Essays on Early Education and Care Systems and Processes

Abstract

In the three papers of this dissertation, I use data from a large study conducted in Massachusetts and regression-based approaches to analyze both access and quality in diverse early education and care (EEC) settings serving preschool-age children. In each of the papers, I include a broader range of EEC setting types than is common in prior literature (i.e., community center, Head Start, licensed family child care, and public school settings) and select measurement approaches that complement and extend those used in previous work, opening new avenues for understanding children’s opportunities and development in the context of EEC systems and settings. In the first paper, I focus on a key component of EEC access: the availability of EEC near young children’s residences. I examine variation in EEC availability by neighborhood characteristics and explore the consequences of those patterns for families’ use of EEC. I find that young children residing in less densely populated areas and in areas with moderate socioeconomic opportunity tend to have less EEC available nearby than those living in other areas. I also find that, among families who selected group EEC for their children, children with more limited availability near their residences tend to have longer commutes to their providers. The second and third papers of the dissertation consider the quality of the EEC settings children attend. In the second paper, I explore children’s multifaceted skill development during the kindergarten transition and the intersection between their skill development and prekindergarten process quality. I first examine child-level dynamics in skill development, analyzing cross-domain associations between children’s prekindergarten skills and their residual skill gains from prekindergarten to kindergarten in five areas: social competence, self-regulation, language, early math, and early reading. I find that children’s self-regulation, language, and early math skills are interconnected from prekindergarten to kindergarten, whereas children’s social and early reading skills are largely unassociated with the other assessed domains. I then turn to the setting level, analyzing associations between a fine-grained observational measure of prekindergarten process quality and children’s residual skill gains in the same five areas. I find few links between process quality and children’s later skills. In the third paper, I explore a hypothesized predictor of process quality: early educator burnout. I first validate the internal structure of a widely used burnout measure in a sample of early educators working in a range of EEC setting types. I then use the measure to describe burnout levels among early educators, finding that burnout symptoms are on average infrequent. Finally, I examine associations between educator burnout and process quality in EEC settings and find few links.