1. Make Data Work for Students: Opportunities in Early Education
2016 Improving Data, Improving Outcomes Conference
New Orleans, LA
August 2016
Elizabeth Dabney

2. Early Childhood Education Data Matter.
Are children on track to succeed when they enter school?
How many children have access to high-quality early care and education programs?
Is the early childhood workforce adequately trained?
Credit: Barney Moss

3. What Is Student Data?

6. Five Guiding Principles
1. Students are central. Data must be used to support student learning and to ensure that each student’s individual needs are met. 2. Data systems are not enough. States must shift their focus from building systems to empowering people. 3. Data needs to be tailored to the user. All stakeholders in education require quality information, but the type and grain size of the data they need depend on the needs of the individual. 4. Data is used for different purposes, including transparency, continuous improvement, and accountability. Not all data collected needs to be used for all three of these purposes. 5. Stakeholder engagement is critical. People who need the data—including teachers, principals, and parents—must be involved in the creation of policies for access and use.

8. Measure What Matters
Be clear about what students must achieve and have the data to ensure that all students are on track to succeed.
What State Policymakers Should Do
Develop a set of policy and practice questions that will set the priorities for state action and determine the information needed to answer those questions.
Link and govern data across all agencies critical to student success, from early childhood and K-12 to postsecondary and the workforce, including other state agencies that support students (e.g., child welfare).
Develop, calculate, and share indicators based on longitudinal data, in addition to measures based on annual statewide assessments, that demonstrate progress toward stated goals.
What District Leaders Should Do
Establish a governance body that has the authority and responsibility to make decisions about district data use and protection policies.
Design data systems that meet the needs of your school community, improve teaching, personalize learning, and measure progress toward goals.

9. Illinois

10. Pennsylvania
Links child-level data across all early childhood programs and to the state K–12 data system.
Pennsylvania’s Enterprise to Link Information for Children Across Networks (PELICAN) was developed as a data partnership between the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services and Office of Child Development and Early Learning.
The goal of PELICAN is “a single integrated information system that automates and supports all of Pennsylvania’s early learning and education programs.”
Using a multiphase, multiyear implementation strategy, Pennsylvania integrated data across early childhood programs, the Quality Rating and Improvement System, provider licensing, and the state’s K–12 data system.
Seeking to answer the BIG questions
What is the impact of OCDEL programs on academic success in K-12 (KEI, 3rd grade PSSA, grade retention, %with IEP, etc.)?
What is the unduplicated count of children served by all OCDEL programs in Pennsylvania?
What are the linkages between learning environment, teacher qualifications, and child outcomes?

11. Risk and Reach Reports

12. Measure What Matters
Be clear about what students must achieve and have the data to ensure that all students are on track to succeed.
Do policy and practice questions include early childhood, such as “Is the percentage of 3- and 4-year-old children served by programs in the top two tiers of the Quality Rating and Improvement System increasing?”
Are early childhood programs represented on the data governance body?
Are early childhood data linked with data from K-12 and other state agencies?

13. Make Data Use Possible
Provide teachers and leaders the flexibility, training, and support they need to answer their questions and take action.
What State Policymakers Should Do
Use the bully pulpit and allocate resources (people, time, money, and technology) to prioritize using data to inform decisionmaking at the state level.
Ensure that leaders responsible for student outcomes have the feedback data they need from other systems to effectively serve students.
Support local education agencies (based on their unique capacity and needs) by providing the flexibility to use people, time, money, and technology to prioritize data use to inform action and improve outcomes.
Enact the necessary policies, practices, and conditions to ensure that every educator can use data effectively.
What District Leaders Should Do
Promote a culture that uses data to measure and achieve goals set by district leadership.
Create the necessary policies, practices, and trainings to ensure that educators, parents, and trusted community partners who receive data know how to use it effectively.

14. KENTUCKY

15. Denver www.denvergov.org/childrensaffairs
Annual publication provides data on Denver’s children in the areas of:
Demographics
Health
Early Childhood
Education
Family Economics
Community
Purpose is to provide policy makers, city agencies and staff, community partners, and non-profits with the best available data on Denver child well-being to inform policy, investment, programs, and services.

16. Make Data Use Possible
Provide teachers and leaders the flexibility, training, and support they need to answer their questions and take action.
Do state leaders use data to inform decisions about allocating resources for early childhood programs or licensing regulations for the early childhood workforce?
Do early childhood leaders have the information they need from other systems and sectors to ensure their programs are effective or to make improvements?
Do early childhood program providers know how to ethically and effectively use data to support learning and continuously improve their programs?

17. Be Transparent and Earn Trust
Ensure that every community understands how its schools and students are doing, why data is valuable, and how it is protected and used.
What State Policymakers Should Do
Provide the public timely, high-quality, relevant, and easy-to-find data.
Communicate the value of data to support student learning.
Communicate the types of data the state collects and how the data is protected.
What District Leaders Should Do
Provide data that meet the identified needs of your community and proactively communicate how that data is safeguarded.
Engage families in thoughtful conversation about their children’s data, welcome their questions, and involve them in planning and governance activities.

18. ILLINOIS http://iecam.illinois.edu/pubs/snapshots/index.html

19. MINNESOTA

20. MINNESOTA

21. MINNESOTA

22. WASHINGTON

23. WASHINGTON

24. Be Transparent and Earn Trust
Ensure that every community understands how its schools and students are doing, why data is valuable, and how it is protected and used.
Is data about early childhood programs publicly available to provide the transparency around program performance that parents and policymakers need to ensure equity and accountability?
Do parents, educators, and the public all understand why investments in data are useful to meeting early education goals and what information is available to help meet those goals?

25. Guarantee Access and Protect Privacy
Provide teachers and parents timely information on their students and make sure it is kept safe.
What State Policymakers Should Do
Ensure that those closest to students have access to student-level data that is tailored to their needs and presented in context.
Intentionally design and implement policies and practices to protect the privacy and confidentiality of student and teacher data and ensure that systems are secure.
What District Leaders Should Do
Establish clear and public processes to ensure that student data is kept private.
Provide teachers, parents, trusted afterschool providers, and other school partners access to student-level data that is tailored to meet their needs.

26. PELICAN Stakeholders PELICAN Systems Users Functions PELICAN-wide
450 staff from OCDEL, Comptroller, Auditor General, Inspector General, Equal Opportunity
Varying – read-only, update/program admin/monitoring, reporting
Subsidized Child Care
900 staff at 42 child care information services offices
Case management, eligibility, enrollments, payments
6,000 staff statewide county assistance offices
Inquiry, reporting
State Pre-K, Head Start, ELN
3,000 providers & program staff
Varying - enrollments, program admin & monitoring
Early Intervention
6,200 staff from OCDEL and EI programs
Varying– program admin, reporting
Keys to Quality (QRIS)
200 regional staff
Program admin
Online Client Self Service
42,000 applications/year
Enter requested info for eligibility determination
Online Provider Searches
100,000 searches/year
Select criteria to search for ECE program/provider

27. Pennsylvania

28. Guarantee Access and Protect Privacy
Provide teachers and parents timely information on their students and make sure it is kept safe.
Do parents, educators, and program providers have access to information to make critical education decisions on behalf of children?
Are families made aware of the data that is being collected about their children and what is being done to keep those data private and secure?

29. Policy Alignment Is Essential
Policy alignment at all levels creates a culture that values and uses data for continuous improvement and empowers those closest to students with the high-quality information they need to make the best decisions.
When all three levels of government (Federal, state, local) work together, families, educators, and decisionmakers can get the data they need to support students.
Alignment across sectors (early childhood, K-12, postsecondary, workforce, and other state agencies that support students) is also critical.
Data on different dimensions of a student’s experience is distributed across all the different agencies that serve them, but data is in systems that often don’t talk to one another.
The fragmented, siloed nature of data systems creates a barrier to informed decision making that can help students facing complex problems.
Students are not just served by one system. The effects from education programs can be felt elsewhere in the system.

30. Turf Trust Time Technical issues
Challenges can hamper efforts to use data to improve children’s early education experiences.
Turf
Trust
Time
Technical issues

31. Trust Turf Time Technical Issues
CHALLENGE: Agencies are designed to work within their own boundaries (i.e., silos) and adhere to independent performance expectations.
CHALLENGE: Agencies are concerned about how their data might be used once the data are linked, matched, and shared.
CHALLENGE: Agencies have limited human capacity and make allocation decisions based on their individual needs.
CHALLENGE: Each agency defines its own data standards and protocols and procedures for data use, making sharing data difficult and inefficient.
Trust
Turf
Time
Technical Issues

32. Resources
Using Coordinated Data Systems to Guide Early Childhood Education Policies
Roadmap for Early Childhood and K-12 Data Linkages
Rising to the Challenge: Building Effective Systems for Young Children and Families, Chapter 7
Empowering Parents and Communities through Quality Public Reporting

33. dataqualitycampaign.org ∙ @EdDataCampaign
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