Research by economists about early childhood education and policy
Parisa Mahboubi complains (Globe and Mail, April 11th) about Ontario’s new plan to provide free preschool child care, but I think she should be cheering instead. I agree with her that the cost of child care is a major barrier to increased labour supply, to gender equality in employment, and to children gaining positive experiences in child care.
Speech to the Institute for Research on Public Policy Roundtable – “Assessing Family Policy in Canada”.
Financing Canada’s Child Care System: A Letter to Ken
Download a PDF of the paper or read the summary.
This is the final report of a 3-year project studying nonprofit and for-profit child care centres in Canada, by Gordon Cleveland, Barry Forer, Douglas Hyatt, Christa Japel and Michael Krashinsky. The focus has been to establish whether and under what conditions nonprofit operation of centres will lead to higher quality services. The authors use four different data sets to answer the question. Here is a very brief summary. And here are a few chosen excerpts from the Final Report. However, Chapter Two of the report provides a more fulsome summary. The report analyzes data from You Bet I Care! (six provinces and one territory), Grandir en Qualite (Quebec), the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (or ELDEQ; Quebec), and data from the City of Toronto. It includes a reasonably comprehensive survey of relevant literature and information about nonprofit and for-profit child care in other countries.
You can download a PDF of the Final Report.