Crossing the Great Divide: Integrating Early Childhood Learning Data with K-12 in Silicon Valley

• In Event: 3-201 - Using Integrated Data Systems to Foster Collaboration and Innovation in Early Childhood Policy

Integrative Statement

The Santa Clara County Office of Education (SCCOE), First 5 Santa Clara County and Franklin McKinley School District have been developing an Early Childhood Integrated Data System (ECIDS) that provides powerful dashboards securely linking DRDP results, demographics, program ratings, attendance and health screening information to help teachers and providers better understand the physical, cognitive and social-emotional development of our pre-kindergarteners and to support a more informed transition to kindergarten. The ECIDS is deeply embedded in SCCOE’s Early Learning Master Plan and involves regular convenings and close collaboration with all levels of government and early learning providers across the early childhood spectrum, including HeadStart/Early HeadStart, State Preschools, Family Resource Centers and other for-profit local providers, health screening providers, the hospital system, the CA Department of Health and Human Services, and social service agencies in order to achieve our mission of ensuring that every child arrives at kindergarten eager to learn and ready to succeed.

Our collaboration drives a collective agenda around integrating, improving and expanding early childhood programs and services by linking individual child-level data through a well-defined process of assigning California Department of Education Statewide Student Identifiers (SSIDs) to all children from birth to 5. The SSID is a pivotal identifier that enables us to link early inputs and investments in early learning from multiple, disparate systems to later outcomes in the K-12 system at the individual, program and system levels. When the ECIDS data is linked with K-12 data, schools can use information on children’s prior experiences to individualize curriculum and instruction. Early childhood providers can receive feedback on how well children progress after they enroll in K-12 schools. With the centralization of this data, we are able to aggregate individual student-level data across programs and services to provide us with a better understanding of our community’s needs and enable us to identify service gaps. As we build on the scope of data flowing into the ECIDS, we will be able to determine whether our strategies are yielding the results we desire and will allow us to implement informed funding or policy changes.

In this presentation, we will 1) discuss our process for building out the ECIDS and integrating it with the Santa Clara County Office of Education’s DataZone PK-12 Data Warehouse ¬- a central education data repository that currently houses over 25 domains of K-12 student data from 34 districts and over 280,000 students – 2) provide a demonstration of our ECIDS dashboards, and 3) discuss our approach to building the capacity of our Pre-K and Kinder teachers to use data for decision-making.

Author

• Marcy Lauck, Silicon Valley Regional Data Trust
  Presenting Author