How Centers Spend Money on Quality - Budgeting for Quality

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Is there a difference in the budgets of centers providing better quality care? What do their budgets look like compared to centers providing lower quality care? Data from a recent study - Cost, Quality, and Child Outcomes in Child Care Centers (CQO) - allowed us to construct budgets comparing center cost breakdowns (see Table 1 below) by quality of service provided.

Briefly, we found that better quality centers spend more per child on staff wages, staff benefits, and administrative salaries and benefits than centers providing lower quality. There is little overall difference in costs per child on other expenses such as for facilities, materials, and food. Furthermore, the higher labor and management costs per child carry through to proportionately higher total cost rather than to a different distribution of costs. The higher total cost per child was also reflected in proportionately higher total revenue, so that good ...