Public funding and enrollment in formal child care in the 1990s

Although the share of all 3- and 4-year-old children enrolled in center-based care and early education has grown steadily in recent decades, rates of enrollment for children from low-income families still lag behind those for children from families with high incomes. During the 1990s, growing public funding for compensatory preschool education and means-tested child-care assistance had the potential to increase the availability of free or low-cost formal child-care arrangements and thus the attendance of low-income children. This article analyzes repeated cross-sectional data on formal child-care attendance from the October Current Population Survey as well as data on state-level funding. The results indicate that increases in public funding are positively associated with the probability that low-income young children attended formal care. These results also suggest that gaps in formal care between low- and high-income families would have widened in the absence of public investments.