Having children properly immunized is a very important goal within public health.  It helps to protect children’s health.  Within early care and education programs, immunizations are both a standard of care as well as an outcome of that care.  Recently, as I have been doing additional in-depth analyses of the national data base that RIKILLC – Research Institute for Key Indicators maintains, having children properly immunized has been and continues to be a key indicator rule that statistically predicts overall regulatory compliance with all early care and education rules.  This is a result that appeared in the research literature over 40 years ago and is still present in today’s analyses.  It helps to account for approximately 70% of the variance related to statistically predicting regulatory compliance.  These results are across the USA and Canada.

So why is an immunization standard or rule such a good discriminator of high performing early care and education programs.  Keeping track of children’s immunizations is not an easy task.  It is very detailed-oriented which takes a great deal of diligence on the individuals doing the tracking.  One can assume that the best programs have figured this out while the mediocre programs who have difficulty with regulatory compliance have not.