Quality Compendium: A Catalog and Comparison of Quality Improvement Systems (QIS)

Early ChildhoodJan 17, 2025

Child Trends maintains the Quality Compendium to promote thoughtful design, analysis, and ongoing improvement in efforts to build early care and education (ECE) systems. The Compendium database, a catalog and comparison of quality improvement initiatives like Quality Improvement Systems (QIS), is designed for state and local administrators, policymakers, researchers, technical assistance providers, and others invested in ECE to explore in-depth information about individual QIS, compare details across systems, and examine trends over time. This project is supported through an ongoing partnership with the BUILD Initiative. 

Background

The 2008-2011 Quality Rating Systems (QRS) Assessment Project—funded by the Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE)—set the foundation for the Quality Compendium. Mathematica Policy Research led the QRS Assessment Project, overseeing the development of the first 2010 Quality Compendium through a subcontract with Child Trends. 

Since 2014, Child Trends and the BUILD Initiative have worked together to update the Quality Compendium every two years.  

Intended Impacts 

Child Trends and the BUILD Initiative seek to supply states, territories, and localities with timely, high-quality, and user-friendly data to inform ongoing improvements to their quality initiatives. We also aim to facilitate cross-state learning, particularly when it comes to identifying innovative quality improvement strategies. 

Quality Compendium data have been used in many research studies on QIS and integrated into numerous other databases, including the Early Childhood Workforce Index and the Child Care and Early Education Licensing Information Hub 

Data Collection Process 

To update the Quality Compendium, Child Trends engages with QIS administrators and other staff representing local or state ECE systems every other year. QIS administrators (or designated staff) review their state profiles for accuracy and comprehensiveness and fill in any gaps in information. Then, Child Trends reviews the revised profiles for errors or inconsistencies and meets with QIS administrators to resolve any issues and ask them more in-depth questions about their systems. Child Trends publishes the updated profiles, along with an analysis of the trends in the data, on the Quality Compendium website.  

For more information about our data collection process, see here. 

Resources 

  • Quality Compendium website 
  • State profiles: Details about quality improvement systems in all 50 states and U.S. territories  
  • Data sets: Spreadsheets of cleaned data from each year of Quality Compendium updates 
  • Top trends: Interactive map highlighting trends across states, territories, and localities on a variety of topics, including program participation and eligibility, rating systems, and system improvement strategies
  • Fact sheets and briefs: Information on the state of quality improvement systems across the United States 

Project team: 

Child Trends:  

BUILD Initiative: 

  • Debi Mathias
  • Tameika Leslie 

Newsletters