Policy Levers:
a university research collaborative
About Our Research Collaborative
The Policy Levers for Equitable Employment and Child Care research collaborative at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice is home to the work of Samuel Deutsch Professor Julia Henly’s projects focused on building a stable system for early childhood care and education. Our team of researchers and graduate students partners with child care and employment equity-focused policymakers, advocates and researchers across Illinois to produce rigorous, policy-relevant research to support children, families and child care workers.
Our work focuses on the challenge of how to build a child care and early education system that meets the needs of working parents, the developmental needs of children, and offers high-quality employment for providers.
Our research considers three critical functions of the early care and education system:
Work Support for Parents
A stable system must meet the needs of working parents with reasonable effort by considering proximity, cost, family schedules and children’s unique needs among other factors. Child care is expensive, especially for families with low incomes. Options are sparse in some geographic areas and many parents work non-standard hours during which schools and traditional child care centers are often unavailable, leaving many families under-served.
Investment in Child Development
Early childhood is a critical period for children’s development and long-term outcomes; thus, our child care and early education system must be able to equitably support high-quality care that meets developmental needs. While child care quality can be difficult to measure and definitions of quality may vary depending on the purpose, age group, and hours of care (daytime, evening, etc.), conventional definitions of quality show that most programs across the child care sector remain low to moderate in quality.
Industry with Professional Workforce
A stable system must be able to support wages and positive working conditions in its workforce, which currently sees high turnover rates and staffing shortages in Illinois. The child care workforce is primarily comprised of women, and disproportionately, mothers of color who earn low wages, which inextricably ties success in the industry to increasing racial, gender and economic equity in the workforce.
Research Highlights
Interviews with child care providers highlight critical need for continuing emergency aid programs in Illinois
Our study of home and center-based child care programs in Illinois demonstrates that providers saw emergency funding during the first year of the pandemic as critical to their survival and found accessing the aid to be less burdensome than prior experiences with receiving government aid.
Policy Levers collaborative awarded federal ACF grant to implement evaluation of innovative Illinois child care grants
Our team was among 10 grantees selected to participate in ACF-OPRE PROSPR grant coordinated efforts to investigate Child Care Development Block Grant initiatives with lead agencies
Research collaboration with Illinois Action for Children highlights low CACFP (federal food and nutrition program) participation rates among license-exempt providers
CACFP Participation in Cook County, IL
- License-exempt FFN providers (n=4479) 4%
- Licensed FCC providers (n=2102) 79%
*Source: IL Action for Children administrative data 2022
Quoted in the News
Henly op-ed on child care in low-income families in The New York Times
“many families could use a great deal more help aligning paid work with caregiving responsibilities. Working parents need a fuller range of children’s programs and labor market policies that reflect the realities of work and family life.”
Henly interview on the expiration of pandemic-era funding in Truthout
“…the sudden end to [pandemic era] child care funding ‘also may disrupt some interesting new initiatives that really have the potential to help a lot of families, and also help give a little more respect and security to the people that work in that industry.'”