Quality Rating And Improvement Systems

Over the last few decades, there has been plenty of research done on the quality of child care and early education programs in the United States which demonstrated the need for benchmarking quality and holding programs accountable at a systemwide level - especially those utilizing public funds. Various program types already had their own means of managing accountability in some way or another, such as licensing and accreditation for child care programs, and public school pre-kindergarten program standards. What was lacking, however, was a framework that provided common ground for these various forms of accountability to align with one another. Thus, the need for Quality Rating and Improvement Systems was born. (National Center on Early Childhood

Therefore, these systems do have a place in the theory of risk and resilience. QRIS intend to improve the quality of programs that all children, including high-risk children, are accessing, and also increase the ease with which they can access these programs. By increasing the quality of the programs that serve high-risk children, theoretically QRIS help to strengthen children’s outcomes from these programs, which adds to the resilience factor. Hopefully, although children may have cumulative risk factors, resilience can be gained and high-quality early care and education programs can contribute to that building of resilience for these high-risk young

There is debate surrounding whether or not QRIS should incorporate a rating for how well programs serve children and families who are culturally and linguistically diverse. For example, most QRIS just aren’t set up to measure, say, the interactions of preschool teachers with children who are dual language learners (Boller & Maxwell, 2014). There is also debate on whether the other measures themselves make sense for programs that are culturally and linguistically diverse. Ultimately, are the standards that programs are being measured against sensible standards for all cultures and languages, or are they geared toward one predominant culture? This can be filed under the category of “unanswered questions” remaining regarding QRIS. Opening up this discussion truly opens up a much broader one about our early care and education system as a whole, and even the K-12