CSSP has worked with members of our Early Childhood Learning and Innovation Network for Communities (EC-LINC) and with national partners to improve our ability to measure the effectiveness of local early childhood systems.
This work has been carried out through various projects, including several Learning Labs with EC-LINC members, a Research to Action project organized by EC-LINC members, and a national scan of outcomes and indicators currently in use.
This work has been supported by the Bezos Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Goldman Family Foundation, and an anonymous donor.
With these community partners, CSSP has developed several resources to guide quality improvement in early childhood systems. The Early Learning Community Progress Rating Tool looks at the big picture of how a community is supporting young children’s early learning by ensuring they and their families have the supports they need; the Early Childhood System Performance Assessment Toolkit helps stakeholders to focus on the functions of their early childhood system and identify areas for growth and improvement; and the Early Relational Health Community Mapping Tool looks specifically at how the early childhood system and its component sectors are promoting ERH. A community may use one tool and then another, feeding into a community action plan that addresses multiple aspects of what is being done, and how well, in early childhood systems.
Many people and organizations are working to improve child and family well-being across the country, yet there is not a clear consensus in the field about how to define and measure those outcomes.
In partnership with the National Institute for Child Health Quality (NICHQ), CSSP conducted a national scan of the outcomes and indicators being used to measure effectiveness of early childhood work. See our compendium here: Metrics of Early Childhood Systems: A National Scan.
CSSP also worked with local leaders from our EC-LINC network to identify a set of indicators related to maternal and child health, early childhood learning, and family and community environments. See a full report on the work to identify and track those outcomes across seven communities, a summary of what we learned from that work, and a listing of the indicators.
Our partners at the National Collaborative for Infants and Toddlers (NCIT) have identified a set of evidence-based metrics, drawn from research, to track the health and development of children prenatal to age three with data that is comparable and reliable across states, communities, and diverse families. See their Data Guidebook for details on the NCIT Prenatal to Three Outcomes Framework and recommendations for using the right outcomes and indicators to measure the success of policies and programs in your state or community.
Early Childhood Data in Action: Stories from the Field. In these three case studies, CSSP and the National Institute for Children’s Health Quality (NICHQ) profile communities using their early childhood data in clear and important ways to tailor more effective interventions and yield better results. Taken together, they illuminate the remarkable range of benefits communities have begun to realize from careful and sustained efforts to collect, refine, analyze, and above all, use their data.
