Bridging the Gaps: Child Care Supply, School Readiness, and the Expansion of Public Pre-K

Sarah Hodgman

This dissertation investigates the structure, consequences, and policy determinants of inequality in the U.S. early care and education (ECE) system. Despite the centrality of ECE to children's early learning and families' economic stability, services remain fragmented, underfunded, and unevenly distributed across U.S. communities. My project integrates new dataset construction, descriptive analysis, and causal inference to situate the ECE landscape as both a product and a producer of social inequality. Chapter 1 constructs the first longitudinal, county-level dataset of U.S. child care supply by provider type, documenting spatial and temporal trends in access to care by community characteristics. Chapter 2 links the child care supply data to school readiness indicators from the National Survey of Children's Health. I use two-way fixed effects models to assess how changes in ECE access shape developmental inequalities by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and gender. Chapter 3 examines how public pre-kindergarten expansions like Michigan's Transitional Kindergarten (TK) program impact local child care markets. I use a staggered difference-in-differences design to estimate the causal effects of TK adoption on the price and supply of child care, evaluating whether TK can expand ECE access without destabilizing the mixed-delivery child care system, or if it introduces new strains, especially for infant and toddler care. Together, these studies advance research on early childhood education, social inequality, and public policy while offering timely evidence to inform solutions to the U.S. child care crisis.

About Sarah Hodgman

Sarah Hodgman is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at Brown University. She is broadly interested in connections between social policy and social inequality among young children and their families. Her dissertation examines the evolution of early care and education (ECE) in the United States, analyzing how changes in ECE access are related to children's developmental outcomes and considering how state policy solutions impact local ECE markets. Sarah is also the Program Manager for the Undergraduate Research Fellows Program at Brown, a summer internship for students interested in applied social science and public policy research. Before coming to Brown, Sarah was a research associate in the Youth, Family, and Community Development program at the American Institutes for Research. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology with focus in Applied Statistics from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) and a Master of Arts in Sociology from Brown University. In her free time, she enjoys teaching and practicing yoga, supporting live music and theatre, and traveling with her husband.