Supporting Our Youngest Learners: When Data Alone Isn’t Enough

August 19, 2025

Blog

With support from the Gates Foundation, thirteen current SDP Fellows in our Early Education Working Group are coming together to unpack common questions and collaborating on analytic approaches that help decision-makers understand and act. Guided by the STEP Forward with Data Framework from Child Trends, these fellows are exploring essential questions around access to public early education and learning milestones across the P-3 continuum.

From the first day of preschool through third grade, every year is critical for a child’s development — but many early learning systems lack the data to understand whether children are meeting key developmental and learning milestones. At the same time, families with young children face vastly different experiences across the country when trying to access public pre-K. While some communities offer universal enrollment, others grapple with limited seats, inequitable procedures, or fragmented information systems.

Understanding Public Pre-K Access: Mapping Supply and Demand 

As more states and districts expand access to high-quality preschool, education leaders face a critical question: Does pre-K supply and enrollment at the community level meet family needs? 

Eight SDP Fellows are exploring this question, digging into deeper questions such as: Does existing supply meet the needs of families from focal populations? Do enrollment procedures help these families access and attend the programs they want? Are children from focal populations enrolled in preschools at the same rates as their peers in the broader community? 

Read on to meet four of these fellows and learn about their work.

One Shared Mission

In cities and states across the country, SDP Fellows are rolling up their sleeves to close the gap between the promise—and the reality—of public pre-K access:

At the Denver Preschool Program (DPP), Dr. Cristal Cisneros is leading efforts to address inequities in preschool access by focusing on data-driven outreach to Denver area families who have historically been left out of the system. Her work with DPP aims to identify where gaps persist—especially for underserved communities—and brings a practical, equity-focused lens to everything from family recruitment to program logistics.
Nick Medrano’s role with the Chicago Early Childhood Integrated Data System (CECIDS) centers on building bridges across agencies and data silos. He is focused on improving not just the technical aspects of data integration but the shared practices, language, and relationships that allow different agencies to work toward collective solutions. Reviewing how childcare agencies collect and report data, Medrano has seen firsthand how operational silos create invisible barriers and duplication, often making it hard to answer even the most basic questions about enrollment or availability for families.
In Denver Public Schools (DPS), Nicole Romanoff is working to modernize how the district examines and plans its pre-K offerings. She hopes to break down the walls between program administration, school-based staff, and external partners through a more collaborative, transparent planning process. For Romanoff, building buy-in at every level has proven crucial. Her project is as much about earning trust and understanding different perspectives as it is about organizing raw enrollment figures.
In South Carolina, Molly Tuck’s project with First Steps is rooted in listening—to both local and state partners, and to families themselves. She explores not only the concrete, logistical barriers families face but also the perceptions, communication challenges, and motivations that influence whether they ultimately enroll. Bringing local and regional perspectives together, she is intent on ensuring solutions reach the families who need them most.

These fellows are not only surfacing gaps in supply or access. They are responding with grounded strategies—whether by creating more accurate maps of need and availability, redesigning outreach, or piloting streamlined enrollment processes that reflect community realities.

Data Work is People Work

As the fellows dove into their projects during their first year of the SDP Fellowship (fall 2024 – summer 2025), a consistent theme emerged: technical skills and robust data systems were only as powerful as the relationships and trust underlying them. SDP’s workshop theme of “Data Work is People Work” quickly moved from slogan to operating principle, as emerging challenges stemmed from a lack of shared definitions, competing historical practices, or entrenched silos. To break down those barriers, fellows guided their agencies toward embracing persistent listening, transparency, and a willingness to adapt analytical approaches in response to stakeholder feedback.

Medrano observed that longstanding silos—between agencies, data systems, and staff roles—made it too easy to duplicate effort or miss gaps. “It appears that existing systems and practices have developed in isolation, with systems not overtly designed to speak to each other. Having a common language that data workers use is paramount to this work,” Medrano reflected.

In some contexts, agencies had far more data than they realized, but lacked a shared understanding of how to use it. In others, the real hurdle was not technical but relational—bridging differences in agency priorities or untangling the emotional and political complexity that comes with systemic change. Reflecting on her work at DPS, Romanoff said, “There is much more than meets the eye when it comes to early childhood education data. I try to keep in mind that there are emotional and political layers to this work: interpersonal dynamics and motivations lie underneath the surface of the numbers and it's important for me to understand those in order to gain buy-in and continue pushing my work forward.” Even careful analytic work can stall if who are using and affected by the data aren’t engaged early and often.

But there were also early wins found when community or front-line perspectives changed the direction of a project, or when co-design and open dialogue made initially resistant stakeholders into champions. For Tuck at First Steps, understanding the “why” behind family hesitance led to better solutions: she focused on listening deeply and developing strategies that meet families where they are. As Cisneros reflected on her work at DPP, “the heart of this project is grounded in family voice.” The stories and lived experiences captured in focus groups provide context that raw enrollment data cannot. From shaping dashboard design to defining what access truly means, her work is deeply relational. “It’s a community-centered analysis and the people are the compass,” she noted.

For these fellows, the most formative experiences come not from crunching numbers, but from the conversations where families, providers, and partners voiced what the data alone could not show. This feedback loop—where data informs practice and practice reshapes data strategy—has become central to each fellow’s work.

The Power of Community

While each fellow enters the work with a unique context, all point to the SDP Fellowship cohort model and the Early Education Working Group as a catalyst for growth. Having a cohort of peers facing similar challenges is more than just a system of moral support—it’s a source of real innovation and accountability. As Cisneros reflected, “Being part of this working group has been invaluable. It has allowed me to problem-solve in real-time with peers who are tackling similar equity challenges in different contexts.”

The opportunity to learn in community has been vital for fellows, and the working group model has provided fellows with a professional network, technical sounding board, and a space to bring challenges for real-time collective problem-solving. In South Carolina, Tuck also credited the collaborative learning for her project’s early successes: exchanging lessons on both the technical details and the human strategies that lead to sustained change. “Being connected to a network of individuals has afforded me the opportunity to leverage the lessons they are learning from their own projects to inform my agency’s approach to data and evaluation practices,” she said.

This collaborative approach helps fellows navigate challenges large and small, from wrangling with messy data to navigating politics, to centering family and provider voices in analysis. As barriers or surprises arise, the group becomes a sounding board: “We often encounter similar challenges, despite our different environments. Being able to rely on the thought partnerships, collective experiences, and diverse skill sets within this group has made my work much more manageable, especially when tackling such significant and complex problems,” shares Medrano.

Perhaps most importantly, the reflection from these fellows reinforces the notion that sustainable change requires a community-driven approach: building toward new practices and policies not just inside a single agency, but across the web of people and organizations working toward access and equity in early childhood.

Understanding Developmental Milestones: The P-3 Continuum

From the first day of preschool through third grade, every year is critical for a child’s development — but many early learning systems lack the data to understand whether children are meeting key developmental and learning milestones. Within the SDP Cohort 16 Early Education Working Group, five additional SDP Fellows are working to change that by helping their agencies uncover where children are progressing, where support is needed, and how programs can better use multiple forms of evidence to guide improvement. This subgroup is also guided by the STEP Forward with Data Framework from Child Trends, exploring essential questions such as: Do programs use multiple forms of evidence to understand the developmental progress, strengths, and needs of children from focal populations, across domains of development? Are children from focal populations reaching developmental and learning milestones when transitioning to kindergarten?

Read on for more from three fellows as they dig into these questions with their agencies.

Bringing Cohesion to a Fragmented System

With early childhood education delivered through a patchwork of public schools, community providers, family care, and state agencies, all three fellows are wrestling with the challenge—and opportunity—of driving greater alignment and coherence.

At the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) in Washington, DC, Melissa Nelson is analyzing how the quality of pre-K programs in DC affects children’s outcomes as they transition into kindergarten through second grade. Her work involves collaborating with multiple agencies to gather data and incorporate stakeholder perspectives, with the goal of informing policy decisions and improving early childhood education quality and supports. In school year 2022-2023, 84% of 3- and 4-year-olds in DC were enrolled in publicly funded pre-K.
In Boston Public Schools (BPS) in Massachusetts, Yuzhu Xia is leading a multi-phase project to align student progress reporting practices across Boston’s mixed-delivery pre-K system, including both public schools and community-based organizations. Through stakeholder engagement, curriculum alignment, and report card redesign, her work aims to ensure clear, consistent, and developmentally meaningful communication between educators and families.
At the California Department of Education (CDE), Robert Carr is examining developmental and learning data from California State Preschool Program (CSPP) participants, linking a decade’s worth of comprehensive assessment data with administrative records to generate insights on children’s progress from preschool into elementary school. His research is being used to help providers and the state understand needs, inform support systems, and promote alignment across early education and K–12 data.

Reflecting on their work thus far, Xia describes how Boston is striving to ensure “a more coherent early education experience across the city,” aligning progress reporting so that “all families—regardless of whether their child attends a BPS school, a community-based organization, or a family child care program—receive clear, consistent, and developmentally meaningful information about their child’s learning and growth.” In DC, Nelson is focused on “incorporating stakeholder input into my research design and … identifying key takeaways from the data analysis to better understand how to support children as they transition from pre-K into early elementary school.” Carr has gained appreciation for the “strategies that exist to promote alignment across Early Childhood Education and formal TK-12 education data systems,” recognizing the foundational impact that alignment has on children’s long-term learning journeys. By tackling fragmentation, these leaders are working toward a future where every child benefits from seamless, high-quality early learning experiences.

Centering Stakeholder Voice

Across these three projects, the vital role of relationship-building, listening, and co-creation with stakeholders is a key theme at every step, including families, front-line educators, and partner organizations. As Nelson emphasizes, “'People work' is often the core underlying framework behind any dataset and research project, and data analysis provides accurate and insightful information only through the buy-in and feedback of many stakeholders along the way.” In Boston, Xia describes her project as “a case study in how people work must precede data work,” noting the value of “conversations, open houses, educator roundtables, and family council meetings” in shaping their progress report revamp. Carr, too, points out that California’s Desired Results Developmental Profile (DRDP) reflects a commitment to “the children behind the numbers,” with teachers, program directors, and parents collaborating to assess each child’s strengths. From these fellows' experiences so far, it's clear that meaningful early childhood data work is only possible when guided by authentic, ongoing engagement with the communities being served.

Turning Insights into Action

Each fellow also highlighted the movement from data collection toward tangible change—turning insights into action that drives improvement in programs and policies. Nelson reflected, “I believe that data analysis is a key component of informed policy making, and I hope that my SDP project helps drive data-driven decisions as DC continues to support and grow initiatives to improve quality of pre-K programs.” Xia hopes for long-term, systemic impact. “The real action is systemic: we’re creating a shared language and shared expectations across a fragmented early ed system,” she said. Meanwhile, Carr reflects on how linking data sources has already enabled California’s Early Education Division to better understand where providers need support— “These findings are feeding into EED’s System of Support and being used to support CSPP providers in collecting and using DRDP data to understand children’s development.” These fellows don’t just want to know more, but to ultimately do better for children, their families, and educators.

Looking Ahead

As year two of the fellowship approaches, collaborative mapping and partnership-building are already shaping how the working group agencies allocate resources, design outreach, and define what equitable access really means. The lessons of the first year point to several broader implications: the centrality of trust and partnership, the necessity of aligning analytic work with lived experience, and the value of doing this work in community.

As the fellows look to year two, there’s much to build on: deeper partnerships with community members, even more nuanced analyses, and a push to translate findings into policy improvements and new practices. The SDP Early Education Working Group will continue to serve as an incubator for ideas, a forum for peer learning, and a springboard for broader change. For these fellows, the working group will also continue to support them on the complex path ahead, remembering that with people and community at the core, real progress is not only possible, it’s happening.