1,720,968 research outputs found
Harris County Child Care Supply and Demand Analysis
No full textPolicymakers and early childhood leaders need the best data on supply of and demand for child care to meet the needs of working families, especially in these uncertain economic times. The evolving COVID-19 crisis highlights the need for high-quality, flexible models that can be adjusted as supply and demand rapidly changes. One of the key challenges in quantifying supply of and demand for high-quality childcare is the very personal and local nature of how families seek and use child care, how providers seek and serve children, and how these sides of the market interact. Previous assessments of child care gaps in Harris County have not examined these local interactions. We have begun to address these gaps by creating child care markets in Harris County. To examine these local interactions between families who need child care and child care businesses, we have adapted an approach used by the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE), which, in turn, is based on a basic approach in Urban Economics. NSECE identifies provider clusters, which is unique in connecting providers and households via their geographic proximity. This kind of approach allows us to describe early childhood markets as geographies where transactions between providers and households are most likely occurring
Update: Estimating Child Care Supply and Demand in Texas
No full textThe Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) seeks to understand the need for child care among workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. This will help TWC support the work of the Governor’s Frontline Child Care Task Force and Strike Force to Open Texas in understanding the underserved areas of the state that might need a greater child care supply. We have summarized our results in a dashboard available here: https://tplapps.rice.edu/shiny/childcare-supply-demand/ . Our estimates build on our previous analysis by integrating new child care supply and enrollment information from the Frontline Child Care database as of June 4, 2020. We have also adjusted demand estimates to reflect businesses that are open in the third phase of reopening (as of June 3, 2020 announcement)
The Texas Child Care Business Coaching Program (October 2022 Full Report)
No full textThe Texas Child Care Business Coaching program was rapidly designed and implemented in 2021 to stabilize the child care sector after COVID-19 disrupted business operations and enrollment. By using a flexible, non-linear model, this program has addressed providers’ most pressing needs in a systematic way through business coaching on core management strategies and specialized topics such as Child Care Relief Funding. In its first year, 1,965 providers participated, with 90 percent of those surveyed in a representative sample reporting satisfaction with support. Additionally, 85 percent said the knowledge and skills gained from coaching improved their ability to operate. The program’s rapid training and deployment of 58 coaches and the complementary roles of Civitas Strategies Early Start, Curantis Group, and AVANCE, created a system of support to ensure providers accessed available financial resources while strengthening their business practices. Fueled by a timely launch that coincided with relief fund distribution, this program was geographically widespread, reaching providers in the state’s largest urban counties (accounting for roughly one third of participants) as well as more rural counties, such as those with fewer than 20,000 residents like Deaf Smith County. However, with the total number of participants representing 15% of eligible providers in the state, program leaders will consider marketing strategies as the program continues to evolve in Year Two
Deeper Than Demographics: Using Predictors of High-Quality Language Environments Can Maximize Limited Resources
No full textWhen we consider the greatest needs in early childhood research and the design and delivery of programs, “serve and return” parent-child interactions are a valuable measure of what is happening inside a home. Demographics and socioeconomic labels such as “low-income” are often considered predictors of early childhood development, but these categories are too broad, and fail to capture the specific parental behaviors that help children cultivate vibrant vocabularies and high developmental capital. Ultimately, what a parent does is more important than who the parent is. Responsive relationships between parent and child are essential to a child’s brain development, but Harris County lacks data on the quality of language environments. Thus, we have begun to assemble a fact base to measure early language development, offering a more detailed view of behaviors, predictors, and the striking differences between families that share socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. We begin with nearly 500 3-year-old old children of low-income families in southwest Harris County in the Alief Independent School District from 2016-2018. We collected objective measures of “serve and return” parent-child interactions, recorded by the LENA device, a small wearable device — often referred to as a “talk pedometer.” Among the findings: About 40% of children are in households with low-quality language environments; 46% of the children growing up in a household with a low-quality language environment are developmentally delayed; about 20% of low-income families provide high-quality levels of language environment; about 73% of the children who are growing up in low-income families and who excel in measures of “serve and return” are on track to be school-ready; and striking differences between low-income families in the same community are driven by what parents do, not who they are
Historical Analysis of Lifetime Justice Involvement of Harris County Youth (Executive Summary)
No full textBetween 2010 and 2019, more than 42,000 youths became involved with the Harris County juvenile justice system. However, by the time they “aged out” at 17, their experiences with the juvenile justice system showed striking differences. This report provides a detailed representation of the multiple ways in which youths interact with the Harris County Juvenile Justice System. It examines the overall level of involvement of youths with the system, as measured by the number of contacts or referrals accumulated throughout their lives. It also investigates how those contacts, and the ways in which the system reacted to them, changed as some youths became repeatedly involved with the system. Furthermore, it explores the extent to which information available at the time of a youth's first contact with the system may or may not help identify youths who could benefit from preventative and rehabilitative programs. Our analysis takes a historical view of the Harris County Juvenile Justice System. Instead of focusing on the youths in the system right now, we use data for youths who were involved at some point in their adolescence but have already “aged out” of the system. Specifically, we analyze the histories of all youths who were born between 2000 and 2002 and had their first contact when they were between 12 and 16 years old.2 Thus, the analysis in this report reflects the system as it was experienced by youths who are no longer under its jurisdiction. This implies that any recent changes to the juvenile justice system will not be captured by this report, or will only be captured to the extent they were experienced by some of the youths who aged out very recently. The historical data demonstrate that most justice-involved youths have only one contact with the system, while a small number of youths account for a disproportionately high share of referrals. At the same time, consequences become increasingly severe as these same youths become repeatedly involved with the system. To the extent that youths of color, particularly Black youths, are more likely to be detained and to receive relatively more severe dispositions than white youths during their initial contacts, these patterns have a disproportionate effect on them. Overall, these findings point to a need for targeted, early interventions and further, rigorous research to understand how we can better identify youths at risk of entering this cycle. Such interventions could potentially contribute to the reduction of racial disparities in the way the system treats and affects different groups of youths
The Texas Child Care Business Coaching Program (October 2022 Executive Summary)
No full textThe Texas Child Care Business Coaching program was rapidly designed and implemented in 2021 to stabilize the child care sector after COVID-19 disrupted business operations and enrollment. By using a flexible, non-linear model, this program has addressed providers’ most pressing needs in a systematic way through business coaching on core management strategies and specialized topics such as Child Care Relief Funding. In its first year, 1,965 providers participated, with 90 percent of those surveyed in a representative sample reporting satisfaction with support. Additionally, 85 percent said the knowledge and skills gained from coaching improved their ability to operate. The program’s rapid training and deployment of 58 coaches and the complementary roles of Civitas Strategies Early Start, Curantis Group, and AVANCE, created a system of support to ensure providers accessed available financial resources while strengthening their business practices. Fueled by a timely launch that coincided with relief fund distribution, this program was geographically widespread, reaching providers in the state’s largest urban counties (accounting for roughly one third of participants) as well as more rural counties, such as those with fewer than 20,000 residents like Deaf Smith County. However, with the total number of participants representing 15% of eligible providers in the state, program leaders will consider marketing strategies as the program continues to evolve in Year Two
Pathway to Progress: Understanding the Impact of the Texas Child Care Business Coaching Program (Full Report)
No full textSince 2021, the Texas Workforce Commission has invested 4.1 billion direct CCRF relief was distributed to 10,813 total child care providers in Texas. The business coaching program was designed and launched quickly, and its first phase of implementation was focused on the most pressing and urgent issues to prevent closures and move from survival to more stable operations. By August 2022, the program moved into its second phase of implementation, and a revised version of the business coaching program model was implemented. It became known as the Texas Child Care Business Coaching Pathway (“Pathway model”). In an effort to continuously improve on feedback from the first year of implementation, the Pathway model was launched to offer a more customized approach, establish foundational financial skills, and build on those skills through a series of modules. Since its inception, the business coaching program has served 2,911 total providers. To date, the Pathway model has served 1,475 total providers. Self-service business coaching resources were also available online, with an average of approx. 15,000 visits each mont
Pathway to Progress: Understanding the Impact of the Texas Child Care Business Coaching Program (Executive Summary)
No full textSince 2021, the Texas Workforce Commission has invested 4.1 billion direct CCRF relief was distributed to 10,813 total child care providers in Texas. The business coaching program was designed and launched quickly, and its first phase of implementation was focused on the most pressing and urgent issues to prevent closures and move from survival to more stable operations. By August 2022, the program moved into its second phase of implementation, and a revised version of the business coaching program model was implemented. It became known as the Texas Child Care Business Coaching Pathway (“Pathway model”). In an effort to continuously improve on feedback from the first year of implementation, the Pathway model was launched to offer a more customized approach, establish foundational financial skills, and build on those skills through a series of modules. Since its inception, the business coaching program has served 2,911 total providers. To date, the Pathway model has served 1,475 total providers. Self-service business coaching resources were also available online, with an average of approx. 15,000 visits each mont
An Evaluation of the Alief Independent School District Jump Start Program: Using a Model to Recover Mechanisms from an RCT
No full textThe Texas Policy Lab collaborated with the Alief Independent School District (AISD) to evaluate its JumpStart Program, a large-scale parenting intervention aimed at preparing 3-year-olds for entry into kindergarten at AISD. Children who received the JumpStart intervention showed modest gains in acquiring the skills targeted by the program curriculum, with scores increasing by seven percentage points more than for children in the control group. These gains were particularly concentrated among a subset of measures, namely name recognition and book handling. We also found evidence of a small JumpStart spillover effect on content areas not directly covered by the curriculum, as measured by the Bracken School Readiness Assessment scale. The results from the randomized controlled trial also show the program increased some parental investments, such as the frequency parents read to their children, which grew by roughly half a day more per week in the treatment group than in the control group. However, the RCT found no effects on some other parental investments, such as whether the parent engages in activities to help the child learn the alphabet or colors. Using a structural model, the researchers evaluated whether the observed impact on children’s knowledge is due to an increase in the effectiveness of parental time spent reading to their child. The estimates of the model confirmed this hypothesis. The model estimates also imply that parents react to this added effectiveness by increasing the frequency with which they choose to read to their chil
Evaluating a Large-Scale Intervention With Alief ISD
No full textThe Texas Policy Lab collaborated with the Alief Independent School District (AISD) to evaluate its JumpStart Program, a large-scale parenting intervention aimed at preparing 3-year-olds for entry into kindergarten at AISD. Children who received the JumpStart intervention showed modest gains in acquiring the skills targeted by the program curriculum, with scores increasing by seven percentage points more than for children in the control group. These gains were particularly concentrated among a subset of measures, namely name recognition and book handling. We also found evidence of a small JumpStart spillover effect on content areas not directly covered by the curriculum, as measured by the Bracken School Readiness Assessment scale. The results from the randomized controlled trial also show the program increased some parental investments, such as the frequency parents read to their children, which grew by roughly half a day more per week in the treatment group than in the control group. However, the RCT found no effects on some other parental investments, such as whether the parent engages in activities to help the child learn the alphabet or colors. Using a structural model, the researchers evaluated whether the observed impact on children’s knowledge is due to an increase in the effectiveness of parental time spent reading to their child. The estimates of the model confirmed this hypothesis. The model estimates also imply that parents react to this added effectiveness by increasing the frequency with which they choose to read to their chil
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