People have important questions about how their state’s early childhood services are meeting the needs of children and families. Building an early childhood integrated data system (ECIDS) is one way for states to bring together cross-agency early childhood data on eligibility, access, enrollment, and the workforce to help people answer those questions.
This spring, Texas legislators passed a law—highlighted in the Data Quality Campaign’s (DQC) recent legislation review—to develop an ECIDS designed to give policymakers, state agency staff, and other early childhood decisionmakers the information they need to understand how the state is serving its children ages birth through five and their families. With data from existing early childhood data systems connected within a single platform, decisionmakers will be able to answer questions about who is eligible for and receives various early childhood services, and whether children are on track for success. The law also codified cross-agency data governance for the ECIDS—a crucial step to promote transparency and accountability about access to and use of the system’s cross-agency data.
Long recognizing the need for better early childhood data in Texas, the Texas Early Learning Council and other Texas early childhood leaders have recently made improving the state’s early childhood data systems an explicit priority. Within this collaborative landscape, advocates from Early Matters Texas and the Commit Partnership led the effort to codify an ECIDS during the 89th legislative session held this spring. Their lessons learned in Texas can support ECIDS-related advocacy in other states:
- Lead with priority use cases that address people’s questions. It is important for an ECIDS to be guided by a set of use cases—which reflect shared questions gathered over time—for how the system and its cross-agency data will be used. These use cases help keep the work grounded in people’s interests and needs, promoting value and sustainability. Initially, the Texas ECIDS will focus on answering foundational questions about eligibility, access, enrollment, and school readiness.
- Document existing early childhood data assets and necessary enhancements, and identify ECIDS best practices. Texas early childhood leaders collaborated to create an ECIDS Roadmap, which coupled with a companion data landscape and inventory to document priority ECIDS use cases, existing state data assets, the additional data necessary to address the use cases, and a set of ECIDS best practices drawn from other states. This foundation provided the basis for legislation—and is now a strong starting point for implementation.
- Build a runway of buy-in within and beyond the early childhood community. Over time, Texas advocates have grown a culture of data use in Early Matters communities across the state. These communities value data and data-informed decisionmaking, and those existing relationships helped grow early ECIDS buy-in and spur broader, nascent engagement of private care providers, parents, and the business community. This groundswell, coupled with long-term interest from state agencies, provided the momentum necessary to convince state legislators that now was the time to codify an ECIDS.
- Identify and engage early childhood data champions in the legislature. Codifying an ECIDS requires legislator champions. Texas advocates targeted well-positioned, data-interested legislators to serve as ECIDS bill sponsors, emphasizing how early childhood services—and underlying data systems and data—represent vital infrastructure that supports the prosperity of the state’s communities and economy. Advocates’ emphases on protecting data security and individual child and family privacy also resonated.
- Emphasize informed policymaking through integrated data. As stewards of scarce public resources, state legislators and agency staff can use an ECIDS to get a more holistic view of early childhood services and their short- and long-term impacts on children and families. This information helps them understand returns on public investments, allocate resources more efficiently to various state agencies, and design more coherent care and education systems. Cross-agency data infrastructure like an ECIDS helps create better, more integrated data to inform these and other important policy decisions.
As state leaders and advocates in Texas and across the country continue to think about early childhood data policy in the context of their larger education and workforce systems, it is crucial to think about this work both horizontally and vertically. Ideally, a state will have a robust ECIDS that connects data horizontally from different early childhood services—as well as a statewide longitudinal data system (SLDS) that connects data vertically across the state’s early childhood, K–12, postsecondary, and workforce sectors. States must invest in their early childhood data systems—by collecting, connecting, reporting, and using high-quality data, and including that data in ECIDSs and SLDSs—to transform their early childhood data to meet the needs of children, families, and those who support them.
For recommendations on how states can build a robust early childhood data ecosystem, check out DQC’s vision for early childhood data. For more information on ECIDSs, check out ECDataWorks and its resources.
