Child Care Equity Study – Impact of Subsidy Policy Changes
As a result of changes to federal child care policy,* significant changes were made to Illinois’ Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) with the goal of improving access, quality, and stability of care. Two changes include
- New training requirements for family, friend and neighbor (FFN) providers who serve families with CCAP.
- Extending the CCAP eligibility period for families from 6 to 12 months.
Research findings indicate that the impacts of these new policies have strong implications for social equity. Announcing new training requirements discouraged many FFN providers from participating in CCAP and was harmful to the types of families that use FFN providers at high rates. Extending eligibility helped all families but supported some types of families that are identified in federal law as priority populations for being historically underserved.
*Federal changes were made in the 2014 reauthorization of the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDGB), the primary federal source of child care assistance in the United States.
Unintended and Inequitable Impacts of a 2017 Policy Change for License-Exempt Home Child Care
This research addresses the question of whether new CCAP training requirements that aimed to improve the quality of license-exempt home child care had the unintentional effect of sharply reducing the number of children in subsidized child care.
Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this research is a collaboration between the University of Chicago and Illinois Action for Children; Co-Principal Investigators Julia Henly, PhD and David Alexander, PhD, with support from Robert Hughes, PhD, and Brenda Eastham of the Child Care Resource Service (CCRS)
