2021 Cost of Quality Price Modeling Report
The 2021 Texas quality child care price modeling report explores the incremental costs of providing quality child care in the State of Texas, relative to care that merely meets state licensing standards. Read the latest report below and appendix below to learn more!
The report measures and models the prices charged for higher–quality care among certified Texas Rising Star and other nationally accredited providers, relative to prices charged by similarly situated providers who are not Texas Rising Star certified nor nationally accredited. In addition to the overall cost of quality, this study attempts to determine the relative contributions to costs of individual structural components of quality.
The empirical approach of this study differs from some of the child care cost literature in that this study attempts to measure the costs of providing care based on extensive modeling of the prices charged. Selected samples of home– and center–based child care facilities were surveyed to capture important quality factors and pricing information. In addition to the surveys, researchers assembled extensive data from various publicly available sources to develop statistical models of the price of quality child care. These models allow the marginal price of providing quality care to be estimated using a combination of factors specific to individual facilities, as measured by the survey, as well as to the local markets in which they operate, as measured by the public data and varying geographically.