Mapping the family experience and underlying tech in Massachusetts Early Childhood Education
Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care (EEC)
November 2023 - March 2024
Why This Matters For Families
Families across the United States — especially those with young children — are struggling. Access to affordable child care is a top concern. The U.S. is home to 22.1 million children younger than 6. More than two-thirds of these children (14.6 million) live in households where all adults are working. Child care subsidies help make care more affordable for working parents.
Massachusetts families are unique in that more children under six live in dual earner households (76%) than nationwide (69%). This likely places an even tighter squeeze on child care availability in the community, since less of this work is absorbed by parents in the home. While there are very real challenges on the supply side of child care, the focus of this effort was on exploring the demand side - and on deeply understanding how families seeking care navigate available information to search for programs, as well as how state data systems could better help address unmet needs of families.
Implementation Challenge
The New Practice Lab assisted the Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) in improving the family experience of accessing subsidized care through the Child Care Financial Assistance (CCFA) program in Massachusetts.
We worked in two areas: mapping how families navigate services, and advising on a technical strategy for EEC’s IT products on the “back end” to better enable the “front end” family experience. Through our process, we identified opportunities to improve the department’s data ecosystem, communicate more effectively with families, and smooth the search and enrollment experience.
Our Approach
Our process consisted of traditional research and analysis, as well as deep, qualitative listening and engagement with family participants, MA EEC staff and community serving organizations. This process included process mapping, desk research, engagement with existing materials, and interviews with the groups listed above.
ORIGINAL OBJECTIVE 1
Research and understand the experiences of eligible families trying to access child care subsidies in Massachusetts.
WHAT WE DID
Conducted 1:1 interviews with families in English and Spanish (16 interviews representing 55 children)
Conducted interviews with organizations who work with families with young children
Conducted interviews with EEC staff
Reviewed previous early childcare and education access studies in MA, operational data, and public facing materials for families developed by state agencies and social sector organizations
Delivered report to MA EEC describing the experiences and challenges families face when trying to access subsidized care for their children and advancing several recommendations, which were accepted by the state.
ORIGINAL OBJECTIVE 2
Support EEC’s Chief Product Officer with refining a technical strategy for managing EEC’s IT products.
WHAT WE DID
Worked with product and IT staff to map EEC’s technology ecosystem
Interviewed product owners, data analysts, and technical vendors to understand the strengths and limitations of EEC’s data ecosystem
Identified data consistency and access to data as major barriers to decision making inside of EEC
Drafted a new data architecture and data modernization strategy in order to address the issues of data consistency and barriers to access
Worked with EEC’s IT and product leadership to create a low risk application-by-application strategy for modernizing EEC’s software ecosystem
Worked with EEC’s IT and product leadership to draft a more aspirational, blue sky long term vision for EEC’s software ecosystem
Made recommendations for technology ecosystem improvements, which were accepted by MA EEC’s Chief Product Officer and interim Chief Information Officer
What We Learned
This project deepened the New Practice Lab’s understanding of family experiences accessing subsidized child care, as well as the technical and logistical realities of delivering child care assistance. We identified delivery challenges and specific breakdowns along this journey. The team explored ways the EEC department could address these issues, many of which could be generalized to other states. These concrete strategies could ultimately produce a significant improvement for families.
It should be said that while we focused on the family experience, the CCFA program is operating in an environment of provider scarcity, which negatively impacts families’ ability to use a child care subsidy. There are families who qualify for and enroll, yet still cannot find child care providers with availability. Despite state investments, there are not enough providers and child care slots to meet the demand for care.
“What I see the most especially … the infant care is just dire. Especially out here. I just— I see it, I hear it all the time. It’s just that there isn’t enough infant care. And it’s scary because I think people are using a lot of unsafe care just because they have to work. They have to work so they have to figure things out...The vouchers may be there, the funding may be there for the infant care, but there’s not enough space in family child care or centers. And it’s really challenging, these poor babies.”
While supply issues remain, the team documented other reasons why families may not access child care assistance:
Underserved communities face bigger barriers to accessing benefits. Recently immigrated families often perceived barriers to starting the voucher process. Broadly, families were overwhelmed with both starting and continuing the enrollment process because of the time and energy required, especially as many had previous negative experiences with the program.
“When people tell you, look, they can take away your kids and it’s difficult for a mother to just let her kids go, so I say if this is going to hurt me or my kids, then I say, well I’m just not going to do it.”
Many families find the ‘right door’ to CCFA through word of mouth and personal connections, including friends, community organizations, health providers, and family therapists. Some of these personal connections or advocates have the added benefit of being able nudge the process along through emailing staff members for updates on approval status.
When a family was partnered with a community serving organization that could help them navigate the process, both logistically and emotionally, we heard the most positive experiences. Those who did not have someone to act as a guide and to encourage them in the next step described the process more negatively and often abandoned the process or did not successfully complete the journey to care.
Families do a lot of waiting, and the process for receiving help is opaque. In the absence of being able to actually shorten the application process, keeping people updated on their progress and communicating with them matters a great deal. Experiences could be improved with efforts to manage expectations, in addition to process improvements that could reduce wait times where possible.
“They just take your information and basically say like “somebody will contact you” and then what ends up happening is you keep calling them because you don’t hear anything. I never heard anything from them. Not once did anyone call me to give me any information it was me calling them and then I just got fed up I was like I just got to do it myself.”
EEC’s data ecosystem impairs its ability to make data-driven decisions. EEC is able to answer relatively sophisticated research questions and their staff have access to a large amount of meaningful data. However, the data that EEC uses to understand their constituents and make program decisions is spread across many different software systems, and is sometimes collected multiple times and stored in multiple locations. The project team found that EEC’s data analysts did not have direct access to these data sources, and had to work directly with vendor software staff – slowing down analysis and pulling technical staff away from system improvements. Massachusetts has since enabled access for analysts.
EEC’s constituent-facing software is structured around the organization’s historical structure, not the needs of its audience. Different users (families, care providers, resource and referral agencies, etc) have access to software portals based on their role in the EEC ecosystem, but the experience is often fragmented, requiring them to access multiple portals to find the information they need and report basic data to the state. While it will take significant time and staff investments, shifting the software ecosystem to provide a single comprehensive access point for each unique audience will improve program efficiency across the board, reduce the frequency of inaccurate or conflicting data, and ultimately improve the experience that families have interacting with EEC.
Next Steps
Potential solutions to these widespread burdens are not one size fits all, and they rely heavily on the availability of childcare slots. Our solutions focused on priority areas currently causing difficulties for families, including how we can:
Make it easier for families to navigate the CCFA journey on their own if they want to do so
Continue to leverage partnerships with community-based organizations
Target more research and communication towards communities experiencing the biggest barriers
Make incremental improvements to reduce wait times, while working on more comprehensive system modernization
Prioritize critical IT enhancements:
Continue aligning IT systems with program policy and assigning dedicated product owners to continuously review and recommend system requirements that will map to changing program needs
Shift from an ecosystem of fragmented, decentralized data into a single shared data service with explicit access points for data analysts
Transition from a fragmented ecosystem that requires referral agencies and providers to log into multiple, disparate sites toward a new ecosystem that allows users to do everything they need in a single place
Wait list management:
Many child care subsidy programs serve priority populations (homeless families, or those receiving cash assistance), but they may lack ways to assign priority effectively and fairly in wait list systems. Consider scoring, etc.
Implement fair removal policies and document metadata for waitlist integrity
Improve transparency regarding family waitlist statuses
Many of these opportunities apply to family experiences with child care assistance programs in states across the country. While Massachusetts is still considering which improvements it will begin to implement, the New Practice Lab has convened a cohort of municipal, county, and state leaders who are dedicated to effective implementation in early childhood programs to collectively surface and address the common challenges organizations face when administering early childhood programs.
