The non-profit organization Texans Care for Children drives policy change to improve kids’ lives, helping them to grow up healthy, safe, and successful. But without local data, Texans Care for Children struggled to inform lawmakers and advocates about how early childhood wellbeing varies across the state. Lawmakers could use this information to determine which regions desperately need investment or to identify which communities have successful initiatives to replicate elsewhere.
Texans Care for Children asked for the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center’s help in providing data to develop their Texas School Readiness Dashboard, which paints a holistic picture of the factors influencing a Texas child’s ability to enter school ready to learn. This blog post covers our powerful partnership—including creative solutions to find the local data needed to understand how school readiness plays out across the Lone Star State.
Texans Care for Children’s Pivotal Work
Our Center’s collaborations with advocates are crucial to helping accelerate states’ implementation of evidence-based policies that help children thrive from the start. Texans Care for Children has a track record of success at the state legislature. In the 2023 legislative session, Texans Care for Children played a leadership role in passing 12-month postpartum Medicaid coverage for Texas parents. In most states, pregnant people can access Medicaid at higher income levels than other adults, but pregnancy coverage traditionally lasts for only 60 days following birth. In another victory last year, Texans Care for Children helped secure increased state funding for early childhood intervention for infants and toddlers with disabilities.
The Texas School Readiness Dashboard
In 2020, Texans Care for Children began facilitating discussions among lawmakers, business and education leaders, and other stakeholders across Texas to strengthen the state’s approach to school readiness. A broad consensus emerged that the state needed a holistic view of what children and families experience in the leadup to the first day of school.
Texans Care for Children worked with key collaborators across the state to determine a set of indicators that would tangibly measure how well Texas and its communities serve families with young children. That’s when Texans Care for Children and the Center joined forces.
In 2022, Texans Care for Children launched the inaugural Texas School Readiness Dashboard, a resource grown out of the conversations with collaborators and the Center. The Center provided state-level and national data for the first iteration of the dashboard. This project exemplifies how the Center can contribute to the work of others in the field—and where our partners may build on our work in a new way.
“After getting the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center’s initial feedback on our Texas School Readiness Dashboard, we decided to contract with them for additional data, a better understanding of the main takeaways, and help articulating the research connections between our measures and school readiness,” said Texans Care for Children CEO Stephanie Rubin. “The whole team has been wonderful to work with.”
Challenges & Solutions for Local Data
A year later, Texans Care for Children and the Center re-engaged in this work to tackle a new data challenge. In working with local advocates and policymakers, the need for local data arose. To best serve these local collaborators, the organization sought to provide information about specific regions within Texas.
Although many of our current data sources offer an excellent range of topics and reliable national numbers, local estimates prove challenging for three primary reasons:
- The data only drill down to a respondent’s state.
- Even if, for example, the data report an individual respondent’s county, only a few counties in the state will be represented.
- When more granular location information exists, the sample size is often too small to generate statistically meaningful estimates.
Our Data team applied our expertise in nine national datasets to assess the availability of local geographic identifiers and evaluate how we might apply those identifiers to the analysis we performed at the state level for the first iteration of the dashboard. We presented the challenges of local analysis to Texans Care for Children and provided ideas for how we might examine meaningful regions within Texas, given the limitations of the nationally representative datasets. In consultation with Texans Care for Children, we developed a plan to report measures at different regional levels based on the purpose of the measure.
Almost every measure required a different solution, but our methodology offered the best approach to providing local poverty, maltreatment, birth, insurance coverage, SNAP receipt, and child food insecurity estimates that hold meaning for Texas advocates, practitioners, parents, and lawmakers.
These groups are among the primary audiences of the Texas School Readiness Dashboard, and local data empower these groups to track where an area is succeeding—and where more investments may be needed to help all children thrive. Now, Texans Care for Children can offer these vital insights in regularly updated data. When existing national data sources are not built to generate these estimates, creative approaches can yield actionable data-driven insights.
