Contributing to Early Childhood Outcomes: The Role of Licensing and Quality Initiatives

How do regulatory compliance rules and quality initiative standards contribute to how well children are doing in early care and education (ECE) programs? This is probably the most important question facing early childhood educators and researchers. In the following graphic and attached research note are presented some thinking related to this question and the contributing factors of professional development, program quality and regulatory compliance predictive relationships with early childhood outcomes. It is based upon ECE research from the past 50 years.

Here is the research note that was written back in 2013 proposing the relationship amongst licensing, pre-k, QRIS, accreditation, & professional development and their potential impact on child outcomes. It helps to support the results presented above in the theory of child outcomes contributions from the various systems.