Commentary

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Affordable, High-Quality Child Care?

Check Out the Military

Gail Zellman is a senior behavioral scientist and Susan Gates is an economist at RAND.

Providing high-quality child care to the many families who need it but can't afford it (or at least its full, unsubsidized cost) is a perennial problem. The issue has recently moved to the front burner in Congress, driven by three pieces of legislation. First, access to child care is likely to become a key sticking point in efforts to reauthorize the 1996 welfare reform legislation. Second, the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) is also up for reauthorization. Third, the Early Care and Education Act is currently wending its way through the U.S. Senate.

While there are no easy or obvious solutions to the child care problem, policymakers can look to an unlikely source for some ideas about improving child care: the military. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has succeeded in optimizing the three key aspects of child care delivery—availability, quality, and affordability—a juggling act unduplicated anywhere else in the country. The system currently meets around 60 percent of the assessed need, serving about 176,000 children 6 weeks to 12 years old in 900 centers and in 9,200 family child care homes nationwide. (The family child care homes are usually run by military spouses.)

The Military Child Care Act (MCCA) of 1989 was designed to promote quality in child care centers, and it has helped to do so through no-notice inspections, salaries tied to training milestones, and the requirement that a training and curriculum specialist work in each center. Today, virtually all centers are accredited—compared to about 10 percent in the civilian sector. The DoD has also applied some of these same regulations to improve quality in family child care homes. Finally, the care is affordable, with the DoD subsidizing a large portion of the cost of care.

What can policymakers learn from the DoD's experience? The clear message is that affordable, high-quality child care requires a system-level commitment to quality, as well as incentives and funding to make it a reality.

Quality can be measured in many ways, but how it is measured must be made clear. For example, the MCCA mandated quality improvement efforts, and the DoD made high-quality care a system goal. The DoD then defined "quality" as accredited care and required centers to be accredited.

Incentives must be created to encourage quality improvement. The highly centralized DoD accomplishes this, as noted, by requiring centers to achieve accreditation. In the highly decentralized civilian sector, a carrot rather than a stick may be more effective. For example, the development of a quality rating system, with a public subsidy tied to a provider's rating, would make quality more transparent to parents and reward providers who offer it. Educare Colorado is working to develop such an incentive system in that state.

Funding—in the form of a substantial subsidy such as the one the DoD provides—must be made available to pay for quality. But how the subsidy is used is just as important. The DoD puts most of its subsidy into making care affordable. Unlike in the civilian sector, DoD bases parent fees on total family income, not child age, and pays the highest subsidies to the lowest-income parents for the most expensive kind of care: for infants and pre-toddlers.

DoD also covers the full cost of care. By contrast, CCDBG subsidies for private centers are set at 75 percent of the prevailing rate for child care fees in the area. This subsidy virtually guarantees that the quality of care will not be high, since studies show that most child care is already of mediocre quality.

We know how to create, promote, and ensure child care quality. But we also need the will—the commitment, the incentives, and the funds—to make it happen. Our children deserve no less.