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The Exchange management guidebook, The Art of Leadership, includes a chapter, "Out of the Box Ideas for Evaluation", which describes ten unique ways to evaluate the quality of your program. One of the ideas calls for getting a child's view of your performance:
"In the business world, companies typically assess their performance by checking the opinions of their customers. Likewise, child care centers frequently survey parents as one means of gauging their performance. This feedback is always useful. If a large number of parents have concerns about your program, you absolutely need to know about this so you can take action.
"On the other hand, if your parents express general satisfaction, this does not necessarily mean it is time to break out the champagne and celebrate your success. The national study, Cost and Quality and Child Outcomes in Child Care Centers, found that parents are not very accurate evaluators of quality in centers. Parents in the study consistently overrated the quality of care their children were receiving.
"A seldom explored alternative might be to survey children in the center. They often spend more time in your center than you do, so certainly their attitudes about the place should carry some weight.
"Of course, surveying children as consumers of your services requires some creative questioning. Asking four year olds to rate the quality of your center on a scale of 1 to 10 would not yield particularly helpful results. On the other hand, it may be useful to ask them what they most like to do at the center, what they like most about their teachers, and what they don't like doing. Such questions have the potential of yielding patterns of responses that are instructive about children's experiences."
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