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Tag: Early Care and Education

Eight Community Engagement Practices That Facilitate Stronger Decision-Making

Written by Afton Group on . Posted in Community Engagement, Effective Governance, Resource Equity.

Answers exist in the communities being served and it is our job to support our public sector partners in uplifting them. The issues we take on do not have “one-size-fits-all” fixes; context matters to both defining the problem and crafting the solution. As such, local champions who know the landscape and can commit to carrying out a vision play a critical role in shaping success. They are also well-positioned to improve newly implemented programs and policies over time to ensure intended and sustained impact. 

To tap into the wisdom of the community, engagement must be pursued with intention. We recommend eight key practices to create meaningful opportunities that result in rich and actionable insights.  

PRACTICE #1: Come into engagement activities curious, without assumptions or predetermined ideas. 

As facilitators of the Governor’s Workforce Commission on Equity and Access in Illinois, we started by exploring the needs of the workforce development system users to understand their challenges and pain points. With our colleagues at MDRC, we created job seeker personas and journey maps and conducted many focus groups with workforce providers and job seekers. Notably, we uncovered specific issues for undocumented workers who felt they could not access good jobs because of work authorization requirements. We also learned that they feel their education, skills, and work experience gained in their home countries are not appreciated or valued in the U.S. They wanted more guidance in using those skills beyond the employment market that overlooked them.  With that input in mind, the resulting recommendations included expanded support for those interested in entrepreneurship and self-employment. 

PRACTICE #2: Include the most impacted individuals, with particular focus on historically underrepresented groups. 

Illinois’ transition to a new unified Department of Early Childhood prompted the creation of robust new engagement channels to include input from impacted parties in the agency design process. While they were successful in hearing from nearly 1,400 individuals, only a small percentage of them were parents or providers. With the help of Afton Partners, the state doubled down on their efforts to reach those groups. We implemented a regional listening session plan, inviting local organizations across the state to serve as hosts. Leveraging local networks proved successful: the 1,700 new participants represented every county in the state, and 98% identified themselves as parents or providers. Of those who were parents, 40% identified as Hispanic or Latino, and 25% identified as African American. Over half of the participants represented rural communities. The more robust participation ensured we had insights that better reflected different communities’ experiences with the current system and what improvements they would deem helpful. 

PRACTICE #3: Make engagement accessible for participants. 

With the Colorado Early Childhood Compensation and Benefits Task Force, we conducted focus groups and surveys in English and Spanish. Additionally, we offered meeting times in both the afternoon and evening to accommodate participants’ work schedules.  Participants received incentives and professional development credit for their contributions and time. To ensure an inclusive process, communications came in multiple formats and included sign language, ADA-compliant accessibility in print and online materials, and the avoidance of jargon in favor of language everyone could relate to. All of these measures led to robust input, and the insights played a valuable role in the development of the task force’s recommendations.  

PRACTICE #4: Set norms and expectations from the start. 

Afton facilitated the development of the Great Start for All Minnesota Task Force’s guiding principles that set the conditions for their process and final recommendations. Co-developed by members, the principles reflected the task force’s values and provided shared expectations for engagement.  

Revisiting the guiding principles at every meeting kept everyone aligned in productive conversation that valued input from all members.  The 12 norms and expectations included: 

  • Attend meetings prepared and on time 
  • Engage in respectful dialogue 
  • Everyone’s input is important 
  • Assume best intent 
  • Listen with an open mind, and for commonalities 
  • Don’t say or type anything you wouldn’t want to have shared in public 
  • Don’t just disagree, offer a doable alternative idea 

In complex processes, co-created norms and expectations offer built-in accountability that has full buy-in from the start. The result is less conflict, quicker course correction when needed, and more efficient discussion in pursuit of the end goal.  

PRACTICE #5: Demonstrate respect, transparency, honesty, and genuine appreciation for all perspectives shared. 

In any community engagement activity, people want their input to be heard, valued, and impactful. In our focus groups conducted with the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, we made sure to clearly articulate why input is needed, what it will be used for, who it will be shared with, and how it will influence final recommendations. We made it clear that there is “no wrong answer” and guaranteed anonymity in our notetaking to encourage sharing and disclosure. Finally, to ensure we close the feedback loop with participants, we shared the final report with our summary findings and results so they can know how their perspectives shaped outcomes and their efforts made a difference. 

PRACTICE #6: Pursue broad and diverse participation when analyzing and making meaning of data. 

Individual, structural, and institutional biases can emerge in community engagement work, and it’s also important to consider statistical bias. In our data analysis and financial modeling work for school districts and charter school networks, Afton emphasizes the significance of looking at site-level financial, academic, and student data in school-level funding allocation policy and budgeting. This must accompany district-wide data analysis to make sure important details aren’t missed.  

For example, certain schools may have higher or changing needs of students, or student outcomes may be on an undesirable trajectory. Examining funding variation across all sites with distinct characteristics and forecasting future expenditures and investments at the school level can reveal unintentional inequities in the school plan. Therefore, it’s critical to have broad participation from education staff, community members, and students and families in interpretive activities that inform decisions.  Those with lived experiences related to the data can explain what it means to them, providing enriched understanding and problem-solving possibilities. 

PRACTICE #7: Conduct iterative engagement activities at various points in the project; consider a variety of methods or approaches. 

Our work with the Office of the Deputy Mayor of Education in Washington DC sought to develop a funding policy that provides equitable and adequate resources to serve each student well and to make a clear case for policy change. In collaboration with our project partners, we identified four primary groups to engage with through a variety of methods: district leaders; school personnel; families, students, and the community; and city leadership. The strategies to engage with each of these groups varied to meet the needs and positioning of participants. For example, we used a survey to capture straightforward financial data from district leaders who deal with the funding policy daily. However, a focus group proved more appropriate for parents and families, allowing for nuanced conversation about the resource needs of students. Finally, we interviewed key school personnel and leaders to gather their insights on the implications of the work at hand.  

Taken together, some groups and methods provided foundational information while others provided valuable reactions to proposals as they took shape. We synthesized all of the feedback to discover recurring themes across the district that either fortified quantitative data or showed important areas of tension, all of which informed the final policy recommendations. 

PRACTICE #8: Ask for feedback along the way and at the end. 

How do you know your process works for participants? Do they feel they have adequate opportunity to share? Do they walk away from each encounter feeling informed? Empowered? Something else? What could be improved for the next community engagement activity?  

In addition to gathering responses to make short-term adjustments, collecting feedback at the end of an initiative offers teams an opportunity to reflect on both the outcomes of a process and the methods used to create them. For instance, every phase of a project brings about a new host of questions. And yet, survey fatigue is real. Narrowing in on the most important questions and choosing the appropriate approach (“is a survey the right way to get what we need?”) can facilitate high-quality responses and reduce attrition over time.  

Done well, community engagement offers unparalleled insight into the reality of complex problems and their workable solutions.  

But we can’t just go through the motions.  

Employing the eight practices will ensure you harness the power of collective wisdom to create the transformational change your communities want and deserve.  

IL Gov. Pritzker Touts Early Childhood Focus in 2024 State of the State Address

Written by Afton Group on . Posted in Noteworthy News.

Earlier today, Illinois Governor Pritzker delivered his State of the State Address, highlighting Smart Start Illinois, which is a historic investment in the state’s early care and education (ECE) system. Smart Start launched last year and is already improving access to quality child care and other critical services for young children and their families, while providing long overdue support for professionals working in the system.

This year, Governor Pritzker is seeking the legislature’s support for a $150 million increase for the second year of the initiative, bringing the total investment to $400 million. Key investments include:

  • $200 million for Smart Start workforce initiatives, including Smart Start Workforce Grants, to help child care providers meet a new, higher wage floor for their staff and stabilize the field.
  • $75 million increase in the Early Childhood Block Grant to increase quality and create new slots in preschool deserts.
  • $13 million to begin the state’s transition to a unified early childhood agency – the Department of Early Childhood.

Afton has a front row seat to Illinois’ efforts, working closely with state leaders to thoughtfully engage stakeholders in a way that centers equity and the human experience while also bringing our expertise in data analysis and cost-modeling for accurate and strategic allocation of resources. We are proud to support the design of the Smart Start Workforce Grants, ECBG allocation, Early Intervention payment reform, and the transition to a unified early childhood agency.

Smart Start Workforce Grants

Nationwide, ECE staff are drastically under-compensated for the important work they do, with an average wage of about $13/hour. Low compensation means child care programs struggle to recruit and retain qualified staff and families cannot find child care for their children. IL is one of a small number of states that has committed significant resources to address this issue. If approved by the legislature, funding for the Smart Start Workforce Grants (SSWG) would build on the previous investments.

Workforce Grants are an innovative approach to address the ECE workforce shortage, using the state’s general revenue to supplement ECE teacher salaries. Child care programs that participate in SSWG will receive funding to pay their classroom staff at least a base wage (the “wage floor”). In other words, these programs will be able to meet a higher wage floor for their staff without raising tuition for their families.

Afton’s Role

Afton supports the planning and design of the SSWG through facilitation of robust stakeholder engagement efforts that include ongoing advisory committee engagement, provider focus groups and surveys. We create opportunities for the state to meaningfully engage the providers who may benefit from these grants and ensure that the unique perspectives of Spanish-speaking providers, home-based providers, and others who have had less access to grant opportunities are considered in design and implementation.

Afton also led the development of IL’s child care cost model, a tool that helped determine the cost to meet the wage floor across different program types and regions to ensure that grant amounts are sufficient to cover the costs of raising wages. This critical support helped determine the parameters of the program so that SSWG can reach as many child care programs as possible within the budget.

Early Intervention

Early Intervention (EI) provides crucial support for young children experiencing or at risk of developmental delays. Unfortunately, payment rates have not kept up with inflation in recent years, straining the system and negatively impacting recruitment and retention among the EI workforce, which includes service coordinators, interpreters, and therapists (such as developmental, speech, occupational, and physical therapists).

Afton’s Role

Afton is supporting an innovative project to develop a cost model for Illinois’ EI system and consider options for payment reform. To date, hundreds of EI practitioners and families have participated in focus groups and surveys that Afton facilitated to give their input on changes they hope to see in the system. Using this input, Afton will work with the Bureau of Early Intervention to develop a cost model that reflects the true cost of providing EI services across the state. Afton is also supporting state leaders in considering short- and long-term improvements to its approach to payment to improve access to high-quality EI services for children and families.

Early Childhood Block Grant

As a critical component in this system, the Early Childhood Block Grant (ECBG) provides funding for early childhood and family education programs and services that help young children enter school ready to learn.  The Illinois investments are intended to increase access to programs, with a focus on preschool “deserts” – regions that lack access to ECE programming – and support quality improvement across new and existing programs.

Afton’s Role

To address inequitable access to high quality programs, Afton has partnered with ISBE to identify and prioritize preschool deserts for new ECBG allocations. Afton is also supporting ISBE to develop a “cost model” that informs equitable funding allocation decisions. Afton will leverage quantitative data and engage stakeholders to inform the cost model.

IL Governance Transition

So often, early childhood systems and structures are designed around funding streams, resulting in a patchworked system that places the burden on families to navigate a dizzying maze of programs and services. Last fall, at the recommendation of the Afton-facilitated IL Commission on Equitable Early Childhood Education and Care Funding, Gov. Pritzker initiated the transition to a new, unified Department of Early Childhood. The transition will provide the state with a unique opportunity to thoughtfully redesign and rebuild an equitable, accessible, family-centered early childhood system. The effort will require reorganization of programs and funding streams that currently span three separate agencies under the new umbrella.

Afton’s Role

Over the next three years, Afton will collaborate with several state agencies, state and local advisory bodies, and communities – particularly those that have been historically underresourced and underserved – to inform the design of the new unified state agency with a racial equity, family-centered lens. Given the complex funding streams involved, Afton will also leverage our deep funding design expertise to identify equitable funding strategies that support the redesigned system.

Impact

In IL and across the country, Afton is excited to collaborate with those who are most impacted by challenges in the early childhood system to create solutions that will work with appropriately allocated resources. Illinois’ work has tremendous potential to serve as a model for other states. We invite you to stay tuned as these initiatives advance and we analyze the impact of these innovations. We will continue to share our learning and resources that other states may find useful as they explore policy change and investments that support the best outcomes for children and families.

Applying Charter Authorizing Principles in the Early Childhood Field

Written by Carrie Stewart on . Posted in Effective Governance.

Introduction: Early Care and Education at a Crossroads

Despite its importance for children’s development, the Early Care and Education (ECE) field has historically often been excluded from broader conversations about education quality and investment. This is changing: an increasing number of state and federal leaders are prioritizing public funding and support for early education. There is still much work to be done to pay and support ECE providers like the skilled educators they are.

As support and investment in ECE increase, policy makers should celebrate the diversity of options available to families and ensure that future public investments are inclusive of all types of ECE models. This goal has much in common with NACSA’s view on charter authorizers’ ongoing work to increase access to quality, expand parent choice, and implement strong accountability. The charter and ECE fields have much to learn from each other.

Background

The ECE field—like charter schooling and authorizing—is at an inflection point. Both sectors use a mixed delivery system (there is a range of charter school types, just as there is a range of ECE provider types), and both currently face labor shortages, compensation pressures, and chronic system underfunding. The ECE sector has long faced a fundamental challenge: high-quality care is too expensive for most families to afford, while the educators who provide this care are dramatically underpaid, earning less than $30,000 per year on average. In the face of an increasingly competitive labor market, providers have particularly struggled in recent years to find and retain qualified staff. Federal relief funds helped many providers supplement staff pay and keep their doors open; as these funds expire, many providers are facing a severe funding and workforce crisis.

At the same time, there is an increasing recognition of the need for more stable public investment into care and learning for our youngest children. The Build Back Better legislation that passed the House in late 2021 held the potential for a dramatically expanded and transformed ECE system, although it fell short of enactment in the Senate. Some states, including New Mexico, Illinois, Minnesota, and Vermont, are making historic investments to expand access to subsidized care and raise wages for providers. As parts of the ECE field gain access to more stable funding, there is an opportunity to invest in quality—which can mean different things to families and educators in different settings.

The policy decisions made in the next few years will set the course of the ECE system for years to come. As policymakers approach these challenges, they can learn from high-quality charter school authorizers’ work. A “one-size-fits-all” approach will not support the diverse needs of ECE providers. The lessons that NACSA has learned from its charter school authorizing experience can guide us toward an approach that better reflects the diversity of the ECE field, forming a “north star” of quality to work toward as we rebuild.

Defining Quality

One of the crucial insights of charter school authorizing is to measure outcomes rather than inputs. This is an important goal, although it looks fundamentally different in early childhood, when each child is developing at their own pace. Unlike in K-12 education, young children generally do not take standardized tests; assessments are developmental and formative rather than summative. As a result, many state Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) for early childhood providers rely heavily on inputs, such as credentials held by educators, class size ratios, and facility features. These inputs may be correlated with quality—for example, small class sizes support more high-quality adult-child interactions—but they can also disadvantage programs with fewer financial resources. For instance, an educator with decades of experience and an exceptional ability to nurture young children may not receive “credit” toward a higher quality rating if she does not also hold a formal educational credential.

The ECE field can learn from NACSA’s “multiple measures” approach to build a more flexible and outcomes-oriented approach to measuring quality. Such an approach could consider factors like classroom observations, family satisfaction, and measures of kindergarten readiness and success. Measuring these outcomes may require better coordination between ECE and K-12 systems to track children’s success over time, including a feedback loop between ECE settings and elementary education.

Like charter schools, ECE programs come in different shapes and sizes. The ECE field encompasses everything from a home-based provider caring for a few children in her own home, to large community-based child care centers, to school-based preschool. Programs have different philosophical approaches: Montessori programs embrace child-directed learning, while Head Start programs emphasize wraparound support for the entire family. Nonetheless, state evaluations of quality often apply a one-size-fits-all approach. For example, state pre-K programs often lay out requirements for facilities and staff credentials that are designed for school-based settings, which can exclude community-based and home-based providers from participating in these public programs.

High-quality charter authorizers offer a model for flexible, yet rigorous, oversight that uses metrics that can accommodate different instructional models. These accountability and performance frameworks create incentives to meet quality outcomes, while giving programs flexibility to reach those in their own way. As NACSA’s recent report puts it, “More than any one proven resource or practice, what NACSA and the authorizing field have developed is a mindset and process of continuous evolution and adjustment.”

Many states have funding streams dedicated to improving ECE program quality. The sources of these funding streams should learn from authorizers’ flexible, outcomes-oriented approach. More work is needed to develop a differentiated approach to quality to ensure that different types of providers can succeed.

Community-driven Decision Making

The ECE field has a long history of engaging families and communities in decisions. Since the 1960s, Head Start Policy Councils have made families and community members partners in important financial and governance decisions. Many ECE providers have staff specifically dedicated to engaging and supporting families’ needs.

Because ECE programs largely operate independently, outside the purview of a school district or other regional organization, many areas have a gap at the regional level when it comes to assessing community need, equitably distributing slots, and seeking community input on new or expanded program models.

Some states are investing in regional councils or networks to address these needs. For example, Birth-Five Councils in Illinois conduct regional needs assessments, build local relationships, and support the community with developing action plans to address local needs. Similarly, Ready Start Networks in Louisiana assess local demand for early care and education, develop strategic plans, and identify local funding that can be leveraged to support access.

Effective charter authorizers provide a model for these new organizations to help regions think holistically about need, demand, and diversity of options for families. To meet a community’s needs, both charter authorizers and regional early learning councils must understand where the need is and what kind of need it is. For example, an area near a hospital may need more home-based providers who can provide non-traditional-hours care to accommodate workers with overnight shifts, while an area with a large concentration of recent immigrants may need to prioritize culturally and linguistically responsive curricula and educators. Without this collaborative, centralized enrollment planning, communities may inadvertently end up investing in programs that do not match families’ real needs.

Building Capacity

For both ECE providers and charter schools, operational capacity is a prerequisite to offering a high-quality educational program. Like charter schools, ECE providers typically have disproportionately complex public funding streams to manage, relative to their size. Even a small early learning program may be blending a variety of funds with different use and reporting requirements, including state child care subsidies, private tuition, state pre-K funds, federal Head Start grants, and other grants or fundraising. In addition, many ECE providers struggle to adopt business practices that would make their programs more sustainable, such as accessing efficient back-office services and effectively tracking enrollment and tuition to ensure that fees are paid on time.

The ECE field can learn from charter authorizers’ assessments of the most important operational factors that make a program viable over the long term. The ECE field also needs to go beyond assessing viability to supporting providers to develop their operational capacity. This can mean providing training, on-call support, and easy access to shared services that take the burden off small programs. At the system level, it also means streamlining public funding and reporting requirements to reduce the burden on educators, allowing them to focus on their most important work: supporting children and families.