Georgia began work to create its QRIS, Quality Rated, with a strategic plan that would help the state “ensure access to high quality early care and education by laying a foundation of learning and school readiness [to support] future success for all [of] Georgia’s children.” The system was research-based and informed by Georgia stakeholders and national experts. First, Georgia stakeholders and partners gathered to identify quality standards and indicators for Georgia programs. Key research partners from the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill then conducted an evaluation of quality in Georgia with a representative sample of child care programs from across the state. They provided baseline quality assessments of the early care and education (ECE) system in three Georgia settings: child care learning centers in infant/toddler and preschool classrooms, Georgia’s prekindergarten classrooms, and family day care homes. The findings from those evaluations presented the case for implementing the QRIS; the data were also used to determine the feasibility of the tools for measuring the standards and indicators.
Georgia strengthened other aspects of the ECE system to support the QRIS, including the early learning standards, the child care resource and referral (CCR&R) system, inter-rater reliability, and the subsidy program. For example, revisions to early learning standards emerged from a yearlong empirical study assessing the quality and completeness of existing standards and their alignment with critical documents such as Georgia’s Pre-K Content Standards, Kindergarten Through Third Grade Performance Standards, and Head Start Child Development and Early Learning Framework. Experts used the principles of implementation science to examine Georgia’s CCR&R system and prepare to more closely realign services to the needs of their QRIS. They conducted a broad-based study of the potential fiscal impact of QRIS standards on child care programs, giving the state a cost model that guided decisions about standards and financial supports that would be critical for programs to achieve those standards. To ensure the integrity of licensing as a foundation of the QRIS, they conducted an inter-rater reliability study of licensing visits. Finally, they did a thorough examination of their Childcare and Parent Services (CAPS) subsidy program by convening a state-level task force to review all policies and procedures. The task force made recommendations for revisions that would connect CAPS policies to other key ECE initiatives in Georgia, including the QRIS. For Georgia, ECE is a system in which all components must align and connect.