New YoungStar Report

The Wisconsin Council on Children and Families (WCCF) has recently completed a policy brief, YoungStar: We’re Turning Five! Five Year Analysis as of July 2015 (here is a link to the full report). The YoungStar child care quality rating and improvement system (QRIS) is a breakthrough policy initiative that has great promise to transform child care in Wisconsin by helping parents make good choices and by providing incentives and assistance for child care programs to improve.

We believe that new initiatives of this size require careful attention to track progress, identify unintended consequences, and ensure that implementation is efficient and effective. The report describes the remarkable progress made in the implementation of YoungStar, including information on ratings statewide and by region, efforts to help programs improve, and considerations and challenges for the future.

This fall, YoungStar is turning five years old and has had a great deal of success. Here are some highlights:

• Seventy-two percent (72%) of Wisconsin Shares children are served in programs rated 3-Star or higher on a 5-Star scale.

• The percent of children served by 3- to 5-Star rated programs increased from 47% to 72% from July 2012 to July 2015, an impressive gain of 25 percentage points of children in higher-quality settings.

• A total of 31,302 children served by Wisconsin Shares were in 3- to 5-Star programs in July 2015.

• The average number of children served by the Wisconsin Shares child care subsidy program has dropped by 13,904 over the past six years. This drop is significant because when fewer children are served by Shares, fewer children benefit from YoungStar’s quality improvement program.

To access an electronic version of this YoungStar report and to see the range of early care and education publications put out by WCCF, go to:  https://kidsforward.org/assets/YoungStarRpt-e-version_FINAL.pdf

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Contact: David “Daithi” Wolfe, Early Care and Education Policy Analyst, dwolfe@wccf.org,

284-0580 ext 328