Evaluating a state child care assistance program using administrative data

Government supported child care assistance (CCA) programs support low-income families by subsidizing costs of child care for working parents. In the United States, federal policy outlines several goals designed to guide the development and implementation of state CCA programs, however the intended outcomes are difficult to quantify. Without the collection and analysis of data related to the families and providers involved in the program, states are not able to effectively evaluate their success. This leaves program administrators and community advocates without valuable information needed for decision-making. Administrative data collected by the state CCA programs as part of their implementation offers a low-cost and effective approach to assessing program performance and execution, but there is currently no guidance for distilling the large quantities of information existing in these complex records. In this article, we present a novel evaluation framework for using administrative data to evaluate CCA program success guided by both policy and literature. We illustrate the benefit of our approach using the state of Iowa's CCA data system and offer recommendations for decision-makers seeking to use a data-driven approach to program evaluation.