Early-childhood-education programs increasingly use quality rating systems, but it’s not clear how much the ratings are helping them to improve, finds an evaluation by the research firm Mathematica.
As part of an evaluation of the federal Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grants, Mathematica researchers found programs that received subsidies to serve low-income children, such as Head Start, Early Head Start, and state preschool programs, were much more likely to participate in tiered quality-and-improvement ratings systems than other preschool programs from 2012 to 2016.
Overall, 48 percent of center-based preschool programs used rating systems by 2016. However, 68 percent of preschool programs stayed at the same rating throughout the four years of the study.
