Zip Code Disparities in Standards of Care: Examining Safety and Health Violations in

North Carolina Childcare Centers

Karen Azevedo Fernandez, Mount Holyoke CollegeJustin Doromal M.Ed.

Vivian Wong Ph.D.Daphna Bassok Ph.D.

Summer Undergraduate Research ProgramUniversity of Virginia Curry School of Education

Introduction¤ “A zip code should never predetermine the quality of any

child’s educational opportunities”-President Barack Obama The White House State of the Union Address

¤ There is substantial community-level variation in the availability of high quality early child care options (Fuller and Liang, 1996; Gordon and Chase-Lansdale, 2001; Magnuson, 2005;Hatfield et al., 2014).

¤ Prior research has also examined variation in child care quality by structural or process characteristics (La Paro, Pianta, Stuhlman, 2004; Valentino, 2015; Bassok & Galdo, 2016).

¤ But there is limited research on a third dimension of childcare center quality: Regulations for ensuring healthy and safe environments at child care centers

Media Headlines

Purpose and Research Question

¤ Purpose: To understand the relationship between community characteristics and the prevalence of centers with health and safety violations.

¤ RQ: Does the proportion of child care centers with safety and health violations vary by:

¤ Community race and ethnic composition?¤ Community socioeconomic status?

¤ Hypothesis: We predict that centers in low income, high minority communities will have a larger percentage of centers with health and safety violations.

Methods ¤ Population:

¤ 569 North Carolina communities by zip code ¤ 4682 Childcare Centers

¤ Data sources:¤ North Carolina Division of Child Development and Early

Education site¤ Contains all health and safety violations filed during annual

compliance visits of North Carolina childcare centers; ¤ United States Census Data

¤ % of minorities by zip code¤ % of those living below poverty threshold by zip code

¤ ANOVA and Tukey’s Post Hoc tests were conducted

Methods: Data Collection

• Data scraping technique allowed us to collect precise violations from North Carolina database.

• Health and Safety violations of a 3 and 5 point demerit were analyzed due to severity and rubric format.

• Our unique data set was then combined with U.S. Census level data to compare communities at the zip code level by racial/ethnic composition, SES, and the percentage of centers with at least 1 of these health & safety violations.

Results¤ Lowest and highest socioeconomic communities

had the lowest proportion of centers with health and safety violations. Middle class communities had the largest.

% of centers with violations NHigh SES Zip Code 28%

(0.32)115

Medium SES Zip Code 31%(0.30)

308

Low SES Zip Code 21%(0.26)

146

Results (Continued)¤ Communities with high representations of Black or African

American families tend to show a similar trend as SES.

¤ Communities with high representations of Latino families differed slightly.

00.05

0.10.15

0.20.25

0.30.35

0.4

�Low �Medium �High

Percent of Centers with Health/Safety Violation

Black Community Composition

Percentage of Black Communities with at least 1 Health and Safety Violation

00.05

0.10.15

0.20.25

0.30.35

0.4

�Low �Medium �High

Percent of Centers with

Health/Safety Violation

Latino Community Composition

Percentage of Latino Communities with at least 1 Health and Safety Violation

Discussion & Policy Implications

¤ Discussion: We suspect that the cause of these observed trends is due to the strict regulations enforced by federal public childcare centers as well as competition between private childcare centers. ¤ Programs such as Head Start receive more frequent

visits from a wide variety of inspectors because they are held to a higher standard due to federal funding regulations.

¤ Implications: Policies need to look at providers serving communities from middles SES in order to understand the best ways to serve children in these communities.

Acknowledgements

¤ The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305B090002 to the University of Virginia. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

¤ Education Policy Works Lab at University of Virginia