New HHS Child Care Regulations Increase Focus on Quality Education

Last week the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a new round of child care regulations. As we wrote here, the regulations would raise health and safety standards at child care centers; provide program information and quality metrics to parents; and allow children to remain enrolled in child care meant for working parents, even after a parent loses his or her job. The regulations could be significant in another way, too: They focus on education as a crucial aspect of child care.

The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) program, last updated through the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Act, was originally designed to allow and encourage low-income parents to work outside the home. Eligibility for the program is tied to parents’ work status and income level, not necessarily to a child’s need for education.

The new HHS regulations would give more attention to the quality of child care settings and offer greater flexibility to families who can’t meet the program’s work requirements, but whose children need educational and child care services nonetheless.

Whereas the new safety regulations are required, the quality regulations are merely suggested or allowed. The existing 4 percent set-aside of CCDF funds for quality improvement activities could be used to implement early learning standards, quality improvement systems, professional development systems and evaluations. States would be strongly encouraged to use Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) to evaluate child care programs and provide data to parents and policymakers. The regulations specify, though do not mandate, what should be included as part of a QRIS: state quality metrics, resources and technical assistance for programs, monetary rewards for programs that meet the standards, regular monitoring of programs and transparent, easy-to-understand information for parents.

States would be able to use the funds for other purposes, as well, such as professional development. Instead of the basic training classes for providers currently allowed under CCDF, for example, states could also develop career ladders or child care teacher assessments. States could set “learning guidelines” for children in child care programs, which would comprise measures of cognitive, physical, social and emotional learning.

The new regulations would give states the opportunity to extend CCDBG funding to at-risk children — such as those living in homeless shelters with their families — who would benefit developmentally from access to early education, but whose parents do not meet the program’s work and income requirements. And the rule would extend the redetermination period to 12 months, rather than the 6 months that about half of states have in place now. That means children would have more stable child care settings, and parents who lose their jobs would have a longer window of time to look for work and re-qualify for the funds.

This is a more holistic, systemic approach, whereas currently, the quality set-aside funds are often used for simpler, program-level changes like caregiver salary increases. Many of these new, more systemic reforms were among those listed in the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC), and they are designed to transform the entire child care profession, from learning to the workforce.

Still, states are already using much more than the 4 percent minimum amount set aside for quality – 12 percent in fiscal year 2011. And because the new regulations come from HHS and not Congress, there is no new funding for them. In a challenging fiscal environment, HHS is asking states to do more with less. Some states will no doubt take up that banner, but others may be left wondering how they will maintain services for current CCDF recipients while trying to raise quality at the same time.