Families with young children often rely on a variety of services to ensure that their child has what they need to thrive—including early care and education programs, early intervention, home visiting, and social assistance programs, among others.
Unfortunately, families may have very limited information about these services and if their children are eligible to receive them. Early childhood service providers are often overburdened by data submission requirements that provide no value to them. And policymakers may know very little about the services being used by families, and the impact those services have, making it difficult to assess service gaps and allocate resources to address them.
Better data is critical to improving the early childhood ecosystem. This resource is meant to help states understand the return on investment of improving their early childhood data capacity, provide guidance about how to make the improvements they need, and support them in laying a strong foundation for connecting robust early childhood data with statewide longitudinal data systems.