The Illinois Policy, 2023 Accomplishments report details progress we helped the state achieve toward advancing our Illinois Policy Agenda. In some places, Start Early may have led a charge, in other places we contributed research and advocacy to help advance shared goals of many stakeholders. While many challenges remain to be solved in our fragmented early learning system, this year’s report details the many ways that tangible progress is being made to improve the experience of families and children and providers.
2023 Illinois Policy Accomplishments
Download Our Accomplishments Document
Equitable inclusion for young children with disabilities and developmental delays in early childhood opportunities is supported by both a human rights framework and evidence-based research. Being meaningfully included as a member of society is a human right that all children deserve and should be able to access. Additionally, there is clear research on the benefits of inclusion for both young children with disabilities and their typically developing peers in early childhood programs and services. Despite this, it is well documented that across the country, young children with disabilities and delays and their families continue to face challenges with accessing inclusive early childhood services individualized to their needs in all settings, particularly young children of color.
To address this, the Alliance for IDEA Policy Initiative and other national partners developed federal policy recommendations in 2022 to advance equity and inclusion for young children with disabilities and developmental delays across the early childhood system. In 2023, Start Early translated these federal recommendations into state policy opportunities, as states have flexibility to ensure equity and inclusion through state policy and financing mechanisms
Key Recommendations
We identified key recommendations across five areas:
- Adequate and Robust Funding
- Stable and Diverse Workforce
- Governance that Enhances Coordination and Collaboration
- Family- and Child-Centered Screening, Eligibility, and Evaluation
- Equitable and Inclusive Services
Publications & Resources
The Challenge
Without an established Quality Rating & Improvement System, Mississippi leaders sought a common framework for quality to better ensure positive child outcomes among their diverse early childhood education providers. While researching options, the successful outcomes of Educare Schools caught their eye.
With support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, four Mississippi trainers with diverse early childhood experience completed The Essential Practices of Educare’s Train-the-Trainer program and launched a unique, state-wide professional learning model. They hoped to:
- Introduce common quality standards across the state
- Encourage educators from Head Start, public pre-K, and childcare to learn from each other
- Increase positive outcomes for the majority of Mississippi’s youngest learners
“We like that The Essential Practices of Educare is detailed, practical, and easily understood… It makes people more curious about the context in which learning is happening.” – Holly Spivey, Head Start Collaboration Director & Education Policy Advisor in the Office of Governor Tate Reeves
The Impact: Engaged Educators Increase Quality and Equity by Cross-pollinating Ideas
The Mississippi training team chose Start Early’s Essential Practices of Educare because it creates space for educators to respond to and get curious about quality. They attribute the early success of their efforts to five guiding principles:
Principle One: Meeting people where they are at is critical to training success.
“What’s unique about The Essential Practices of Educare is that it’s a foundation that a lot of people need. It’s a very relatable PD that gives them opportunities to really talk about what they’re doing and how they can change, or how they can redirect what they’re doing to make it better.” – Amye Hoskins, Mississippi Training Team, Professional Development Specialist, Mississippi Dept of Education, Office of Early Childhood
Principle Two: Equal access to training creates equity among educators.
“Typically childcare doesn’t receive as much PD as the normal public school teacher. So we want to make sure The Essential Practices of Educare is accessible across the state and allows everyone to have the same opportunity.” – Amye Hoskins
“We didn’t originally think about The Essential Practices of Educare as a workforce development equity move, but that’s naturally what’s happening.” – Holly Spivey
Principle Three: Training educators from diverse programs at the same time increases engagement and creates a cross-pollination of best practices across the state.
“We have people from all parts of the state learning from each other as a group. We’ll say, ‘Tell us what’s happening and how do you overcome that challenge,’ so they can listen to people across the state– and then they can take it back to their classroom.” – Tamara Smith, Mississippi Training Team, Professional Development Specialist at Midtown Partners & Childcare Director at Little Samaritan Montessori
Principle Four: A flexible professional development design is essential for localized, authentic conversations about quality.
“I’ve often been surprised with where people take this foundational learning and what they notice. The Essential Practices of Educare has made them more curious about the context in which learning is happening.” – Holly Spivey
Principle Five: When a diverse training team facilitates The Essential Practices of Educare, it increases value and insight for participants.
“As trainers, we are unique – by representing childcare, the Department of Education, and Early Head Start, we relate better with the people on the ground. I understand where you all are coming from and your stress In the classroom …but here are things you can implement that will work.” – Tamara Smith
“Our Start Early practice consultant has been a godsend for us. She’s always willing to assist and give advice; that helped us really understand each other and our vision of what we wanted to accomplish as a training team.” – Amye Hoskins
Looking Ahead
The Mississippi Training Team wants to expand access to The Essential Practices of Educare, reaching as many educators across the state as possible. And they have their sights set on taking their training support to the next level. Soon they hope to create a model that allows them to follow trainings with customized technical assistance to ensure participants feel supported as they apply their learning to daily practice.
Read Full Case Study
Complete this form to read our case study detailing how the training team used The Essential Practices of Educare to create a common understanding of what high-quality education looks like across Mississippi’s early childhood systems.
More Like This
Providing equity-driven, high quality early care and education (ECE) requires significant financial investment (Borowsky et al., 2022). Currently, many individual ECE funding sources are not funded to a level that allows all eligible children to access high quality services. This contributes to disparities in access and quality—particularly for marginalized groups, such as children in low-income households, children who are dual language learners, children with disabilities, children who are Black, Indigenous, and Latine, and other children of color and their families (Babbs & Frankenberg, 2022; Karoly et al., 2021).
One strategy to address this challenge may be to use or coordinate multiple funding sources to meet the total cost of delivering high-quality ECE programming. The use of multiple funding sources may have critical implications for workforce strength and equity in program quality, access, and outcomes for young children and their families. Using multiple funding sources may also carry administrative, personnel, or other costs to programs. Yet there is limited evidence about the national prevalence of ECE programs’ use of multiple funding sources, the reasons why programs do so, the strategies and supports available for coordinating funding sources at different levels of ECE systems, the policies that may encourage or inhibit the use of more than one funding source, and in what ways the use of multiple funding sources may be associated with more equitable quality, access, and outcomes. Of particular interest for this project is whether, which, and how Head Start programs use federal funding alongside state and local funding sources to provide high-quality, comprehensive services and the state policy contexts in which Head Start programs make those decisions.
Therefore, the Financing for Early Care and Education Quality and Access for All (F4EQ) project seeks to better understand the landscape of Head Start programs’ decision-making around the use of multiple funding sources to provide high-quality comprehensive services. This project is also interested in the state and local contexts and conditions that influence those decisions, including systems-level approaches to coordinating or supporting programs’ use of multiple funding sources.
The F4EQ project is a collaborative research venture led by NORC at the University of Chicago in partnership with Start Early, the Children’s Equity Project (CEP) at Arizona State University, and consultant Margery Wallen, under contract with the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) at the Administration for Children & Families (ACF).
Study Aims
The primary aims of the F4EQ project are to:
- Identify the funding approaches Head Start programs use to support the cost of programming.
- Explore how Head Start programs’ funding approaches may be related to program implementation and efforts to advance equity.
- Examine system-level approaches, structures, and supports around coordinating multiple funding sources that may inform Head Start programs’ a) use of multiple funding sources, b) integration within broader ECE systems, and c) efforts to advance equity.
- Investigate in what ways Head Start programs’ funding approaches may be related to system-level approaches, structures, and supports around coordinating multiple sources of ECE funding.
Key Findings
The project team is conducting a nationwide descriptive study of financing in ECE programs, including (a) surveys of Head Start program directors and state ECE administrators and (b) case studies. To inform the development of the surveys and design of the case studies, the project team completed a review of the existing knowledge base, conducted an environmental scan of policies and regulations around the use or coordination of multiple ECE funding sources at the state and program levels, interviewed key informants, and consulted with technical experts.
Key findings include:
- Many Head Start programs seem to use multiple funding sources. This includes some common sources such as child care development fund (CCDF), state pre-kindergarten (pre-K), city or regional pre-K, foundation grants, program endowments, local prevention initiatives, and family co-pays. However, we do not know the prevalence of this nationally.
- Equity was not commonly highlighted or integrated into program approaches to combining funding or research design. We define equity in early childhood systems as “providing access to a full array of high-quality comprehensive services and supports to all children and families that result in positive outcomes regardless of race, socio-economic status, language, disability, or any other social or cultural characteristic”. There is a need for research that explores if and how Head Start programs use multiple funding sources to reach or better support populations that have been marginalized.
- Programs seek out multiple funding sources to implement comprehensive, high-quality care, improve access, and better meet the needs of local communities and some priority populations. However, we do not yet know how programs plan for equitable access and experiences for specific priority populations and use multiple funding sources to meet these goals.
- Challenges in combining multiple funding sources appear to increase administrative burden, costs, and effort for providers.
- Governance structures and integration of Head Start with other state ECE funding sources (e.g., state pre-K or CCDF) seem to affect whether and how programs used multiple funding sources. However, there is little documentation of the relationship between state governance structure and Head Start integration into the broader ECE system or the availability and quality of guidance and direct supports.
Methods:
These early project activities and findings informed the design of the first nationwide surveys of Head Start program directors and state ECE systems leaders examining financing policies and practices, which were fielded in early 2024
Additionally, project’s case studies, projected to be completed in 2025, are designed to supplement the state- and program-level surveys by providing a more detailed and nuanced picture of on-the-ground ECE funding approaches and decision making. The case studies aim to shed light on the intersections between state-, local-, and program-level decisions about the use of multiple funding sources by more deeply investigating:
- how state-level governance and funding structures inform local Head Start programs’ decisions and approaches to using multiple ECE funding sources;
- the role that local coordinating entities that some states have formally established through statute to support ECE programs play in Head Start programs’ funding decisions; and
- Head Start programs’ approaches to and implementation of the use of multiple funding sources and whether and how their decisions and strategies are shaped by state and local policies, supports, or enabling conditions.
The resulting insights from this multimethod descriptive study will generate beneficial knowledge about Head Start programs’ use of multiple funding sources, Head Start programs’ integration within broader ECE systems, and the state policy contexts, levers, and conditions under which ECE financing decisions are made and implemented. Furthermore, findings from this project may inform decisions about the allocation and flow of public resources, the availability and provision of supports for using different funding sources, and the design and implementation of more effective and equitable ECE policies, systems, and programs.
Research & Evaluation Team & Collaborators
The Challenge
At Child Care Associates in Texas, the central office team noticed that, after a period of gains, its CLASS evaluations of childcare and Head Start/Early Head Start providers had plateaued.
System leaders decided it was time to change how they approached outcomes improvement and they made three important decisions:
- Shift ownership of CCA’s education vision from the central office to campus instructional leaders.
- Recommit to using family experience as a critical performance measure.
- Implement The Essential 0-5 Survey across 25 campuses to provide leaders with a unified framework to move program improvement forward.
Improving CLASS instructional support scores was important to CCA – but our goal in using The Essential Survey was to focus on how supporting leaders will drive improvement in the classroom.
Karin Scott, Chief Performance Officer, Child Care Associates
The Impact: Energized Leaders Re-shaping Daily Practice to Improve Outcomes and Equity
Karin Scott, Chief Performance Officer, outlines four key outcomes the CCA team experiences with their annual Essential Survey implementation:
- Outcome One – Our entire team now uses a common framework to talk about improvement.
“We transformed campus director meetings to bring people together who are working on common problems of practice – to share out what’s working, lift up people getting better outcomes, and talk about pivots when something doesn’t work.” - Outcome Two – We are reducing leader & teacher overwhelm by focusing on where they CAN have impact.
“It can get overwhelming when you’re dealing with deep root causes to early childhood issues, like a national labor shortage or systemic racism. The Essential Survey toolkit’s root cause analysis allows us to dig down to root causes and build strategies to affect the most change with limited resources.” - Outcome Three – Staff at all levels are making proactive, positive changes in daily practice.
“The Essential Survey got teams into the practice of reviewing data. They’re taking it into their own hands to make easy, accessible processes for people. They’re rethinking how they use their time.” - Outcome Four – We have more data to help us drive equity for families of color.
“There is a huge equity piece to the Essential Survey work. We serve majority families of color and we need to know how they’re feeling about the services they are receiving, as well as how we can improve. This is a great tool to do that.”
We want staff to feel like they are valued and cared for while they’re here – and make sure they keep doing this work because it’s important for our community.
Karin Scott, Chief Performance Officer, Child Care Associates
Looking Ahead
The Child Care Associates team is committed to implementing The Essential 0-5 Survey annually to sustain a culture that values and supports leaders. “It was important before the pandemic, but now more than ever we need to know how people are feeling,” says Karin Scott. “Our long-term hope is that our staff are supported and feel motivated to do their best work, which in turns leads to better interactions with children and teachers and better outcomes for families.”
Read Full Case Study
Complete this form to read our case study about the Child Care Associates’ rollout of The Essential 0-5 Survey across 25 early childhood campuses.
Communities across the country are experiencing a dearth of child care options for families with infants and toddlers. Frequently described as a crisis, the availability of high-quality child care for infants and toddlers has only worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic began in spring 2020.
The need for expanded access to quality care for infants and toddlers in Illinois is clear—what is less clear is how to overcome the many challenges to meet this urgent need. The Infant and Toddler Child Care Roadmap project, led by Start Early, explores various ways Illinois can better meet the needs of families with infants and toddlers through the lens of the State’s child care community. The purpose of the project is to examine the current supply, demand and impact of infant-toddler child care on family well-being and the economy. The project is part of Raising Illinois’ Prenatal-to-Three Policy Agenda.
The Infant and Toddler Child Care Roadmap includes a review of recent and relevant literature on infant and toddler child care, a scan of relevant policies and practices in Illinois and other states, and a summary of findings from our engagement with Illinois’s child care field through focus groups and surveys. To better contextualize and interpret the data collected through these activities and to identify subsequent policy recommendations, a series of community conversations were convened around the State to share findings from the literature, state policy scan and surveys and focus groups and to reflect with communities on their implications. Input received from community conversations was integrated into this report, which details the project’s findings and recommendations for increasing access to infant and toddler child care in Illinois.
The following recommendations are reflective of the need for an intentional focus on infants and toddlers and are centered on the professionals who deliver child care services, as our State’s ability to expand infant-toddler child care capacity largely hinges on their ability to do so.
Key Recommendations:
- Strengthen the perception and reputation of infant-toddler teachers and other professionals working with children under age 3.
- Strengthen the workforce.
- Increase engagement with local communities.
- Improve the Child Care Assistance Program.
- Increase supports for children with disabilities, and early childhood staff and families struggling with mental health and social emotional challenges.
- Increase business and operational supports to child care programs.
- Improve availability of data on infants and toddlers.
Publications & Resources
Research & Evaluation Team & Collaborators
Special thanks to: City of Chicago Mayor’s Office & Every Child Ready Chicago Working Group; Illinois Early Childhood Asset Map; SAL Family and Community Services; Children’s Home & Aid Child Care Resource and Referral; Child Care Resource and Referral at John A. Logan College; Southern Illinois Coalition for Children and Families; Christine Brambila; Madison Conkin; Ireta Gasner; Brenda Eastham; Jennifer Kemp Berchtold; Beth Knight; Ann Kremer; Lindsay Maldonado; Marcy Mendenhall; Gail Nourse; Emily Ropars.
Funders
This project was made possible by grant number 90TP0057. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official view of the United States Department of Health and Human Services,
The Partnership for Pre-K Improvement (PPI) was launched in 2016 with a vision to develop and sustain high-quality, equitable state pre-K systems. Throughout the 5-year project, we partnered with 3 states – Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington – to learn alongside state education leaders, advocates and researchers about how to systematically improve pre-K quality. Along the way, we focused in on infrastructure and the policies, data, and implementation supports pre-K programs need to succeed.
As a culmination of this project, we created a report to capture lessons learned and recommendations for state early learning agency leaders, researchers and advocates, along with a free toolkit to support pre-K systems improvement.
What We Learned
- Systems change is complex and occurs over a long period of time. Although we saw important improvements during the life of the project, substantial systems change is ongoing and occurs in cycles as states navigate governmental, political, leadership, and funding changes and challenges.
- Practice frameworks can both advance and impede systems change work. While focusing on core elements of teaching and learning seemed that it would yield the greatest impact on quality, states were most successful when focusing on just one or two elements at a time.
- Implementation science is useful at the systems level but does not sufficiently advance equity. While an implementation science framework was very helpful in driving improvements, equity does not automatically follow quality changes. Equity must instead be intentionally centered.
- At the systems level, coordination, alignment, and resource-sharing across programs are necessary when striving to improve pre-K statewide. Quality and equity can only improve when pre-K is seen as a legitimate part of the broader education system.
- Strong, trusting, and stable partnerships between advocates and researchers are key to success of improvement efforts. Specifically, relationships that are pre-existing, intentional in terms of allocating staff and resources, and provide opportunities to learn from each other, are all critical factors in building stable and successful partnerships.
Recommendations
For state systems leaders, advocates and research partners:
- Build meaningful partnerships among systems leaders, advocates, and researchers.
- Think beyond pre-K.
- Recognize that implementation and infrastructure are critical missing pieces of systems change.
- Use intentional strategies for increasing equity and elevating parent and teacher voices.
- Prioritize data infrastructure and your state’s ability to use data for improvement.
For national and local consultants and technical assistance providers:
- Center equity from the beginning of any project.
- Ensure that state and local voices drive systems improvement consultation and technical assistance.
- Throughout this work, keep in mind both long-term vision, and more pressing, daily challenges.
- Provide flexible resources and funding.
Partnership for Pre-K Improvement Resources
For more on how our experiences in the Partnership for Pre-K Improvement provide critical lessons and actionable recommendations for those engaged in the complex work of improving state pre-K systems, download our new report & access the free Partnership for Pre-K Toolkit.
Looking for Additional Resources and Support for Your Quality Improvement Efforts?
Drawing from our experience on PPI and our work in states and communities across the country, the Start Early Consulting team supports partners to ensure that prenatal to five systems have the right policies, programs, and funding in place to prepare young children and their families for lifelong success. Email us for additional information.
Thank you to our partners: Cultivate Learning, Alliance for Early Success, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Executive Summary
In spring 2020, Start Early engaged more than 150 participants from 12 states and the District of Columbia in the Build it Back Better Dialogues*. The dialogues afforded space for Start Early to hear directly from parents, systems leaders and early childhood practitioners. Actively listening to stakeholders’ concerns provided critical insight into the challenges facing early childhood professionals and the families they serve. By sparking courageous and often difficult conversations, Start Early gained a deeper understanding of the disparities that perpetuate the opportunity gap among our youngest learners.
This report outlines key findings from the Build it Back Better Dialogues, including actionable information to help lead long-term, systemic changes through research- and evidence-based policies. Listening to the lived experiences of families and early childhood professionals generated critical questions that can be used to guide further discussions about the future of early childhood education and care in a post-pandemic world. Paying attention to the voices of people on all sides of early childhood systems will allow the creation of more equitable, responsive policies moving forward.
*The Build it Back Better Dialogues are not associated with the Build Back Better Framework.
We are excited to share our annual Start Early 2021 Year in Review, which showcases accomplishments and elevates reflections from last fiscal year (July 1, 2020 – June 30, 2021).
Highlights from this past year demonstrate how the early learning field adapted to continue being fully present for our families and providers regardless of where they were physically and emotionally.
At Start Early, we collaborated across program, policy and research partnerships to gather new perspectives and lessons learned. We implemented new strategies and expanded our innovative and interdisciplinary portfolio, positioning us to transform the field and drive collective action in the years to come.
We are fortunate to have incredible partners in this work, and we are grateful for each of our supporters who make this work possible. We are champions for early learning, and together, we can transform lives.
Executive Summary
In March 2021, Start Early received a short-term exploratory grant from the Illinois Council on Developmental Disabilities to gather insights into how to better support the inclusion of young children with disabilities across school and community settings by engaging school district leaders and their management organizations. From March through August 2021, Start Early conducted key informant interviews and focus groups with school management associations and school district leaders, including principals, superintendents, school board members, and early childhood and early childhood special education coordinators to gain an understanding of what Local Education Agencies (LEAs) would need to be able to provide services to all preschool aged children with IEPs regardless of setting, with a focus on outside-of-school settings.
This report outlines key findings from these focus groups and potential next steps for policy makers and systems leaders to build LEA and state capacity to leverage new federal resources on inclusion. This work will inform early childhood systems efforts in Illinois including the Early Childhood Transformation’s implementation of the Funding Commission recommendations, the Governor’s Office of Early Childhood’s needs assessment and strategic planning process funded through the federal Preschool Development Grant, and the work that is anticipated under the Build Back Better Act.
Policy Team & Collaborators
Acknowledgements
This report was prepared thanks to many individuals and organizations that generously provided time and expertise, research, consultation and other supports. Special thanks to: Debra Pacchiano, Isabel Farrar, Ann Kremer, Emily Ropars, focus group participants and key informants.
In partnership with the Illinois Council on Developmental Disabilities. This project was supported, in part by grant number CFDA 93.630, from the U.S. Administration for Community Living, Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C. 20201. Grantees undertaking projects with government sponsorship are encouraged to express freely their findings and conclusions. Points of view or opinions do not, therefore, necessarily represent official ACL policy.
