Could access to daycare centers influence children’s overall development over the years, especially on their school performance? To answer this question, for the first time in the world, a medium-term experimental assessment was conducted of the impacts of a large-scale public daycare provision program. The findings of this unprecedented study, set in low-income neighborhoods in the city of Rio de Janeiro, show a positive impact on attendance and academic performance, and are relevant to the region’s debates on policies for expanding childcare centers.
The case of Rio de Janeiro and crèches
To understand how conducting an experiment with such large data analysis and over such a long time was possible, we need to get in a time machine and travel back to 2007. At the time, Rio de Janeiro had a population of approximately six million people, of which 7% were children aged 0 to 4.
Although the Brazilian government had established free access to public childcare centers as a fundamental social right, in practice not enough places were available to fully meet the demand, in fact, in the low-income neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, there were only 244 crèches –the name by which these childcare centers for children from 0 to 3 years of age are known in Brazil. Then, in places where the number of available places was less than the number of applications, the municipal government agreed to implement a lottery to allocate the available vacancies. Thus, 10,000 of the 24,000 children who applied for the 2008 period were selected at random. This is where the timeline begins for the purposes of the research, where two groups were studied: the treatment group (lottery winners) and the control group (losers).
While high-quality school records were available at the municipal, state, and national levels, unfortunately no unique administrative identifier was available to link all of the individual children’s records with existing information at different points in time. Although the information was available, the records did not allow for tracking all the children as they grew older, to understand whether access to crèches at an early age translated into better school outcomes later in life. Besides, not all the children who attended crèches continued their education within the Brazilian public system, as they moved out of the country, to private schools or otherwise, so their results were lost track of. As a result of this, we lost track of approximately 20% of the children who originally participated in the lottery and this was the main challenge of the study, which spanned 10 years.
The project was part of the Early Childhood Development Innovation Fund, which allowed the multidisciplinary work of a team of researchers to analyze thousands of school records of children aged 0 to 3 in December 2007 (when they participated in the lottery to access the crèches), and aged 11 to 14 in 2018.
The analysis of this data marked a point in history, as it is the first worldwide experimental assessment of the medium and long-term impacts of a large-scale public childcare provision program.
Main results over 10 years
The group of researchers assessed the impact of attending a public childcare center -between the ages of 0 to 3- on school results upon reaching basic education, this being a medium-term result, taking into account school attendance, test scores in all subjects in general and results in the Prova Rio standardized test applied in third grade of elementary school, all this for different ages. Additionally, the impact of winning the lottery for crèche attendance during early childhood was assessed, this being a short-term outcome.
The results suggest that:
- The lottery had a positive impact on crèche enrollment rates and the number of years children attended childcare during early childhood, indicating that winning the lottery was an effective incentive for parents to decide to make use of crèches.
- Winning the lottery for crèches had a positive effect on how regularly children attended elementary school during the academic year.
- Unlike girls, boys did seem to benefit from winning the lottery in terms of their overall grades and their Portuguese scores on the Prova Rio test.
Considering the undeniable effect that winning the lottery had on childcare attendance, it is important to highlight the benefits that result when children between the ages of 0 and 3 receive quality services in childcare centers like: nutritious food, free health services, early stimulation, toys and activities to stimulate cognitive and psychomotor development, and materials on positive parenting practices. Likewise, there are studies in the region supporting the fact that the expansion of childcare centers has an impact on the increased employment of mothers or caregivers. This set of early life variables is decisive for the development and accumulation of human capital over time.
In the opposite scenario, we see that a situation of poverty could affect growth and development during early childhood, and these disadvantages are likely to influence children’s education, employment, and health later in life. Persistent equity gaps in access to childcare services and the quality of the home environment affect mainly the most vulnerable populations.
The study in numbers
The need to assess children’s development in the medium and long term
Evidence shows that experiences and interventions in the early years last throughout life. However, when we are late, we validate the cycle of poverty and exclusion. That is why policy interventions that promote development during this period favor equity and the healthy growth of children, so that they can have more opportunities in the future.
Among efforts in Latin America and the Caribbean to expand coverage of early childhood services, Brazil is one of the most noteworthy. As part of its early childhood development policy over the last decade, the country expanded access to crèches to serve the population with the greatest needs. However, it was essential to find out whether these efforts were having results on children’s development in the medium and long term, and whether they had an impact on their school performance even 10 years after. This study’s answer is yes and validates what Brazil did as a pioneer in the region.
This project was funded by the Early Childhood Development (ECD) Innovation Fund, with the coordination of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the support of Fundación FEMSA, Fundação María Cecilia Souto Vidigal, Open Society Foundations, Porticus and the Bernard van Leer Foundation. The Fund will continue working in the coming years with the firm purpose of innovating to achieve the quality of ECD services. To stay connected and learn more about this innovative work, we invite you to explore the Knowledge Hub on Early Childhood Development where you will find details of this and other projects, resources, and useful information on ECD.
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