The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) is the largest source of federal funding to states to provide child-care assistance for low-income families. These subsidies help offset the expense of childcare for low-income working parents. The Connecticut Office of Early Childhood (OEC) has recently made several significant subsidy policy changes that affect affordability of care, the supply of high-quality care, and families’ access to subsidies in the state. OEC now needs to understand the impact of the new policies.
EDC is partnering with OEC to create a plan to evaluate these policies and their impact on children and families in Connecticut. The goal of this planning grant is to develop the tools necessary to conduct a high-quality evaluation that can inform future state subsidy policies.
The project is carrying out the following activities:
- Develop a data catalogue highlighting available data and data gaps related to the subsidy policies, thereby allowing the team to fill gaps during the planning grant
- Conduct data explorations and preliminary analyses to build the capacity of OEC to design and carry out rigorous evaluations of their subsidy policies
- Engage with a consortium of nine other grantees to identify common measures, instruments, and analytic approaches and then to refine the logic model
- The project will result in the development of a robust, rigorous evaluation plan to guide a subsequent study of OEC’s subsidy policies and their impact on families’ access to care.
Connecticut Office of Early Childhood; Partnership for Early Education Research