FALSE SECURITY

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 2004 by Frazier, Eric

Lauded day-care rating system manipulated to achieve higher marks, investigation shows

In 1999, North Carolina stepped to the front of the national day-care reform movement when it launched an ambitious licensing system designed to prod day-care centers toward higher standards.

The state's old licensing system had awarded centers an "A" license for meeting minimum standards. Those who aimed higher, perhaps by having more activity centers or fewer students per teacher, could get an "AA" license. Critics said that didn't tell consumers enough about the quality of care or the distinctions between centers.

The new licensing system raised standards and drew sharper distinctions between good-quality and poor-quality centers. It set up a five-star licensing regime under which the best centers would get five stars and the worst would get one. Stars would be awarded based on three categories - program quality, staff education and compliance with state regulations. Each category carried a maximum of five points. You needed 14 total points - near perfection - to get five stars. The licenses themselves showed how many stars centers earned in each of the three areas. Parents checking out a center needed only look at the license on the wall to get a sense of what the center in question did well or poorly.

Day-care experts called it a huge step in the right direction. They suspected parents would get much more detailed information about quality, and that would prod the low-rated day-care providers to improve themselves. "You're on the leading edge," an official with the Children's Defense Fund told the Observer in 2000. "It's very thorough, very well done, very challenging." Harvard University named the program a finalist for its Innovations in American Government Awards, the "Oscars" of the public policy world.

The Observer had given heavy coverage to the rollout of the star licensing system, but as the years passed, the spotlight faded. When a source told me this year that many centers were moving up the ratings toward five stars, the cynical part of me groaned at the thought of a "feel good" story. But, realizing how important a subject day care is for any newspaper's readership, 1 decided to take a look.

I discovered that the state's day-care centers were indeed earning higher star ratings. But as I kept digging, I came across one brochure on the program that opened a whole new line of inquiry. The brochure mentioned that, in gauging program quality, the state had done thousands of rigorous, onsite evaluations at day cares across the state. The evaluations - one for infant and toddler classrooms, one for preschoolers and one for school-age children - produced numerical scores. While searching the state's Web site on the rating system, I came across a link to a Web site run by the university professors who directed the onsite evaluations under a $2 million state contract. The professors were concerned that too many of the evaluation scores were falling below acceptable standards. I figured the state probably kept a database of those scores. Couldn't hurt to take a look, I thought.

I asked the state Department of Health and Human Services, and sure enough, it did have those scores in several handy Excel spreadsheets. The agency promptly e-mailed them to me. The data fields included the name of the day care, the county, the ZIP code, the number of stars it received overall, and its scores on the three onsite quality assessment tests. I'm still a relative novice with spreadsheets, but with some help from Adam Bell, one of our in-house experts, I ran simple searches to see what trends might pop out. As the professors had hinted on their Web site, there were indeed problems.

The average scores for infant and toddler classrooms fell far below the standards set by child development experts. The evaluations conducted in infant and toddler classrooms showed that the safety practices observed by 76 percent of day cares fell below minimal or basic standards. Some were rated as dangerous or inadequate for children.

The experts overseeing the tests also found that 68 percent of day cares fell in the inadequate or below minimal care range on the sanitation standard. Teachers, for instance, routinely forgot to remove their diaper-changing gloves before putting on a clean diaper. Getting kids to wash their hands properly before eating also seemed to be a big problem. Such oversights, the experts said, could easily help spread communicable disease.

So, what the spreadsheets showed was that the state's highly acclaimed day-care rating and licensing system had been quietly pinpointing disturbing problems with the quality of care the state's children were receiving. Some day-care owners complained that the tests were too hard, that the evaluators were looking for perfection. But that's a hard argument to make when children's health and safety are at stake. The rating system was designed to spark improvement, even if it meant showing centers exactly how below par they were. And in that sense, it was definitely doing its job.