Child Care Center Directors’ Experiences with QRIS

Sim Loh is a family partnership coordinator at Children’s Village, a nationally-accredited Keystone 4 STARS early learning and school-age enrichment program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, serving about 350 children. She supports children and families, including non-English speaking families of immigrant status, by ensuring equitable access to education, health, employment, and legal information and resources on a day-to-day basis. She is a member of the Children First Racial Equity Early Childhood Education Provider Council, a community member representative of Philadelphia School District Multilingual Advisory Council, and a board member of Historic Philadelphia.
Sim explains, “I ensure families know their rights and educate them on ways to speak up for themselves and request for interpretation/translation services. I share families’ stories and experiences with legislators and decision-makers so that their needs are understood. Attending Leadership Connections will help me strengthen and grow my skills in all domains by interacting with and hearing from experienced leaders in different positions. With newly acquired skills, I seek to learn about the systems level while paying close attention to the accessibility and barriers of different systems and resources and their impacts on young children and their families.”
Implementing a quality rating and improvement system (QRIS) is an increasingly popular strategy to expand the access of families, especially the most vulnerable, to high-quality child care programs. Currently there are 22 statewide QRIS and several states have QRIS implemented at the county level. Recently QRIS was a major component of the Race-to-the-Top Early Learning Challenge competition. It is likely to continue to be the framework on which policymakers build an integrated system of early learning and development, inclusive of child care, Head Start, and state-funded pre-K programs. The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) and the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), recently conducted a study to explore the perspective of center directors on both the opportunities and the challenges faced by “on-the-ground” participants in QRIS. … Download this resource to read the rest of the research.
This resource is part of our Research Note series.