1999 Early Education and Care Assessment

 

PERFORMANCE MEASURES

Although many early education and care providers are tracking their own performance, there is currently no system-wide measurement system in place. The Community Action Network (CAN) is dedicated to developing early education and care performance measures that will enable the community to track its progress in achieving the goals identified in the Community Assessment vision statement:

Austin/Travis County will be a community where all children and families have access to a comprehensive system of high-quality early education, child care, and family support in order to assure that all children have opportunities for successful and productive lives.

One way to capture changes in the early education and care system over time is to utilize regularly published federal, state, and local data as outcome indicators. When the next assessment on early education and care is conducted, the same data, statistics and numbers can be examined to determine what changes have occurred since the last assessment. Assessment writers can examine both quantitative and qualitative changes over time. Listed below in Table 15 are some examples of community indicators for early education and care.

Table 15
Suggested 1999 Community Indicators for Early Education and Care

TYPE OF INDICATOR

DESCRIPTION

Quantitative

  • The number of affordable child care slots that are available in the community compared to the number of children needing slots.
  • The percentage of child care programs/spaces/homes that are accredited and/or demonstrate that they are quality programs.
  • Average turnover rates of staff, teachers, and directors in early education and care programs.
  • Average hourly wage of child care staff, teachers, and directors.
  • Average teacher to child ratio.
  • Number of children on waiting lists for subsidized child care (CCMS and Head Start) and average length of time to wait.

Qualitative

  • Changes in the proportion of parents reporting particular child care concerns (compared to baseline findings by Austin Families Inc. survey results).
  • Coordination of funding sources for parenting programs in the community.
  • Coordination of parenting services to ensure consistency, availability, and quality.
  • Changes in marketing, structure, and availability of parenting classes so that more diverse types of families are encouraged to attend.

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