Few Texas childcare providers meet quality standards

Texas lawmakers are looking to improve child care safety and oversight, prompted in part by an American-Statesman investigation into reports of death and sexual abuse suffered by Texas children at childcare facilities.

During a Tuesday news conference announcing new legislation, Robert Sanborn, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit Children at Risk, said parents have to make “tough choices” when it comes to choosing a day care option for their children due to financial constraints and varying quality among facilities.

“Right now, only 11 percent of the 15,000 childcare providers in Texas are certified as meeting quality standards,” Sanborn said before pausing and repeating the claim for emphasis. “We need to do a lot more.”

Childcare providers in Texas must meet minimum standards to be licensed or registered by the state. Beyond that, they can participate in a voluntary state program and several national programs that offer accreditation to providers who meet higher standards.

Is it true that just 11 percent of Texas childcare providers are certified through those programs?

Minimum standards vs. quality standards

To operate in Texas, child care providers must meet minimum standards and submit to inspections conducted by state officials.

Carrie Williams, spokeswoman for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission which oversees licensing and registration for providers, said the agency does not rate facilities based on quality.

“Our focus is on whether or not facilities are meeting the standards set to ensure the health and safety needs of the children in care,” she said in an email.

These minimum standards are different than the quality standards Sanborn referenced in his claim.

If providers meet the state's minimum standards, they are eligible to seek accreditation from a voluntary state program and several national organizations. This would allow them to be “certified as meeting quality standards,” as Sanborn said.

These programs typically require operations to meet standards related to staff training and education, curriculum and class size. Many also require an application fee.

Texas Rising Star is the voluntary state quality rating program. Providers can only qualify for the program if they participate in a Texas Workforce Commission program that subsidizes childcare costs for low-income families.

Shay Everitt, director of early childhood education initiatives at Children at Risk, said Sanborn’s claim was based on a calculation that looked at the number of providers certified through the Texas Rising Star program and four prominent national accreditation programs, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, the National Accreditation Commission, the National Early Childhood Program Accreditation and the Association of Christian Schools International.

The numbers add up

Everitt said the group’s findings were current as of September 2018, and she shared a spreadsheet that listed total providers and those accredited by each of the five programs.

Their research found that, of the 15,036 registered providers in Texas as of September, 1,501 providers (about 10 percent) participated in Texas Rising Star and/or one of the four national programs.

Everitt said the group added an extra percentage point to their findings to account for any providers who may be participating in smaller national accreditation programs.

We gathered the same data, using the most recently available numbers from each organization.

At the end of March, there were 14,716 Texas childcare providers registered with the state. Of those, about 1,400 (or about 10 percent) are certified through the Texas Rising Star Program.

Membership lists provided by each of the four national organizations included a total of 464 Texas providers.

It’s fair to say that somewhere between 10 percent and 13 percent of Texas providers are certified as meeting quality standards through at least one of these five voluntary accreditation programs, given that some providers could be certified by multiple organizations.

Our ruling

Sanborn said “only 11 percent of the 15,000 childcare providers in Texas are certified as meeting quality standards.”

The math behind the claim checks out, but Sanborn left out important context about what standards are being considered. He was referring to the percentage of childcare providers who participate in voluntary programs that have higher quality standards than the minimum standards required to obtain approval from the state.

We rate this claim Mostly True.