Steps to Quality

What? Another Early Childhood Report? As quality issues continue to influence the growth of the early childhood education and care (ECEC) field, ECEC professionals search for useful and effective guides to define and identify quality standards and essential program requirements. One of the latest publications available at no cost from United Way’s Success By 6 opens with a quotation not from an early childhood expert, but from the University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate James Heckman: “Learning starts in infancy, long before formal education begins, and continues throughout life. Early learning begets later learning and early success breeds later success....”

What’s the Report About? The report, Stair Steps to Quality: A Guide for States and Communities Developing Quality Rating Systems for Early Care and Education (July 2005) describes in detail how communities, preferably at the state level, can develop a Quality Rating System (QRS). The guide is a “hands-on, practical, planning tool” for communities of real people to use to develop or revise a QRS. It describes numerous actual examples from around the country. Anne W. Mitchell, a national expert on the wide range of supports required for ECEC, is the author.

What’s Key to QRS? The five elements of any QRS are:

Standards,

Accountability,

Program and practitioner outreach and support,

Financing incentives specifically linked to compliance with quality standards, and

Parent education.

This last requirement offers what many parents have requested for years: a system by which they can assess and select an ECEC program for their children, so that they themselves can take responsibility for choosing their children’s early childhood program. The report examines existing QRS and offers resources about states and communities around the country eager to create their own QRS.

Call 800-616-2242 for additional copies of the report or download 85 pages from http://nccic.org/poptopics/index.html. Click on “Quality Rating Systems,” and under Overview, click on the title of this report.