Qualistar ‘Paved the Way’ for Child Care Rating System in Colorado

By Tatiana Flowers

In the late 1990s, Mile High United Way leaders convened meetings with community leaders who were interested in improving the early childhood education system.   

“At that time, everyone knew there was a shortage of child care,” said Susan Downs-Karkos, then a Colorado Trust senior program officer. “It was a time when welfare reform meant there was a renewed emphasis on ensuring people were working, but that people had access to child care to make working possible. And there were innovative ideas coming up around child care that folks in this space were intrigued by.”  

In 1997, after several of those convenings, leaders in business, education, religion and philanthropy formed Educare Colorado, a pioneering organization that created a rating system to help parents, funders and legislators make informed decisions about the quality of education and child care at licensed early learning programs for children from birth to age 5. 

Soon after, The Colorado Trust granted $10.4 million to Educare Colorado from 1998 to 2008, a commitment that helped sustain the small nonprofit’s pivotal work. The goal was to incentivize early learning programs to receive quality ratings and then undergo training and complete improvement plans with help from coaches, and to provide loans and grants to centers and in-home day cares needing facility improvements and classroom materials. 

“Before this time, as a child care provider, you got licensed by the state or you didn’t,” Downs-Karkos said. “No one was going in and observing your program, looking at your data or giving you a sense of how you stacked up in terms of quality. This was one of the first efforts of its time to provide that kind of feedback, giving child care providers a roadmap for how they could improve and giving parents straightforward, easily digestible information on the quality of care their kids were receiving.” 

Educare Colorado—which, in 2004, was renamed Qualistar Early Learning (and in 2012, Qualistar Colorado)—invented a quality rating and improvement system, implemented in 1999, to evaluate centers across the state. In 2015, the State of Colorado began running the program and expanded its reach under its current moniker, Colorado Shines, said Melissa Swayne, chief innovation officer at Clayton Early Learning. 

“Qualistar paved the way for a quality rating and improvement system before anybody else in the nation was aware of one, or even started developing one, and it put some standards around it—not just for Colorado but nationally,” said Swayne, formerly a quality rating specialist at Qualistar. 

The innovative work implemented at Educare Colorado in 1999 likely ignited a national movement that inspired other states to create and implement their own quality rating systems, according to six people interviewed for this story, and the Obama administration to provide grants to states that created, expanded or executed such a system, said Gerrit Westervelt, former president and chief executive officer of Educare Colorado. 

“It became a national policy that spread across the country, which resulted in billions of dollars flowing to early education settings,” Westervelt said.  

“The Colorado Trust’s investment was catalytic across the board,” he added. “It helped us learn how to measure, improve, coach and scale up a complicated intervention across a very loosely regulated and fragmented system that is hard to fix.”  

Ninety percent of the brain’s structure is formed before a child turns 5, meaning the preceding years are essential to a child’s development. Studies suggest children who attend early learning programs are more likely to graduate from high school, have financial savings accounts as adults and are less likely to face specific mental and physical health ailments, among other variables. 

From birth to age 5, children spend more hours in care each month than their older school-aged counterparts, “so it’s critical they’re in high-quality learning environments” during those early learning years, Swayne said. 

In the early 2000s, Educare Colorado leaders began rating programs in Denver at Mile High Montessori, Clayton Early Learning and Catholic Charities before scoring programs in other parts of the state, including in Colorado Springs and Grand Junction. 

Educare Colorado considered five components in its rating system: classroom environment, child-to-staff ratios, staff and director training and education, parent involvement and accreditation. Early learning programs could receive a score of 0 to 4 stars as their rating, noted a 2008 study of Qualistar’s rating system by the Rand Corporation, though the rubric later changed to 1 to 5 stars. A 5-star rating is the highest score. 

Raters and coaches used the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale and the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale to determine the quality of centers and homes, said Geri Mendoza, former regional coordinator at Educare Colorado, who decided on ratings, and coached and created improvement plans there. 

“What is the environmental setting in which children can thrive, grow and learn? Are there enough materials? Are there areas where children can play by themselves and with others? Is there a structure to the day? Are there activities? Are teachers interacting with children? Are there health and safety procedures happening in the classroom?” said Mendoza, now the school director at Clayton Early Learning.  

“It was about a two-hour observation,” she said. “The higher star rating you got, the more reimbursement you got from the child care assistance program, CCAP, for general operating expenses.” 

Swayne said the Denver Preschool Program also used Qualistar ratings to assess and incentivize quality in child care centers and homes. 

Among the first 10 program assessments, “maybe we had one 1-star,” said Doug Price, the former Educare Colorado founding co-chair—and the rest of the early assessments were zero stars.  

“It was grim,” Price said. “At a base level, quality was virtually nonexistent in most of the settings we were able to review and recruit. So, think about what The Colorado Trust accomplished by helping the ratings movement become almost a requirement in the United States.” 

Coaches were “nonjudgmental mentors” who helped center directors and teachers understand the reports they received, which included details about their ratings, he said. They would then work together to implement practices that could help improve the center’s scores, which in some cases included receiving funding for training early educators or covering their college tuition. 

Centers would be re-rated a year later. Westervelt said that scores almost always increased after receiving training and financial support.  

“What we learned is that staff qualifications and the quality of the adult-to-child interaction were what was going to take a child care center to a star 4 or a 5,” said Meera Mani, former president and board co-chair at Educare Colorado. 

It soon became clear that Educare Colorado, a small nonprofit, would need more sustainable funding as it continued expanding to rate more centers and in-home day cares across the state. In 2002, Westervelt began meeting with a leader at the Colorado Office of Resource and Referral Agencies (CORRA). This network helped families find and access licensed child care and other early childhood resources. 

CORRA had been linking parents to quality child care services, but after Westervelt approached it, the two entities decided it made sense to work together. Educare Colorado would benefit from some of the federal funding CORRA was receiving. In turn, CORRA could expand its footprint and mission of linking parents to quality child care by helping Educare Colorado with its rating, coaching and improvement plans. 

After 18 months of talks that culminated during the summer of 2004, the organizations merged. The resulting entity was named Qualistar Early Learning, and “very importantly,” the new organization would receive federal passthrough funding to help sustain its work, Westervelt said. 

“We had steady growth throughout the six years I was there and continued to grow, and then Qualistar eventually ended up finally sunsetting [in 2018] when the state took over the rating system and improvement intervention work,” Westervelt said. The sunsetting meant Qualistar’s program became embedded in what is now the Colorado Department of Early Childhood. 

“It was a good thing it ended, because the state was now in a position to take over the functions Qualistar had been doing for 20 or so years,” Westervelt added. “The whole purpose was to invent and create a method to rate and improve the quality of early childhood settings. We did that, and then the challenge was to spread it across the state, and you needed the state to take it over to do that.” 

Swayne said rating centers was one of her most meaningful job experiences, even though she worked hard to reduce fears among center leaders stressed about receiving and improving lower ratings. 

“You felt like, every day, you were making an impact because the feedback you were going to give a program ultimately was going to help them recognize the things they were doing amazingly well, and then you’d also pick out some things they could improve on to make the experience better for children and families, which was what it’s all about,” she said. 

While Qualistar operated, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge encouraged states to develop, implement or expand quality rating and improvement systems and provided grants to those that did. By 2024, 45 states had implemented a statewide quality rating and improvement system. 

Under the state’s current rating system, Colorado Shines, all licensed early child care and learning programs serving children from birth to age 5 enter the rating system as a level-one program. Licensed centers that advance to level two complete self-assessments of their programs before setting goals and making plans to improve the quality of child care at their facilities over time. 

Organizations that reach the highest ratings of levels three, four and five receive marks on their workforce qualifications, professional development, partnerships with families, leadership, management and administration programs, learning environment and child health, according to the Colorado Shines website.  

Many parents were interested in enrolling their children in child care centers that had received a rating from Qualistar. However, it cost almost $1,000 to receive a rating and improvement plan from Qualistar, which meant some centers that couldn’t afford it didn’t get a rating, said Swayne.  

She said centers no longer have to pay for a rating under Colorado Shines. 

Clayton Early Learning staff had a small team of employees that trained assessors who rated centers for Qualistar. When Qualistar stopped operating in 2018, Clayton Early Learning created a quality assessment services department that still helps the state deliver ratings through the Colorado Shines program, Swayne said. 

“For all of us that were involved, it felt like a good thing [the state was taking over Qualistar] because the state had the funding to make this more accessible to everybody, and they were able to modify and enhance the program and line it with current research and better technology,” she said. “There were a lot of improvements, but a lot of the components that were in the Qualistar rating are still in the state rating today.” 

The Colorado Trust’s grants created awareness about Qualistar, which leveraged funding from other organizations, including the Buell Foundation, Mile High United Way and Daniels Fund. 

“Without that money, nothing would have been possible,” Price, the former Qualistar founding co-chair, said. “There’s an accountability structure that is inherent with the rating system. You can measure quantitatively what is going on at a child care setting and understand why it’s not getting a higher rating based on resources or other issues. You can have a very specific understanding of the assets that go into a child care setting and the liabilities that hold it back, and that will never fail to be important in establishing the best outcomes for children and their families.”