With recently awarded grant funding, Dr. Irma Arteaga continues her studies of early childhood education with her study entitled Policy Influences on Early Care and Education. The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) of the Administration for Children and Families, at the US Department of Health and Human Services, awarded $105,000 for Arteaga’s study to “examine the consequences of two main policy or programmatic changes that have occurred between 2012 and 2019,” with primary concerns “for children from economically-disadvantaged families and English language learners.”

The referenced policies are the Child Care and Development Fund, (CCDF) which was reauthorized in 2014, and the state and local decisions to increase pre-k availability.  In her study, Arteaga compares early care and education arrangements from 2012 to 2019 using two waves of the National Survey of Early Care and Education. By leveraging the longitudinal nature of the data and using quasi-experimental techniques, one of the goals of Arteaga’s research is to examine the effects of changes in the CCDF law on the characteristics of children enrolled in various early care and education settings, as well as to examine if there is differential impact among children from the lowest-income families or those residing in high-poverty communities and/or areas with higher percentages of Hispanic children.