People need better, more useful early childhood information to make informed decisions when seeking, delivering, and supporting early care and education (ECE) services—such as pre-K, child care, Head Start, special education services, and home visiting. But families, practitioners, policymakers, and others have long struggled to get information from states’ fragmented ECE ecosystems and data infrastructure to answer their common questions. Fortunately, state leaders across the country are increasing their investments in ECE data and data systems to help answer peoples’ questions.
One emergent approach, taken recently in Illinois and Texas, is to codify an early childhood integrated data system, or ECIDS, in state statute. An ECIDS integrates disparate ECE data to help create more useful information for diverse decisionmakers, from state to local levels and across agencies, funding streams, and services. It helps people answer common questions, including:
- What ECE services is my child eligible for and where and how can our family access them?
- What ECE training and other professional development opportunities are available to me and my staff?
- What populations are being served by which ECE services? Where and when?
- How is the supply of ECE services meeting the demands of working families and the economy?
By providing this information, an ECIDS can support leaders as they make wide-ranging policy and practice decisions related to resource allocation, program administration, understanding of impact and returns on investments, alignment with state education and workforce systems, and many others. Through a codified ECIDS and related data governance, states can equip themselves to modernize technology and center data privacy in the best interests of the children and families they serve.
California possesses the key ingredients to build an ECIDS and use it to strengthen decisionmaking within and beyond ECE. This spring’s introduction of a bill to formalize pursuit of a California ECIDS represents a renewed push towards better ECE data, building on past efforts and benefiting from the state’s existing agency data infrastructure, strong human capacity, and engaged ECE communities. The ECIDS bill also offers another opportunity for California to set the pace in integrated data systems legislation, just as it did in 2019 and 2021 with legislation to build and govern a statewide longitudinal data system, the California Cradle-to-Career Data System (C2C).
A California ECIDS would complement, not duplicate, the work of C2C. Prioritizing answering the questions and meeting the information needs of California’s ECE communities and decisionmakers, the ECIDS would lay a foundation of integrated, more complete, higher quality data that reflects the state’s ECE ecosystem. It would in turn serve as a primary source of ECE data for C2C and its connections with K–12 and other education and workforce data—connections that would enable pursuit of more longitudinal questions regarding the impacts of ECE services and children’s transitions to kindergarten and subsequent education.
California can carry the positive momentum of C2C forward into the early childhood data space, building on that system’s proven example of integrating, protecting, and governing data. By bringing together data across the cradle-to-career spectrum and launching accessible public-facing data tools, C2C is starting to deliver better, more useful information to Californians. Describing and meaningfully representing the cradle side of that information spectrum is pivotal, and codifying an ECIDS would mark a significant step towards providing value directly to ECE stakeholders and also better representing ECE in C2C. Taking this approach—connecting disparate data “horizontally” across pre-K, child care, and other ECE services via a codified ECIDS as well as connecting that more integrated ECE data with education and workforce data via C2C—would position California as a national leader in addressing peoples’ ECE information needs.
