States and federal governments are making greater investments in early childhood education. As K-12 schools and districts are held to rigorous data reporting requirements by state and federal agencies, so far Pre-K education has largely been exempt from these mandates. But five years from now, and probably sooner, that's unlikely to remain the case.

For the time being, largely absent reporting requirements also mean pre-K education organizations tend to capture and collect less data than their K-12 counterparts — leading to significantly lower data use and maturity. Because significant brain development occurs before a child ever enters kindergarten, missed opportunities to inform instruction with data and identify learning barriers are even more impactful at this level.

In the K-12 system, schools build Early Warning Systems, which leverage data to identify potential barriers to a high-school student's success, then apply interventions as early as possible, when the trajectory of the student can still be corrected. There's no question that increased access to data would empower early childhood educators and specialists to have an even greater impact on their students' educational lives than they do now.

But although many states have recently received federal grants (e.g., Preschool Development Grants) targeted specifically at maturing preschool programs, including the collection and use of effectiveness data, these data efforts remain largely below the radar of chief information officers (CIOs) at state education agencies. Yet for instructional and accountability reasons, a connection to existing K-12 data systems is inevitable, and should be planned for proactively today.

Here's why it's crucial to become aware of your state's PDG program — and to start planning ahead today for tomorrow's preschool data challenges.

PDG grants help preschools build infrastructure and expand into targeted communities

It's no secret that statewide preschool is much less programmatically mature than K-12 education. Many federal Pre-K grants don't have a clear programmatic home at the education agency at the state level — instead living at universities, state health organizations and human services departments.

Enter Preschool Development Grants, which help local organizations launch and maintain early education programs — provided they collect and report program data. Currently, a full 46 states have access to multi-million dollar grants earmarked for setting up base-level staffing and programmatic infrastructure, and for collecting data to track each preschool program's effectiveness.

Agencies that succeed in operating these programs in the early phases of the grant can expect grant renewals over the coming years — along with invitations to scale what's working in their operations, both within their own states and in other areas across the country. The long-term goals of the program are to support in-depth strategic planning at the birth-through-five level, while expanding the available range of provider types and settings across the public, private and faith-based sectors.

However, this exciting range of benefits comes with its share of new challenges.

PDGs will require significant adaptation to prevent data siloing

Because pre-K is a fairly new space for this depth of planning and tracking, very few states have incorporated its data needs into their overall data architecture planning. What's more, vendors supporting the pre-K space have had limited exposure to the heavy technical demands of data collection typical in K-12 data systems. However, existing data infrastructure will need to adapt in order to incorporate these new initiatives, or risk creating yet another data silo.

K-12 CIOs have spent much of the past decade working to unsilo their data across the primary and secondary education levels. After years of intricate problem-solving, today's CIOs can not only track student progress across multiple institutions from kindergarten to the post-secondary level, but can make data-driven longitudinal predictions about the effects of interventions.

Now, just when the K-12 data unification process nears maturity, early education use cases are appearing. Inevitable future questions from federal grant programs, state program leaders, state legislators, and other stakeholders will require collecting and reporting pre-K data. In addition, integrating this wave of preschool data into the existing informational ecosystem will require just as much in-depth work as the unification of primary and secondary data — unless CIOs start planning ahead today.

Early Childhood data offers tremendous promise — if we connect the dots in advance

Even if your state hasn't yet begun collecting data on its early childhood efforts, the growing federal financial commitment, and the consensus across states of early childhood education's effectiveness, mean a larger need for data around these programs is coming. And as soon as that happens, it won't be long before state education agency CIOs across the country are tasked with connecting early childhood data to their State Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) infrastructure to allow for state program monitoring, research questions, compliance reporting, and other data uses we have seen evolve in K-12.

The benefits of unifying Pre-K data far outweigh the challenges. Not only will early-education data systems unlock significant federal funding — tomorrow's fully educational data will enable CIOs to track, measure, and predict each child's experience from the birth-through-five level all the way through secondary education, and beyond. That's a powerful benefit for families and educators alike.

At Double Line, we spend a lot of time thinking about strategic implementation of educational data and the trends facing the education community. We've recently worked with multiple state education agencies to incorporate early childhood data into their SLDS infrastructure, and advised others on how early childhood data and the PDG program impacts SLDS planning. We'd love to talk through the unique considerations of your state as you plan ahead and consider what it means to unify your state's early childhood data with your existing K-12 data systems.