Reduce Licensing Micromanagement in Service Quality: Minnesota should ensure children’s safety while freeing child care providers to meet industry standards.
At Think Small, our mission is clear — to advance quality care and education for children in their crucial early years, with the goal of ensuring all children are ready for kindergarten. To that end we have always recognized that child care licensing plays a fundamental role in providing a foundation for health and safety. However, our recent testimony to the Minnesota House Children & Families Finance and Policy committee highlighted how we are rethinking the state’s approach to both licensing and quality assurance. We envision a new framework that is less burdened with regulating, offers streamlined licensing, and advances industry-led, consistent quality standards. This innovative approach is the focus of our Small Talks online event, Beyond Red Tape: Innovating Child Care Licensing and Quality Standards.
Observations on the Current Child Care Licensing System
Work by the Bainum Family Foundation and conversations with our partners have inspired us to re-think our positions and to challenge our assumptions. Here are some key observations we shared with legislators from our perspective as outsiders not normally engaged in debates around licensing:
- Overreliance on Licensing: Minnesota’s child care licensing system is burdened with regulating not just health and safety, but also aspects of quality, professional qualifications, and the day-to-day behaviors of the educators working in our system. This approach is unique compared to how other professions are regulated.
- Regulatory Complexity: Our overreliance on licensing contributes to regulatory complexity. The current Child Care Center Rules & Laws book spans 335 pages. The book for licensed family child care has 190 pages. For comparison, the book for Dentistry is 207 pages and the one for Nursing Homes is 145. This complexity creates a significant “time tax” on providers, diverting energy from supporting child development to compliance management.
- Licensing Not Always the Best Tool: It is difficult to measure aspects of quality through licensing, yet we often try to do so. One example is the regulation of the number of blocks in a classroom. This has little utility from a health and safety perspective and is a poor proxy for quality. What matters for quality is how an educator uses blocks to support children’s learning.
- Challenges for Licensors: The current system makes it difficult for licensors to provide support or technical assistance to child care providers, as a wide range of regulatory responsibilities fall back to them. In other regulated industries a web of accountability extends beyond state facility licensing to professional associations or other standards setting bodies.
A New Framework for Licensing and Quality Assurance
To address these challenges while maintaining our focus on quality, we are exploring a three-part approach:
- Streamlined Licensing: Focus state licensing on core health and safety requirements, including facility safety, basic health and hygiene, ratios, minimum staff qualifications, and background checks.
- Industry-Led Quality Standards: Shift to using quality standards from recognized professional associations such as the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), the National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC), and the Office of Head Start. Use accreditation processes for quality assurance instead of a state system like Parent Aware.
- Unified Standards and Support: Apply consistent standards across all program types, regardless of building type or funding stream. Provide support teams with expertise in licensing, program operation, and child development to assist all programs in meeting these standards.
We believe this new framework offers several advantages:
Focus on Quality: By freeing providers from excessive compliance tasks, they can dedicate more time to quality improvement and professional development.
Regulatory Relief: Providers would experience a reduced regulatory burden while maintaining essential health and safety standards.
Equitable Treatment: All early care and education programs would be held to the same standards and receive equal support, ensuring consistent quality experiences for children.
Moving Forward
The initial response to this proposal has been encouraging. Providers have expressed that this approach “makes a lot of sense” and could potentially open doors that are currently closed to pursuing accreditation and other quality improvement initiatives.
While there is still much work to be done to refine and implement this framework, we are inspired by the potential for bipartisan collaboration to explore this concept further. We believe that by working together – legislators, providers, parents, and others in the field – we can create a licensing and quality assurance system that truly serves the best interests of Minnesota’s children and families. By streamlining licensing requirements and emphasizing industry-led quality standards, we can create an environment where providers have the time and resources to focus on what matters most: providing high-quality care and education that prepares all children for success in kindergarten and beyond.
Want to learn more about this? Join us for a Small Talks online event titled, Beyond Red Tape: Innovating Child Care Licensing and Quality Standards.
Written by Ericca Maas, Think Small Advocacy Consultant
