Author: Hannah Baxter

Gabrielle Stroad’s work experience in the early childhood field is varied and extensive. She worked her way up from being a classroom aide to director of a child care center, and later, she opened a family child care program. She even drove a school bus! In 2022, she added another role to her resume by becoming an approved trainer within the state child care training system. In this Q & A, she shares her perspective on becoming a trainer and advice for those considering it.

You went from being an aide and teacher to being assistant director and then director of a child care center. Did you miss working with children when you took on a management role?

I still tried to be in classrooms as much as possible to be with my staff and the children. But I also loved managing a center, because I love connecting with people. I felt grateful that I had worked in all the positions I was managing. I had been in the aides’ and teachers’ shoes, and I could tell them, “I understand, and I am here to truly support you.” I enjoyed being able to talk with them about the “whys” of our work and help everyone focus on our purpose as educators and how we can help children and families. I do enjoy direct care though, and that’s why today, in addition to being a trainer, I am an ECSE paraprofessional in a preschool classroom.

What made you decide to become a trainer?

At the time, I was operating a family child care program, and I was working on finishing my two-year degree at the same time. Our family was starting to grow out of operating a child care program out of our home, so I decided to make a change. One of the things that I liked about being a center director and that I missed as a family child care provider was being able to work with a large number of educators and have an impact on more families. I remember running into a former employee and talking with her about her new job at a child care center. She told me, “I took everything you taught me and brought it to this new job.” It was amazing for me to hear that I inspired someone to bring even higher quality and more passion to their teaching. I feel I’ve learned so much from educators I’ve worked with in return. My hope in becoming a trainer was that I could reach people in that same way, and continue building that community of mutual support and learning.

What was the process like to become a trainer?

In my case, I would say that overall it was a little confusing. There was a hiccup because right when I was ready to apply, I learned about a change in requirements. It took me extra time to overcome that obstacle, but becoming a trainer was important to me. I believe it is important to make sure we have qualified trainers with the right credentials. However, there can be frustration when you have experience and knowledge but not credentials.

I’ve also heard from people in the field that sometimes they are put off when they see that a process like becoming a trainer has a lot of steps. What I would say to those folks is that the TARSS team and the Develop team are there for you. My grandmother used to say there are no stupid questions, and I’ve always been a person who’ll ask lots of questions. I’ll even ask questions that I know the answer to if I get the sense that others are not comfortable asking. I do feel that my willingness to ask questions helped me a lot in the process of becoming a trainer. 

You were also able to take advantage of the TARSS Trainer Observation and Coaching program. How did that work?

[Mentor FCC Project Specialist] Molly Hughes set up the observation for me and was my coach. We had met before at the Trainer and RBPD Specialist Symposium–which everybody should go to! Molly is very personable and kind. 

I had also met the trainer who did the observation before. That made me feel comfortable and confident. My observer had a positive and professional vibe. She had a couple of questions for me, then I did the training. Afterwards, the observer and I talked about next steps, and we had a great conversation about child care. I felt a sense of partnership, which I really appreciated. The observer then sent the observation tool to Molly. Soon after, I met with Molly to talk about how the training went. She picked out areas I was strong in and areas that I might want help with. She asked good questions and listened to me. I really felt heard. I’ve never felt like I was being timed by anybody I’ve talked to at TARSS. Everybody is generous with their time and very open to helping.

One thing that I appreciated about Molly was how she structured our coaching session. I’ve had coaches before who started out by asking me what I wanted to talk about. That’s a tough question, because when I’m new, I don’t even know where to start. Molly helped me figure out where to start and where to go next. Then we set a S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely) goal to work on in between sessions and planned when it was best to next meet. 

What are some of the challenges of being a trainer?

The biggest challenge is when you’re in front of people who aren’t interested in learning new things. I love to learn. I’m always the one sitting in the front row with my notebook taking notes and nodding my head. So it’s hard when I’m there to try and make an impact, and people choose not to be open to it. With that said, I’ve learned to give myself and the situation a lot of grace. I also accept it as a challenge and say, “How can I change that mindset?” 

A related challenge is building a relationship with the people you’re training, especially when you’re delivering someone else’s content. I used to love leading training as a center director, so I thought it would be a smooth transition to being an approved trainer. It’s really different, though. You’ve got to build that relationship with your audience within minutes. You also have to feel comfortable enough to deliver the content effectively so you give participants something that will better their programs. 

A final challenge is getting consistent training experience so that you can improve. Just like in any job, you get better with experience. Unlike many other jobs, though, trainers don’t train all day, Monday through Friday. Generally, I do about two trainings a month. This month I have three. But during my first year as a trainer I did 12 total. Because so much time passes between trainings, it can feel like it’s taking a long time to build skills and confidence.

What are some of your favorite parts of being a trainer?

One of my favorite things about being a trainer is also one of my favorite things about teaching children. I get a kick out of those “aha” moments, when someone makes a comment and the whole group says, “Oh, that makes sense, I’m excited to try that!” It doesn’t matter whether the idea came from the training content or from the participants’ experience. Seeing connections take place is amazing to me! I also love hearing people’s takeaways, even simple things like a new art activity they want to try. When you’ve been in the early childhood field for a long time, you tend to take certain practices and strategies for granted. It’s hard to remember what you didn’t know when you were starting out. I feel I’m most authentic as a trainer when someone asks me a question and I can say, “This is what I would do.” I love it when we’re able to make a connection between a real-life situation and the training content. 

What would you tell someone who is considering becoming a trainer?

I would say, “You’re going to have a lot of fun. Let’s do it!” But I would also tell them that navigating the process can be hard. My biggest piece of advice is to connect with TARSS staff and join the TARSS professional learning communities (PLCs). It’s really helpful to make connections with other people who are becoming trainers. I’ve done the new trainer and course writer PLCs. I made friends and exchanged numbers with other trainers so we could brainstorm together and check in with each other. The key is to ask lots of questions and stay in touch.

What’s something you wish more people understood about the early childhood field?

One of the things I often think about is how capable and smart children are, and how intentional we need to be in supporting their development. Why is it so important that early childhood teachers understand child development? Well, think of a toddler who is building with blocks. You might look at that child and say, “They’re playing,” or “They’re making a mess.” But another way to look at it is to say, “Wow, they’re picking up blocks and balancing them. They’re making stacks of three blocks.” That child is developing their motor skills, working on early numeracy, and building confidence.

Another thing I like to tell people is that here in Minnesota we have a lot of support for early childhood. Think of all the organizations that exist to improve early childhood education in Minnesota–TARSS, Child Care Aware, Parent Aware, and many others. A couple of months ago I did a training in St. Cloud. One provider who participated hadn’t heard of Parent Aware, so I was able to share things with her that could benefit her program. Recently I did a training at a child care center where they didn’t know about the free coaching that the Center for Inclusive Child Care offers. I’m grateful for what we have here in Minnesota that other states don’t necessarily have, and I try to get the word out about it. Our state government and organizations like the ones I mentioned are putting resources into child care, because child care is important, and I hope that mindset keeps growing in everyone.

Minnesota’s Early Childhood Indicators of Progress (ECIPs) lay out a shared set of expectations for Minnesota’s young children at different ages. The ECIPs describe things children should know and be able to do before kindergarten. This document, which was designed to inform practice in the early childhood field, was originally drafted in 2007 and last revised in 2016. Last year, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) tasked CEED with a new revision of the ECIPs. Emily Beckstrom and Ashley Bonsen, both project specialists, and Anna Landes Benz, curriculum specialist, teamed up to lead the project.

Every state has its own early learning guidelines for preschoolers, and most have early learning guidelines for infants and toddlers, too. Program directors and educators may refer to these guidelines when developing instructional activities for the children in their care. Specialists like speech-language pathologists may refer to them when coming up with plans for the children they work with. In Minnesota, the ECIPs consist of eight domains, each representing a major area of child development:

• Approaches to Learning
• The Arts
• Language, Literacy, and Communication
• Mathematics
• Physical and Movement Development
• Scientific Thinking
• Social and Emotional Development
• Social Systems

The number of domains, the skills and knowledge categorized under each domain, and the names for the domains vary from state to state. 

“The domain that we in Minnesota call ‘The Arts’ is a good example of how early learning standards vary. Minnesota’s ECIPs link creativity and curiosity to making art, like theater or music. But not all states have ‘The Arts’ as a standalone domain,” says Beckstrom. “The dispositions and skills that our document associates with art might show up in a different domain, such as Approaches to Learning.”

Determining the revision process

Beckstrom, Bonsen, and Landes Benz designed Minnesota’s ECIPs revision process almost from scratch. For guidance, Landes Benz, CEED Director Ann Bailey, and CEED Professional Development Coordinator Deborah Ottman, met virtually with the team that led the revision of Ohio’s Early Learning and Development Standards. CEED staff used elements of what had worked well in Ohio, such as a public comment survey. They issued an open call for applications to work groups that would tackle each individual domain. Their work group application process, too, drew inspiration from the one that was used in Ohio–and it was very successful.

“We got almost two hundred applications in 10 days,” says Bonsen. “People are extremely passionate about children and early childhood education, and that’s what oozed out of all the applications.”

Some work group participants were invited to apply. Others nominated themselves or others. The work groups were made up of geographically and racially diverse experts from a wide range of fields. There were teachers and staff from public schools and Head Start; center and family child care providers; and parents. College faculty; experts on special education, the hard-of-hearing population, and other needs and abilities; and occupational and speech-language therapists also joined. Most participants had five years’ experience or more in their field. Some work group members had been part of the 2017 revision of the ECIPs.

“It was helpful to have those [returning] participants, especially those who were working in the same domain and saying, ‘We had hoped this would happen. It didn’t. Let’s work on it again’,” says Landes Benz.

Before the work groups convened, CEED staff worked with Rebecca Nathan (Aviellah Curriculum and Consulting), who provided critically important grounding in best practice around diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) for facilitators and work group members. Nathan helped guide the content, conversation starters, and framework that the work groups used to keep a strong equity lens at the heart of the revision project. Nathan often reminded the facilitators that keeping DEIA front-and-center during work group meetings was only a first step. Like all DEIA work, ensuring that the ECIPs serve young children from all of Minnesota’s communities is an ongoing process.  

The work groups came together for three virtual working meetings facilitated by CEED personnel (Bailey, Beckstrom, and Bonsen). Each group followed the same revision process. They began by agreeing upon a diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) approach. Next they evaluated existing content and language in each domain and looked at the latest research. Frederique Corcoran, a doctoral student at CEHD, created research summaries for each domain, organizing the latest information about child development and the impact of recent societal changes. Finally, the work groups drafted proposed changes and developed consensus around the new drafts. Participants brought their knowledge and experience to the process, as well as strong opinions that sometimes gave rise to healthy debate.

“Some groups were very much on the same page from the beginning,” says Landes Benz. “For others, the complexity of the domain created more room for passion.”

One challenge was to show how much room for individual variation there truly is in child development. The ECIPs categorize skills into an age-range continuum, describing what children can do aged zero to one, one to two, two to three, and so on.

“A particular skill might be observable by age two, but then again, it might not,” Bonsen explains. “How do we capture that variability?”

Another challenge was categorizing skills and abilities into the eight domains.

“For example, writing letters or numbers shows up in fine motor development. It should also show up under literacy, art, and math,” Bonsen continues. “How do we demonstrate that when you’re working on a coloring activity, it’s not just coloring? By the way, all these domains of development are linked! If the ECIPs show this, we can help those new to the field understand that there is a lot of fuel for learning in play. Play is not just free time.”

Many of the work groups found that the existing ECIPs did not necessarily reflect the different cultures and environments in which Minnesotan children grow and learn.

“For example, the previous version of the Physical and Movement Development domain might have talked about a child using a spoon to feed themself. But that is not an East African cultural reference. Our work groups needed to come up with observable skills that were free from the trappings of Western culture,” says Bonsen.

“So the challenge was to not be too rigid about the exemplars, but extrapolate to what’s actually intended,” Landes Benz adds. “If the kids don’t specifically string beads on a string, what would be comparable to that?”

“We try to remind ourselves that if we don’t check the bias that’s in this tool right now, kids are going to receive that,” says Beckstrom. “So the work groups worked diligently to be really honest about the bias that we did see in the ECIPs and to address it in new language choices.”

The team credits Corcoran’s research with helping the work groups describe development within domains in a robust and inclusive way.

The legacy of the pandemic

Each of the work groups confronted two themes that flowed from the COVID-19 pandemic as well as broader changes in society. The first was technology.

“Technology has a dominating role in almost every domain related to relationship development, attention, and persistence,” Beckstrom says. 

“Children access technology at younger and younger ages,” Bonsen adds. “Some one-year-olds know how to skip ads on YouTube. Whether we like it or not, digital literacy is something children need to be members of society.”

The second theme was trauma and resilience. The revised ECIPs are informed by the role of trauma, particularly as it impacts skills in the Approaches to Learning domain. These include executive function skills. MDE specifically requested that CEED take a close look at how executive function is represented in the ECIPs. MDE wanted the document to clarify the role of executive function in early learning and development. The team brought on CEED’s resident expert on executive function, Research Associate Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD, to assist with this effort.

Before sending the draft ECIPs to MDE for review, the CEED team engaged content experts to take a final look at them. The feedback they received was encouraging, and it matched up with Corcoran’s research findings and what they heard from work group members.

“They are all agreeing,” says Landes Benz. “It’s good to feel that validation, in all these different information streams, that we’re on the right track instead of there being a conflict or gap.”

Early care and education (ECE) programs–like child care, private and public preschool, Head Start, early childhood special education (ECSE), and Early Childhood Family Education (ECFE)–offer a lot of benefits to young children. Research suggests ECE programs boost children’s and their families’ health and wellbeing over their lifetimes. These programs are even thought to contribute to better parenting practices. And of course, ECE helps young children get ready for kindergarten, setting them up for success academically and socially.

The Minnesota legislature was interested in knowing more about how many children in foster care in Minnesota participate in ECE programs. They also wanted to find out what the possible barriers to participation might be and how to address them. The Minnesota Department of Human Services, on behalf of the legislature, commissioned a study with the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare (CASCW) and its partner, CEED, to answer these questions. 

Researchers from CASCW and CEED accessed public data from 2019 to learn about children in foster care and their enrollment in ECE programs. They released an initial report describing their findings, including the fact that less than half (43.7%) of young children in foster care participated in ECE in 2019. That figure is similar to the percentage of the general child population in Minnesota who participated (44.1%). Yet it is arguably very important for children in foster care to access ECE. Studies have found that children in foster care are more likely to face challenges both in school and in their lives outside of school. ECE programs could help children in foster care build a foundation to overcome those challenges.

Barriers to participation

A new report, Early Care and Education Participation for Young Children in Foster Care: Family and Staff Perspectives, builds on the researchers’ earlier work. To compile this report, they spoke directly with Minnesota families, ECE staff members, and child welfare professionals about their experiences. They conducted 37 focus groups and interviews with 69 individuals across the state.

The researchers learned that barriers to ECE participation could pop up anywhere in the process of finding, enrolling in, and attending an ECE program. 

Families said that simply finding a suitable ECE program to access was the hardest part. There were too few programs with too few openings for children. There were logistical problems with work hours, program schedules, and transportation. Also, too few high-quality programs accepted Early Learning Scholarships–a type of financial assistance that helps families afford ECE.

Many families said child welfare workers and ECE staff members were a big help in getting children enrolled in programs, but that wasn’t the case across the state. Some families leaned instead on foster family support groups and personal networks for information and support in finding ECE programs.

Opportunities for improvement

In speaking with study participants, the research team found that foster and biological family members, ECE educators, and child welfare workers all felt that ECE was important both to children and their families. Interviewees offered ideas for lowering barriers that agreed with the researchers’ recommendations–ideas like better information-sharing and statewide guidance for child welfare workers on assisting families with signing up for ECE. The report also recommends that the state invest in ECE programs themselves.

“The greatest barrier to ECE participation may also be the most difficult one to fix: program capacity,” says Ann Bailey, PhD, director of CEED and one of the researchers involved in the project. “Our conversations with families and educators painted a vivid picture of the ongoing shortage of high-quality early childhood programming, especially in rural areas of the state. However, we can also do a better job of helping families get connected with existing ECE programs. The easier we make it to get children in foster care enrolled in ECE, the better for everyone.”

CEED was founded in the fall of 1973 as an “interdepartmental unit” within the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD). CEED was created to encourage connections and collaborations among faculty, students, and community members who were interested in early childhood. At its inception, along with Director Shirley G. Moore, a professor in the Institute of Child Development (ICD), CEED’s staff consisted of Associate Director Richard Weinberg, PhD, and Coordinator Erna Fishhaut. They held conferences, round tables, and seminars (many open to the public); distributed fact sheets and mailed out newsletters; talked with Minnesota legislators; and even set up a lending library filled with materials relevant to early childhood professionals.

Today, Director Ann Bailey, PhD, leads a group of 14 full-time and several part-time staff who carry on that early legacy of translating early childhood research into practice that can improve the lives of young children and the professionals who care for and teach them.

CEED’s work can be broken down into several activities.

Professional development

• We offer in-person and virtual training for early childhood educators, programs, and administrators with an emphasis on classroom assessment using the CLASS(R) tool.
• We offer online courses on the Reflective Interaction Observation Scale (RIOS™) as well as self-study modules on reflective practice.
• We administer the Trainer and Relationship-Based Professional Development Specialist Support (TARSS) program, providing professional development for the trainers and coaches who work with early childhood educators.

Applied research and evaluation

We work with academic institutions and community partners on a range of projects touching early childhood. Some of CEED’s current projects include: 

• Conducting classroom observations for early childhood education programs
• Revising Minnesota’s Early Childhood Indicators of Progress (early learning guidelines that describe what children should be able to do before kindergarten)
• A pilot study of a reflective supervision program for county child welfare workers
• Helping the Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery update and publish their in-house training curriculum
• A four-year study of the impact of subsidies on providers’ and families’ participation in child care assistance programs (in partnership with UMN’s Department of Applied Economics)

Outreach

• Our staff share their expertise via our blog, email newsletters, research-backed Tip Sheets and other free resources, and conference presentations. 
• We partner with other CEHD departments on valuable content for people in the field, like an online library of professional development resources for child welfare workers (co-created with the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare) and the Building Family Resiliency podcast (co-created with the Institute on Community Integration). 

Kerri Gershone works with CEED as Professional Development Policy and Implementation Specialist at the Minnesota Department of Human Services. 

“People at CEED have a certain je ne sais quoi that combines professionalism, passion, and compassionate humanity,” she says. “Often when we meet, in addition to discussing our agenda items, we’ll discuss important issues facing the field, how we approach our work, and best practices in providing high quality education to both adults and children. I know that this content isn’t just work for CEED employees, it’s also their passion and area of expertise.”

Bailey agrees.

“I’m grateful for the people who have chosen to bring their talents, their curiosity, and their drive to CEED,” she says. “They show up every day excited to advance the early childhood field and ultimately, to have a positive impact on the lives of early childhood professionals and the children and families they serve.”

Chris Wing, PhD ’13, CCC-SLP, built on her career as a speech-language pathologist by pursuing a PhD in language development. She is currently developing a preschool curriculum that emphasizes communication. The curriculum was commissioned by The Family Partnership, a Minnesota nonprofit that provides early childhood education as well as mental health, home visiting, and other services. Wing is working with CEED evaluators Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD, and Mary McEathron, PhD, to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum, which is being piloted in preschool classrooms as well as in home visiting and parent education programs. In this Q & A, Wing shares information about the curriculum and about the science underlying its storytelling content.

What motivated you to pause your career and return to graduate school?

CW: I had been working with a population of young children at extremely high risk for speech and language delays. I observed that when we addressed these children’s communication needs, they were changing in ways that were not considered to be directly related to communication. I saw changes in self-regulation and executive functioning skills. I wasn’t familiar with how that worked. It moved me back to school for my PhD in speech-language-hearing science.

My total focus was to understand the relationship between overall development and communication. I had to merge separate sets of academic literature related to infant mental health and communication. 

How is infant mental health related to language development?

Speech and language, attachment relationships, and executive functioning are all connected. Research shows that the ability to use internal state language is predictive of executive functioning. Internal state language is a speech pathology term. It refers to language like, “I wonder how you are feeling,” or, “I can see by the look on your face that you might be afraid.” In the infant mental health literature they call it “mind-mindedness”–being mindful of the child’s mental state. 

In my research for my PhD, I found wonderful and fascinating information about how attachment is transmitted from caregiver to child. Parents with good executive functioning create secure relationships and are using this kind of language. The good news is that when we address children’s speech and language needs, we get spread across areas of child development that impact attachment and behavior.

How did the storytelling curriculum that you are designing come about?

John Till is senior vice president of strategy and innovation at The Family Partnership. He learned about the importance of executive functioning and self-regulation. He also learned about the need to develop a two-generation approach to strengthen these skills. We agreed that I would create a communication-based curriculum for both parents and children with personal storytelling as a key strategy. I wanted to get that process down to a concrete level: what does it look like? What does it sound like? What are the steps involved in helping children develop these skills?

The preschool storytelling curriculum is designed for direct delivery to children and also for parents to deliver to children. So one version is to be administered by preschool or child care teachers. The other version is to be used with parents either one-on-one in a home visiting context or in a group setting. 

Often, the parents themselves have not had many opportunities to work on developing their own communication and self-regulation skills. We’ve actually gotten some data in from a pilot where we’re having home visitors listen to the parent’s narrative and prompt them with questions like “Who was there? When did it happen? Was there a problem? Was the problem solved? What was the sequence of events?” We saw changes in the parents in terms of how coherent their storytelling was. These skills don’t just happen on their own. They result from participating in interactions and from what we call scaffolding. Scaffolding means building on what they already know. 

How does the curriculum build storytelling skills?

One of the major strategies is called “Telling My Story.” We don’t ask children to retell a story that they learned from a book or at school, such as a folk tale. Instead, we ask them to tell a story about their lives. In the academic literature, this is known as a personal narrative.

To determine the child’s skill level, we use a protocol where an adult shares an experience that involves getting sick or hurt. The adult then asks the children to share a similar experience. We’re not trying to upset them by asking about times when they got sick or hurt. We ask about these events because they have what we call emotional salience. Kids are at the top of their skill level when talking about these events. They show us everything they’ve got in terms of storytelling. That’s why sharing a story about a negative experience is part of the assessment process. But of course, the curriculum is not just about bringing up bad experiences. Throughout the curriculum, children have many opportunities to tell stories about a variety of events.

We help them tell their story by asking questions. We talk about words for physical states like hunger. We ask, “What were you thinking at the time?” Parents who really form secure attachments are conscious of their child’s mental state; they’re checking in and mirroring that. 

After children finish telling their story, if they haven’t told us already, we ask, “How did you feel?” We ask this of both kids and adults. Some research shows that most of us adults really struggle with naming a feeling outside of some pretty concrete ones: happy, sad, afraid. We don’t get much better than that. 

I recently went to a live recording of The Moth Radio Hour. Ten people told stories, and I was amazed at how few internal state words they used. To me, those are what connects us. I can’t really relate to the experience of someone who set a Guinness World Record canoeing on the Mississippi, but I can relate to how it made them feel. When we are able to name feelings, that ability correlates with emotional intelligence. So as parents practice naming their own and others’ feelings, that impacts their ability to engage with their kids. 

A favorite definition of self-regulation I ran across that dovetails with what we’re trying to accomplish is, “Self-regulation is monitoring your internal states in relation to your external objective.” The regulating part comes in adjusting either your internal state or your external objective so that you have a match.

Our adult curriculum asks parents to tell their own story. It’s an opportunity to reflect, to problem solve, to process their internal state. With adults, we always end with an affirmation. We recognize something in their story that creates something coherent out of what can feel like chaos–many parents’ lives are chaotic. What we find in adult research on this kind of telling is that the important thing is not whether the storyteller felt successful in the story–it’s how they process it after the fact and see their own agency and what can be built on. 

Your curriculum is currently being piloted. How is it going?

The curriculum is being simultaneously written, revised, and piloted. The original version was a six- to eight-week curriculum. Stakeholders gave us wonderful but sometimes painful feedback on that draft. One message that came through is that it needed to be a nine-month curriculum. The new version will last 30 weeks. 

We did a “baby” pilot of the new version and found it was headed in the right direction. We were very encouraged, so we began our scheduled pilots at the beginning of the school year with 10 weeks of the curriculum complete. Now I’m writing ahead of the pilot. It feels like running in front of a speeding train, but there’s something about the content that has its own calming, mindful effect. Teachers have even said that the kids are being kinder to each other. One thing I like is hearing from teachers, “I like doing this. It’s fun. The kids like it.” That means it’s developmentally appropriate. We know neurologically that positive engagement facilitates learning. Fun is not optional; fun is mandatory!

Researchers at the Center for Early Education and Development (CEED) and the Department of Applied Economics were awarded a $1.4 million grant for Coordinated Evaluation of Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Payment Policies, a research project evaluating child care subsidies in Minnesota. The grant for the four-year project was awarded by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Co-principal investigators Ann Bailey, PhD, director of CEED, and Elizabeth E. Davis, PhD, professor of applied economics, will lead the project to measure the effects of child care subsidy policies on families’ access to high quality child care.

Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) provides subsidies to low-income families with funding from the federal Child Care and Development Fund. About 30,000 children and 15,000 families receive child care assistance each month in Minnesota through CCAP. The purpose of the Child Care and Development Fund is to ensure that families who receive child care assistance have “equal access to child care services comparable to those provided to families not eligible” for such assistance. Having equal access means that families should be able to find care that meets several criteria. It should be: 

• Reasonably affordable
• Reasonably convenient in terms of hours of operation and location
• High quality; i.e., supportive of child development

“Quality child care opens doors to employment, education, and training for parents. It also supports children’s healthy growth and academic achievement,” says Bailey. “Its importance to the functioning of our society and our economy, as well as to individual opportunity, can’t be overstated. Yet so many families have a tough time finding quality child care that they can afford. That’s especially true for our communities of color, immigrant communities, and rural communities. CCAP is designed to address that issue.”

Since 2014, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services has made several major updates to CCAP. These updates create natural experimental conditions, representing an opportunity to evaluate CCAP’s impact before and after implementation of the changes. Bailey, Davis, and their research team will look primarily at changes to subsidy payment rates. Other policies of interest include family copays, payment for enrollment versus attendance, speed of payment, and the administrative burden of participation. 

The researchers will partner with Minnesota’s Department of Human Services to compile and analyze data related to families who enroll in CCAP, such as demographic and geographic information. They will model the number of families eligible for CCAP and compare that with participation rates and county-level waitlists. They will also look at providers’ participation in CCAP as well as their participation and rating in Parent Aware, Minnesota’s voluntary child care quality rating and improvement system. In addition, the research team plans to measure CCAP’s effects on parents’ employment and children’s school success. 

The project will also include a large-scale qualitative study. The researchers will survey and interview providers and families who participated in CCAP as well as those who did not. This will allow for a better understanding of how policies influence providers’ decisions to accept subsidies and families’ decisions to obtain subsidies. It will also shed light on families’ decision-making process as they choose providers. 

“We believe that our evaluation methodology will result in actionable findings for Minnesota and for other states as well,” says Davis. “For example, some states use a market price approach to setting subsidy payment rates. Other states use a cost modeling approach. Our study will determine how an increase in payment rates affects families’ access to care regardless of the approach used to set rates. There is so much to learn about the policy levers that states can use to maximize the effectiveness of programs like CCAP.”

In addition to Bailey and Davis, the project team will include Jonathan Borowsky, JD, PhD (Department of Applied Economics); Alyssa S. Meuwissen, PhD (CEED); Mary McEathron, PhD (CEED); Meredith Reese (CEED); Aaron Sojourner, PhD (W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research); and Barbara Vang (CEED).