States around the country have big plans to improve the collection and coordination of data on young children, including data dashboards, scorecards and tools for tracking the well-being of children from the day they are born. But how -- and if -- these plans turn into reality depends on whether they can win support from federal grants, state funds or private philanthropy, according to a report released today by the Early Childhood Data Collaborative.
In Developing Coordinated Longitudinal Early Childhood Data Systems, members of the Collaborative analyzed the plans of 35 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, DC as described last year in applications for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC). Of the 37 applicants in the competition, 30 included details on improving state data systems.
The Collaborative is a partnership led by Child Trends in conjunction with six other national organizations* that focus on early education. Its inaugural report, published in 2011, provides a baseline report on the state of statewide early childhood data systems.
The Collaborative’s analysis starts by pointing out that timely, reliable data is scarce, with policymakers often unable to get answers to basic questions on the number of children participating in high-quality programs. In fact, as we reported last week, it’s even difficult to get comprehensive information at the local level on the number of children participating in pre-K programs or gaining access to full-day kindergarten at all, let alone whether they are enrolled in classrooms or centers that meet a high bar for quality.
The report spotlights several ideas states have put forward to improve the ability to link data between databases and enable the tracking of individual children’s progress over time, across multiple providers of child care, preschool and, in places where links are made to K-12 education data, to the public school system.
Rhode Island, for example, plans to build a universal database that includes data on individual children starting at birth. It proposes to build on its public health data system called KIDSNET that tracks immunizations and data from newborn screenings and connect that data to the statewide longitudinal data system for K-12 education. Rhode Island is a triple winner– winning an RTT-ELC grant, a K-12 Race to the Top grant and a competitive grant from the Maternal Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting program – so it may actually have the dollars to bring this kind of longitudinal database to fruition.
Other innovations revolve around the creation of portals or dashboards. Minnesota, for example, proposed the creation of a web-based dashboard that can create reports tailored for different audiences of parents, administrators and teachers. Pennsylvania wants to develop a “provider scorecard” that includes data on individual preschool and child care providers, such as how many stars they have earned in the state’s quality improvement and rating system (QRIS), the credentials of members of the workforce and data on children’s growth and development. Minnesota was an RTT-ELC winner.
Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Illinois are three examples of states that proposed new strategies for linking data from early childhood programs with K-12 systems, according to the report. And at least nine states proposed integrating Head Start data into coordinated state-based systems of early education.
The breadth of ideas in the report show that many states would like to tackle the problem of disparate and disconnected early childhood data – a good sign. One thing missing from states’ plans, however, is any mention of how to provide good, comprehensive data on pre-K and kindergarten enrollment and funding to leaders at the local level, whether superintendents of school districts or county supervisors. This omission likely derives from the fact that those data points did not appear to be priorities for the U.S. Department of Education, nor the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources, when writing the guidelines for the RTT-ELC. In our report last week, Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten, we highlighted the need for states to collect basic data from the local level that can be integrated into school district databases, and we described the need for a task force to help states and the federal government agree to some common definitions for data collection. We hope that work may flourish on its own, but as made clear in the Collaborative’s report, improving data systems often requires a boost from programs like the RTT-ELC or other federal funding streams.
If there is a next iteration of Race to the Top grants (both K-12 and the Early Learning Challenge), improving local data collection should be a priority, helping to ensure that reliable and usable data is part of states’ longitudinal systems.
*The six organizations are the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC-Berkeley, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Data Quality Campaign, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, and the Pew Home Visiting Campaign.
CORRECTION 9/25 at 2:15 p.m.: An original version of this article incorrectly stated that Minnesota was not an RTT-ELC winner. It was.