Zip Code Disparities in Standards of Care: Examining Safety and Health Violations in
North Carolina Childcare Centers
Karen Azevedo Fernandez, Mount Holyoke CollegeJustin Doromal M.Ed.
Vivian Wong Ph.D.Daphna Bassok Ph.D.
Summer Undergraduate Research ProgramUniversity of Virginia Curry School of Education
Introduction¤ “A zip code should never predetermine the quality of any
child’s educational opportunities”-President Barack Obama The White House State of the Union Address
¤ There is substantial community-level variation in the availability of high quality early child care options (Fuller and Liang, 1996; Gordon and Chase-Lansdale, 2001; Magnuson, 2005;Hatfield et al., 2014).
¤ Prior research has also examined variation in child care quality by structural or process characteristics (La Paro, Pianta, Stuhlman, 2004; Valentino, 2015; Bassok & Galdo, 2016).
¤ But there is limited research on a third dimension of childcare center quality: Regulations for ensuring healthy and safe environments at child care centers
Media Headlines
Purpose and Research Question
¤ Purpose: To understand the relationship between community characteristics and the prevalence of centers with health and safety violations.
¤ RQ: Does the proportion of child care centers with safety and health violations vary by:
¤ Community race and ethnic composition?¤ Community socioeconomic status?
¤ Hypothesis: We predict that centers in low income, high minority communities will have a larger percentage of centers with health and safety violations.
Methods ¤ Population:
¤ 569 North Carolina communities by zip code ¤ 4682 Childcare Centers
¤ Data sources:¤ North Carolina Division of Child Development and Early
Education site¤ Contains all health and safety violations filed during annual
compliance visits of North Carolina childcare centers; ¤ United States Census Data
¤ % of minorities by zip code¤ % of those living below poverty threshold by zip code
¤ ANOVA and Tukey’s Post Hoc tests were conducted
Methods: Data Collection
• Data scraping technique allowed us to collect precise violations from North Carolina database.
• Health and Safety violations of a 3 and 5 point demerit were analyzed due to severity and rubric format.
• Our unique data set was then combined with U.S. Census level data to compare communities at the zip code level by racial/ethnic composition, SES, and the percentage of centers with at least 1 of these health & safety violations.
Results¤ Lowest and highest socioeconomic communities
had the lowest proportion of centers with health and safety violations. Middle class communities had the largest.
% of centers with violations NHigh SES Zip Code 28%
(0.32)115
Medium SES Zip Code 31%(0.30)
308
Low SES Zip Code 21%(0.26)
146
Results (Continued)¤ Communities with high representations of Black or African
American families tend to show a similar trend as SES.
¤ Communities with high representations of Latino families differed slightly.
00.05
0.10.15
0.20.25
0.30.35
0.4
�Low �Medium �High
Percent of Centers with Health/Safety Violation
Black Community Composition
Percentage of Black Communities with at least 1 Health and Safety Violation
00.05
0.10.15
0.20.25
0.30.35
0.4
�Low �Medium �High
Percent of Centers with
Health/Safety Violation
Latino Community Composition
Percentage of Latino Communities with at least 1 Health and Safety Violation
Discussion & Policy Implications
¤ Discussion: We suspect that the cause of these observed trends is due to the strict regulations enforced by federal public childcare centers as well as competition between private childcare centers. ¤ Programs such as Head Start receive more frequent
visits from a wide variety of inspectors because they are held to a higher standard due to federal funding regulations.
¤ Implications: Policies need to look at providers serving communities from middles SES in order to understand the best ways to serve children in these communities.
Acknowledgements
¤ The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305B090002 to the University of Virginia. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
¤ Education Policy Works Lab at University of Virginia