The BUILD Initiative is utilizing national expertise to facilitate stakeholder engagement and inform recommendations on how to position the state’s quality rating and improvement system, Quality Counts California, for broad scaling and for greater focus on responsive quality improvement that coordinates all of the California Department of Education’s quality initiatives and that benefits the full continuum of early learning and care providers.
This project consisted of 32 key informant interviews, 8 focus groups, a workforce survey of 4,800 respondents, 2 input and feedback meetings with the regional hubs/local consortia, feedback meetings with the PDG State Stewardship Team, and regular in-person and virtual meetings with the California early leadership at the California Department of Education (CDE) and First 5 California (F5CA). The work included the development of several models for consideration by CDE and F5CA in the design of the quality improvement system. One was selected and more fully fleshed out, and it proposed to change current relationships and roles, identified some gap areas and key policy areas for improvement, and provided recommendations.
Our work was designed to inform the state government of options for moving the work forward. Prior to the pandemic, the work was on track to be fully incorporated into the Master Plan, with the recommendations to become part of the Master Plan.
After the initial startup logistics were sorted out, the project went very well. The main problem we encountered was that we were not able to send out the results to the many people who participated in the development of the work, so the literally thousands of people who participated were not thanked and do not know of the recommendations.
We prepared a lengthy report, which contains our conclusions. (Reach out for report)
As the state recovers and has an opportunity to continue to rethink its early childhood education work, we hope that the model and the ideas set forth in the paper could be adapted and used. We also hope that the California Department of Education finds a way to distribute the report we prepared so that the many people who helped inform the model can see how valuable their thoughts and ideas were, and the level of influence they had on the work.
