Quality

Importance: High-quality ECE is associated with better child outcomes. Quality is especially important for children facing challenges such as poverty, homelessness, or developmental delays. High scores are desirable on this index, indicating a greater likelihood that nearby seats are of high quality.

How We Got This: Programs with a national ECE accreditation (NAEYC, NECCPA, NFCCA) and public preK sites (which are highly rated by NIEER) were considered to be high quality. The quality index is calculated for each housing lot as the availability-weighted average dichotomous quality score of nearby ECE programs. This takes into account the number of nearby seats, the number of these seats in public preK or accredited programs, and the number of nearby children. Tract-level scores are the average quality index score (weighted by the number of children estimated to live at each lot) for all housing lots located within that census tract.