Sonja Castaneda-Cudney: I think you want as much information as you can get. And I feel like getting straight answers from anywhere was very hard.

Jamee Herbert: This is Sonja Castaneda-Cudney, a parent who first spoke to us about struggling to find childcare in the first episode of the show. This time, Sonja isn't describing a parenting problem. She's describing a data problem. In childcare, the information families need, what's available, what it costs, what's actually going on in the day often isn't visible. And for millions of families in America, it turns finding childcare into a nightmare. I'm Jamee Herbert, CEO of BridgeCare, an organization that helps make navigating the minefield of early care and education easier. I've spent years trying to understand why our childcare system feels impossible to work through.

Every episode, we'll be looking at a different part of the equation, from the economics to the workforce, to the policy barrier shaping what care looks like on the ground. By the end of the season, you'll have a clearer picture of why America's childcare system has been set up to fail, and more importantly, what we can do to fix it. This is Child Care Matters: Built to Break. This week, we're examining the data gap in early care and education. The childcare system isn't actually one system. Through the series, we've explored how it's a patchwork of different programs, different rules, and different tech. And when the systems don't connect, the data doesn't either.

Simon Workman: You need data, otherwise you're flying blind.

Jamee Herbert: Simon Workman is the co-founder and principle of Prenatal to Five Fiscal Strategies, a nonprofit focused on addressing the imbalances in early care and education.

Simon Workman: One of the things we don't have enough data on is what it really costs. And what we talk to states about is you need this data and whether you are using it to make your cuts in a more data informed way or if you're using it to make your investments in a more data informed way. And if one day we ever get a big influx of money for this system, you need to be ready to spend it. One of the things when this happened before and there was the idea of maybe getting more money from the federal government, a lot of states were not prepared to know how to spend that money if they got that, right?

Jamee Herbert: So what happens when you get the funding? But the system can't tell you where the money can be spent.

Simon Workman: You might have a state UPK program, a federal Head Start program, a subsidy program, and they all have different requirements, different data needs. And where's it all coming together? You ask a state, "Tell me how many childcare slots you have." And they often can't answer the question. They might be able to tell you how many subsidy slots they pay for, and they might tell you how many licensed providers they have, but they don't even necessarily know within those licensed providers the age of kids that can be served, how many are full or not. There's such a dearth of data because it's been so tied to whether you take public funds or not, but because public funds are not that sufficient, a lot of providers don't take public funds. And so there's just this black box of people don't have any information.

Jamee Herbert: That gap isn't just on the state and federal level. It filters through on every level down to parents like Sonja, influencing crucial choices parents make about where to send their children.

Sonja Castaneda-Cudney: I think you want as much information as you can get. And I feel like getting straight answers from anywhere was very hard. Looking at websites, I felt like I couldn't find all of the information that I was looking for. "How was I going to check? How do I know what certifications we have? What are other parents' experiences?" I like to know that. And I feel like a lot of that didn't feel as accessible as I wish it would've been.

Jamee Herbert: Sonja and Simon are talking about two different parts of the system, but the net outcome is the same. And at the same time, there's not a lot of clear information for parents about what kind of help is available to them. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, only 15% of eligible families receive childcare subsidies in an average month. That means the other 85% were unable to access help either due to insufficient funding, administrative barriers, or they're unaware that the subsidies even exist. Unfortunately, we don't have strong data indicating where in the process families are falling through the cracks. But one thing is certain, the lack of transparency makes the situation very difficult for people like Sonja.

Sonja Castaneda-Cudney: On the page, there will say, "You might qualify for this or this." And it was really MediCal. And then there were some other subsidies with maybe paying for wifi or something like that. And I was never able to access that. I don't know if we qualified for it. I imagine we do, but again, for some reason it just didn't work when I would apply. But no, there was nothing that ever said, "You could qualify for childcare subsidies." There's nothing that pops up on those pages and that would be a really great place to have it pop up. Again, LA County is really challenging and California is such a large state, but I am happy to say that they have, I think, figured out a lot of things with these programs, but it's still very challenging.

Jamee Herbert: The need for better data filters through to every part of the system. Simon contrasts what we see in childcare with a thorough long-term planning that happens in Head Start and school districts. The historical disconnect between supply building, demand needs, and community building leads to unsustainable systems.

Simon Workman: What is the potential need for childcare here? How is that need being met? What are the specifics of that need? Do we have a lot of care at need for care at non-traditional hours? Because we have a lot of factories that are open on third shift, or we have a lot of nurses in this community or whatever. Headstart does this. All Head Start grantees have to do a needs assessment, a community needs assessment like what is going on in the community. We have nothing like that in childcare. School districts have to think about, "What is the birth rate? Is the population changing? Do we need to build a new school?" There is, in most communities, no one really paying attention to that and saying, "We really need more childcare here, and we need this type of childcare, and how do we incentivize this type of childcare?"

Jamee Herbert: Time and time again in our work day-to-day, states will come to us and say, "We don't even know where there are openings, or we don't even know sometimes which childcare providers are actually open." And it's not necessarily that this data doesn't exist. The bigger problem is that it doesn't exist in a central location. The fragmented nature of the childcare system of systems means that data lives in siloed places. It lives in lots of different systems or even sometimes with every single childcare provider and not in a central location. Sometimes one system and another system will have the same piece of data, but conflict with each other because one's old or one gets more frequently updated or they have different meaning behind them. And so the fact that it's just all fragmented and not coordinated together creates this big data problem where it feels like we don't have enough data and we don't have data, but actually it's just the data lives in so many places and isn't coordinated. And so it doesn't have a universal understanding of what that data means and how to use it.

So there are information gaps at every level of the system, from parents to policymakers. How do we find a way to close it? To find out more, I spoke to Sabina Andersson. She works inside Colorado's Department of Early Childhood. It's an agency that's still quite new. It was established in July 2022, just one year before the rollout of the state's universal preschool program. Her department has played a significant role in Colorado's rapid rise from 27 to third in the country for preschool enrollment. The state previously struggled with families bouncing between entry points, information scattered across systems and no clear picture of whether they were reaching the families they were trying to serve.

Sabina Andersson: Right now, if you are a family and you're trying to understand what are you maybe eligible for, the various different types of ways that people interact with CDC and how they get to us, for instance, if you want to have UPK, you can go to the UPK website. If you're trying to understand more in general, if you're a low income family, some people tend to go to PEAK. Some people call our call centers, but we also have Raising Colorado Kids, which is our kind of new front door for families. A lot of time families don't know what type of services are out there, what type of benefits or programs are out there. And we're trying to break away from that model of families need to be very... Almost like they have to be in the know, they have to know how to be expert at government research.

Jamee Herbert: Part of the reason parents have become experts on research is because as we've already seen, program information doesn't always trickle down in a way that's easy to find or understand. Despite the requirement for states to play an active role in consumer education, marketing is often treated as an afterthought. It's a function rarely afforded a budget to really move the needle on awareness and participation.

Sabina Andersson: We don't have a lot of information, and I think we're trying a lot to make sure that we are standing up new ways of working to be able to make the right type of decisions, also surface the right type of information to our partners and legislation to be able to drive the right type of outcomes for constituents. I think also the entire part of data around technology and that staying modern is also a big lack, but I also think it's because no one is asking those questions [inaudible 00:10:13]. We have to have people within our agencies asking those types of question because otherwise that data is never going to be implemented, instrumented, and bubbled up.

Jamee Herbert: Even at the highest levels and with multiple funding streams, we only see a fraction of the picture of what is required to fund childcare in any specific state. But talking to Sabina, we learned that there could be another reason for the data gap.

Sabina Andersson: I think in general, we tend not to hire people to drive the right type of decisions and outcomes. When we create new digital experiences, it tends to be an acceptance criteria for program delivery, but product delivery in itself requires product outcomes. So how are we reaching? How are we engaging? What is the user journey? What is the adoption? How are we looking at that user journey to make sure that it's equitable? And how are we measuring all of this? We tend not to do that in government, and we tend not to have product managers, product designers, UX researchers to be able to facilitate the right type of research upfront.

Jamee Herbert: When Sabina refers to a product, she's talking about the platforms used by families to learn about and access ECE programs. Now, we're not just talking about the data gap, we're talking about the gap in the way ECE data is collected and the friction experienced by families that can lead to the inaccuracies in data. User experience needs to be front and center in these conversations, but in practice, it rarely is. Data is one of the most important building blocks policymakers need to make decisions that benefit families and providers. To find out why, I spoke to Sarah Rittling, the executive director of the First Five Years Fund, a bipartisan advocacy group.

Sarah Rittling: We at the First Five Years Fund are able to track data tied to federal funding streams when that data is available, which is never immediately after the several years lagging. So I think it's also getting clearer on what it is in terms of data that we're trying to capture that allows for better service, better financing, and things of that nature. Part of the difficulty is that where children go before the age of five looks different. We do not have a formalized system across all children, across all 50 states. You have 50 states who have different things. You have 50 states where that service or that sector lives, it could live in the State Department of Ed, it could have a state early childhood office. It could have live in the state something other office. There's really no consistency, and that's just because that's the way it is.

Jamee Herbert: So it seems like the solution is tied into better data collection in a more centralized way, collected by people who understand it and why it matters. Without that, it becomes very difficult for policymakers to understand what needs to be prioritized and where. And we know that when it works, it really works. In Colorado, the state's focus on technology and trying to find more complete data has made an enormous difference.

Sabina Andersson: My question is, "Have we reached all the people that we need to reach? Is this what we actually have? Is 67% the highest we can get? Or is this actually a kind of supply and demand that every single person in Colorado actually want to have universal preschool and should we actually be passing more universal preschool for the entire state of Colorado?" But we can't get there without data and we can't get bills without data and we can't... I mean, I wouldn't expect people to vote without data on what they're voting on. So I think it's understanding what are the needs of people too is something that we can help with technology to be able to understand that supply and demand.

Jamee Herbert: When we started BridgeCare in 2016, the data situation in the public data systems was pretty dire, and it really stayed that way until the pandemic. There was a focus on data systems in a way that had never happened before in the pandemic. And because of the changing and fluid nature of openings and closures and different age groups being served by different providers during that time, it really drew a lot of attention to the major cracks in the infrastructure, the technical infrastructure of the childcare system. And that's when a lot of states were coming to us saying, "We don't even know who's open and we don't even know who's serving who and how many openings they have. And how are we supposed to help families and providers with matching these needs if we don't have any data to support it?" And so that really was a sea change moment in the infrastructure for the early care and education system.

Ever since then we have seen a very different expectation of public systems and a shift toward modernization. These things happen slowly often in government systems, so there is still a lot of modernization happening, but it really started in that time around 2020 when we saw that change. And we have seen a lot of progress in data systems over that time, a lot with our own work, but just a greater emphasis on the need for data and the way that technology helps states get there. We've seen the values that system thinking and holistic data can bring to the table, but there's a risk there, a risk that will fall into that old trap of thinking that more data is the same as better data.

Sabina Andersson: We tend to get very output focused and like, "This is going to be the new shiny thing. This is going to save the world." It's like, "That's not how it works." The real progress is really when you have iterations, when you have feedback loops, when you continuously evolve system for the better. And that is, I think, the most commonly misunderstood is that we have to break this model of being output focused to outcome focused, even with our technology. And it is a culture shift for government, but I think it's also a culture shift for people too.

Jamee Herbert: It's not just about the right kind of research either. Well-presented information in a way that's easy to access and understand will go a long way toward closing the knowledge gap for both parents and legislators.

Sabina Andersson: And I think we are seeing kind of like a pivot because there are more and more people coming in with more of our diverse background in building technology to be able to drive towards the right type of outcomes. We've seen pretty commonly that product delivery has been an acceptance criteria maybe based on legislative mandate, but the legislative mandate is still going to come from what they're hearing from constituents, but it doesn't replace good product research. So how are people using products out there? How are people expecting to use products? What problems do they have? How do we drive towards the right product outcomes? And kind of similar to when I was talking about technology outcomes, product outcomes is also an important part to keeping that product relevant to people because otherwise you're going to have a new product, a new product, a new product, while you actually can evolve usually one product to meet constituents' needs.

Jamee Herbert: The need for inclusion and equity is also incredibly important.

Sabina Andersson: I've gone through various different types of research and seen that, yes, we talk to users, but are we actually talking to users in the right way or do we tend to talk to people who have time and trust in government? And if you only talk to people who have time and trust in government and also who tend to be only English speakers, you are going to be developing for a particular type of person. And if you don't have qualitative and quantitative data in terms of product analytics, you're only going to get a piece of the puzzle.

Jamee Herbert: That push and pull dynamic is crucial. Yes, we need to ground our advocacy efforts and policy decisions and data, but that data needs to be representative of the entire community. One of the benefits of embedding product leaders like Sabina and state agencies is that the same user research principles that guide sophisticated technology development can also be applied to government programs. This unique approach could revolutionize the ECE landscape if implemented at scale. It's easier said than done, but if it's working for Colorado, it could be a model for other states too. Across this series, we're showing you every piece of the puzzle of a system that has been built to break. In the next episode, we define exactly what quality childcare looks like in America.

Simon Workman: It was definitely stressful because you don't find out until a month before that there's a spot available and it's like, "Well, I have to go back to work in April. Maybe we'll have a slot, maybe we won't, and how are we going to make it work?"

Jamee Herbert: We can only fix the system if we first understand why and where it's broken. So subscribe and share the podcast with others who are navigating this system too. And go to getbridgecare.com if you want to learn more about what can be done to help families access high quality, affordable childcare. The link is in the show description.