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“Isn’t it kind of crazy that we are still asking the same questions that we asked 15 years ago?” marvels Dawn Thomas, who leads the Illinois Early Childhood Asset Map (IECAM), an ever-expanding demographic and service-related data resource for policymakers. As a professor at the University of Illinois, Thomas focuses on how communities, districts and the state can improve early care and education services through better data and IECAM is part of that effort.

Duplicative counting is one of the issues that have long bedeviled Thomas and her fellow researchers. Let’s say a particular 4-year-old boy simultaneously participates in the Child Care Assistance Program and Preschool for All. Is he being counted once or twice in the IECAM database? In evaluating the efficacy of these state programs, Illinois’s newly formed Department of Early Childhood, among other public and private bodies, needs to know the answer when determining the impact of each program.

Illinois is not alone in grappling with data on programs and services for families with young children. The newly formed Big Ten Early Learning Alliance (Big Ten ELA) was designed to address issues that span research and policy, like the challenges facing the IECAM team. Led by Ohio State University professor Laura Justice (who also heads the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy) and Rutgers University professor W. Steven Barnett (who founded and co-directs the National Institute for Early Education Research), the alliance is open to researchers from Big Ten universities, which comprises 18 higher education institutions across 14 states. Members collaborate on research that addresses important early childhood issues and work together to champion and disseminate solutions to the field. The states involved collectively have nearly 5.8 million residents aged 5 and under, according to State of Early Childhood Education in Big Ten States, a recent brief published by Big Ten ELA — and the alliance is dedicated to improving their early learning experiences and lifetime outcomes.

“For these nearly six million children, it is crucial that their states provide high-quality early childhood education to ensure that these children experience optimal environments and interactions in the earliest years of life,” Justice and Barnett wrote in the brief. 

“States are increasingly taking the lead in enacting policies that affect early childhood,” Justice says. “One of our goals in establishing this alliance is to ensure that science underlies these decisions by state policymakers. We also want to leverage the expertise in early childhood at our Big Ten universities. Bringing researchers together through this alliance will ease collaboration and allow us to advance our understanding of crucial issues in early childhood by engaging our diverse research perspectives.” 

Critical Data Solutions

Why is data critical to service delivery, and why did the Big Ten ELA’s first webinar zero in on data solutions? “Part of the rationale for many investments in early childhood programs,” Justice and Barnett explain in their report, “is to capitalize on the potential return on investment of preschool participation, such that for every dollar put into the system, dividends are returned in the future.” If the data can’t be trusted, policymakers might balk at the price tag. Improving early care and education depends on a sophisticated understanding of demographics, services received, program enrollment and learning outcomes.

While IECAM has been tracking aggregate data for early childhood programs and demographic data for young children and their families since about 2006, the Illinois Longitudinal Data System (ILDS), a project staffed by Northern Illinois University (NIU), tracks which early childhood services the state’s children are receiving over time and the outcomes of receiving them. The longitudinal data is designed to answer questions about which programs can be credited for increasing wages and income mobility. 

Benjamin Boer, senior director of data for Education Systems Center at NIU, notes that the complexity of data poses challenges and opportunities. “I don’t think people understand all the different programming that goes on,” he says. “There are prenatal programs, early childhood programs, home visiting, Medicaid-funded screenings for special needs and so on.” Boer hopes to establish correlations between participation in these various programs and third grade assessment data. (If you’re keeping score at home, NIU is not part of the Big Ten, but Boer appeared on the Alliance’s webinar, and their collaboration with University of Illinois makes them honorary members.) 

Recently, the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative partnered with ILDS to study the flow of children through the education system. The Illinois Network of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies — which comprises the state’s quality rating and improvement system along with education training and referral functions — is also using the data resource. 

“Other states may want to use data for accountability — justifying the expense — but our goal is ensuring that children get the services that they need,” Boer says. 

Sarah Clark, senior director of strategy and development for Education Systems Center, refers to the longitudinal project as “a space where researchers can collaborate and build upon each other’s work. And that’s critical because it’s not just from university researcher to university researcher, but also back to state agencies, who have such limited capacities.”

As Big Ten ELA continues to promote best practices on data systems, a more recent webinar in December examined two landmark studies on the effects of early childhood education — the Perry Preschool Project, which began in the 1960s and followed students through age 40, and the Chicago Longitudinal Study, which has been ongoing since 1986. According to Barnett, both studies “show the full potential of longitudinal data systems to inform science and policy on early childhood education.”

Thomas sees promise in the “open dialogue going on between advocates, researchers, and other stakeholders who are invested in knowing more about young children and about the early childhood landscape.” Ultimately, this work will lead to what she envisions as “a public portal that will be used for a lot of our integrated data.” 

“We’ve been talking about these data issues for years,” Thomas acknowledges, “but I really feel like this is the closest Illinois has been in decades. And now we actually can see… maybe not the end of the tunnel, but I can see that little light.”

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