April 2024
The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) aims to assist families from low-income
and underserved backgrounds with access to affordable early care and education (ECE),
and CCDF includes guidelines about which families should be prioritized. Specifically,
CCDF provides child care subsidies to qualifying families using federally specified
eligibility criteria. However, less is known about whether ECE programs that accept
subsidies serve diverse groups of children. We analyzed national data to understand:
-How ECE centers that accept child care subsidies align into groups based on
demographic diversity of children served.
-Whether state CCDF policies predict membership in the identified groups
