Study Finds Child Care in Decline : Social services: California’s system once served as a model for the nation. Large numbers of children now receive ‘woefully inadequate’ care, researchers say.

The quality of California’s child-care system, long a model for the rest of the country, has declined dramatically in the last decade, resulting in “woefully inadequate” care for large numbers of infants, toddlers and preschoolers, a University of California study released Monday has found.

“California’s child-care centers are no longer distinctly different from those in the rest of the country” and are inferior to programs in about a dozen other states, said Carollee Howes, a UCLA associate professor of education.

In the larger of two categories of centers studied--those not receiving state subsidies--the report found two-thirds of preschoolers (ages 3 to 5) were receiving inadequate care.

Howes cited a rapidly growing demand for child care and unwieldy workloads for generally underpaid day-care and preschool staffs as the main factors in the decline.

“When there are too many children in a classroom, the adult care-giver becomes like a factory worker--changing diapers, feeding the children, putting them to bed. There is too little time and energy left to provide for anything beyond the immediate physical needs of the children,” Howes said.

Lee McKay, president of the California Assn. for the Education of Young Children, which represents child-care providers, said she had not seen the report but was not surprised to hear of its findings.

“Standards (for teachers) are very, very low, and they need to be much higher, along with salaries,” McKay said. “The problem is that parents cannot afford to pay what it really costs (for good child care). Parents have created a demand for quantity but not for quality because they do not yet know what to look for.”

Howes conducted the study, published by UC’s California Policy Seminar, with Marcy Whitebook, executive director of the Child Care Employee Project in Oakland. They based their conclusions on surveys of 225 child-care centers in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Phoenix and Seattle and of 65 in Southern California.

They rated the centers after looking at 37 factors, including classroom toys and activities, safety features and effectiveness of teachers. A center was deemed inadequate if it earned a score of 2.9 or lower on a scale of 1 to 7.

California has higher licensing standards for centers that receive state aid than for those that do not. Teacher training requirements and adult-to-child ratios are stricter for state-subsidized centers, which generally serve very low-income families.

Not surprisingly, researchers found more adequate care in the centers that followed the standards required of state-subsidized centers. For example, only 10% of infants up to 12 months in centers following the more rigorous requirements were found to be receiving inadequate care, compared to 45% in centers that followed the less stringent set of regulations.

For toddlers ages 1 to 3, only 4% received inadequate care in the stricter-standards centers, contrasted with 26% in the others. For preschoolers, the percentages receiving inadequate care were 5% and 67%, respectively.

The vast majority--about 80%--of centers in California do not meet the stricter standards, the report said.

Because of the higher standards for centers that get state aid, middle-class families who send their children to profit-making private centers face a bigger risk of receiving inadequate care than do low-income families who qualify for state-subsidized centers.

In the state-subsidized centers, adult-to-child ratios can be no higher than 1 to 3 for infants, 1 to 4 for toddlers and 1 to 8 for preschoolers. In the other centers, the rules are 1 to 4, 1 to 6 and 1 to 12, respectively. Also, teachers in state-subsidized centers must have earned 24 credits in early childhood education classes, while teachers in other centers are required to have just 12 credits.

However, Howes said that many centers, especially those run by nonprofit agencies, voluntarily abide by higher standards.

The study’s authors advise parents who are shopping for child care to start looking at centers early, talk to parents experienced with day-care centers and ask the directors about their teacher-child ratios, staff training and pay. Generally, centers that pay higher salaries have less teacher turnover, Howes and Whitebook said.