Partnership Planning Grant: Coordinated Evaluation of Child Care and Development Fund Policies and Initiatives in Connecticut

Challenge

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.

Key Activities

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

Our Impact

• 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.