Early care and education quality and child outcomes

States and the federal government have invested in early care and education programs with an explicit goal of improving school readiness for low-income children. These investments, aimed at strengthening the quality of care and supporting families’ access to high-quality settings, are based in part on a confluence of research findings showing a link between program quality and children’s outcomes.

While research to date is quite consistent in showing that measures of quality in early care and education settings and measures of children’s development are linked when examined in individual research studies, there has not been a systematic examination of the strength of these relationships across multiple studies. (author abstract)