, and more recently through Preschool Development Grants. The federal government continuing to play that supportive role is key. At the same time it needs to continue avoiding top-down, prescriptive solutions, and allow states to use federal funds within the context of local circumstances -- which are quite diverse in the early childhood field.

Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about the report or about parent choice in early learning more generally?

From what we’ve seen at the state level, there’s barely any difference between how red states and blue states think about this issue. They all want to support parent choice, and they’re all strapped for capacity. We’re confident that if the federal government offered to help, a diverse group of states from around the country would be interested in that assistance. Our hope is that this will create the opportunity for some bipartisan problem solving at the federal level.

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