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Some of the following resources were compiled for a Cantigny conference on Early Care and Education System Building: Maintaining Momentum in a Time of Fiscal Crisis, held in June 2003, sponsored by the Build Initiative and the McCormick Tribune Foundation.

Visual representations of a system System elements System change tools State-of-the-states Coordination of early care and education programs

Visual representations of a system
The following pictures of systems show how different groups illustrate their efforts. These are not all parallel efforts, but the variety shows the range and complexity of the components in an early childhood system. Ultimately, each effort will have to define its own system and understand the relationships between the parts. These examples are intended to show the possibilities.

Systems Change Efforts – Charles Bruner, Child and Family Policy Center
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Framework: Universal Child Needs and their Policy and Program Counterparts – State Early Childhood Policy Technical Assistance Network
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North Carolina Smart Start
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Pyramid for a Comprehensive System of Care – West Virginia’s Governor’s Cabinet on Children and Families, http://www.prevnet.org/pyramid/pyramid.html

A Model for Child Care Quality Improvement – Alliance for Early Childhood Finance,
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Early Childhood Comprehensive System Components and Partners – Health Systems Research
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System elements
Building Comprehensive Early Childhood Systems: Preconference Resources (2007)
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The May 8, 2007 Early Childhood Systems Building Preconference sponsored by the Build Initiative and the Smart Start National Technical Assistance Center brought state and community leaders together with national experts to flesh out system building strategies. The Preconference was built around the work of the Early Childhood Systems Working Group in defining both the critical interconnected elements of an early childhood system (early care and education, family support, health, mental health and nutrition and early intervention) and the crosscutting issues for developing effective systems (culture competence and diversity, governance, communications, and financing).

Back to Basics: Essential Components of an American Early Care and Education System (2001)
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Dr. Sharon Lynn Kagan acknowledges there is no accepted definition of an early care and education system. She outlines her vision of an early childhood system, defining the eight essential components, and providing concrete suggestions for New York’s efforts to build a system for Universal PreK.

Overview of the State Maternal and Child Health Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems (ECCS) Initiative (2003)
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The Maternal and Child Health Bureau will award states up to $100,000 per year to support State Maternal and Child Health Agencies and their partner organizations in collaborative efforts to strengthen the state’s early childhood system of services for young children and their families.

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System change tools
Babies and Toddlers in the Policy Picture: A Self-Assessment Checklist
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Zero to Three has developed this checklist for states to use in assessing their policies for children under age 3. The goals of good health, strong families, and positive early learning experiences form the framework of the self-assessment questions.

The Stages of Systemic Change
http://www.insites.org/documents/systemic.doc
Beverly L. Parsons develops "A Continuum of Systemic Change" by defining six developmental stages and six key elements of change. While this paper assumes there is already a system in place to change, it offers insights into the developmental stages of systems reform. Beverly Parsons is the Executive Director of InSites, a Colorado-based non-profit organization that conducts research and evaluation and provides technical assistance to schools, districts, states, and organizations engaged in major change within education systems. The InSites website includes additional information on using logic models and evaluation. Go to: http://www.insites.org/publications.html.

Policy Matters
http://www.cssp.org/major_initiatives/policy_counts.html
Policy Matters is an initiative of the Center for the Study of Social Policy. It attempts to offer coherent, comprehensive information regarding the strength and adequacy of state policies affecting children, families, and communities. This is done by establishing consensus among policy experts and state leaders regarding the cluster of policies believed to offer the best opportunity for improving key child and family results. Further, the project puts forth key benchmarks for gauging the strength of existing state policies aimed at these results.

Pathways Mapping Initiative
http://www.pathwaystooutcomes.org/
This website outlines a logic model for ensuring the outcome: Children Ready for School. Its goal is to provide information on what has worked elsewhere, and to make it easier for an array of stakeholders to agree on plausible strategies—across disciplines and jurisdictions—to ensure children are ready for school.

Planning for Success: Mapping Goals, Services and Outcomes for Program Improvement
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For a hard copy, call the Ounce of Prevention Fund at (312) 922-3863.
This new report by the Ounce of Prevention’s Birth to Five Project describes the uses and many benefits of developing a logic model to improve services for young children and their families. While the focus of the publication is programs and services, the information on developing a logic model can be adapted to state systems. Planning for Success includes: an overview of logic models, how to create a new logic model or refine an existing model, and examples of logic models and how they are effectively incorporated into management of a variety of programs and services for young children.

Smart Start Toolkit
http://smartnet.smartstart-nc.org/toolkit/main.htm
Smart Start has garnered national recognition and is considered a model for comprehensive early childhood education initiatives. In 2001, the North Carolina Partnership for Children established a National Technical Assistance Center to assist other states with the development of an early education initiative. This website offers a toolkit of information on replicating the Smart Start model of comprehensive service integration for young children. Topics include: child care, family support and involvement, health supports, evaluation, needs and resources assessment, and planning.

West Virginia’s Pyramid of Care
http://www.prevnet.org/pyramid/
The Pyramid of Care is a tool for examining the system of resources for children and families. It is based on a model originally circulated by the Children's Defense Fund. A pyramid is used to show that the majority of resources and expenditures should be made at the base of the pyramid. Crisis resources should be fewer in number and are represented at the top of the pyramid.

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State-of-the-states
Building Connections resources: State case studies of early childhood system building
The system building efforts of six states, including Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Vermont, are profiled in a case study document and cross-state summary matrix. These resources have been developed for the Building Connections meeting in June 2006, and relate specifically to state-community connections and governance issues.
Download "Beyond Parralel Play: State and Community Partnerships in Building Early Learning Systems" Powerpoint
Download "State Case Studies of Early Childhood System Building"
Download "Building Connections Cross-State Summary Matrix"

Getting Every Child Ready for School: A Foundation for Success
http://www.sreb.org/main/Goals/Publications/Every_Child_Ready.asp
This report from the Southern Regional Education Board outlines four successful strategies for high-quality early learning programs: (1) Offer pre-kindergarten to all children who are at risk of academic failure, not just those from families living in poverty; (2) Strive to meet quality standards; (3) Ensure that all children have a school-readiness assessment before they enter first grade; and (4) Continue to place a priority on programs that encourage vaccinations and health insurance for children.

The Role of States in Improving Health and Health Care for Young Children
http://www.cmwf.org/publications/publications_show.htm?doc_id=288611
Based on discussions with officials from all key child health care programs administered by states, this Commonwealth Fund report finds that successful quality improvement ultimately depends on changes to the culture, traditions, and practice patterns of the health care delivery system. Potential solutions that state officials consider promising include developing specific child health quality measures, measuring and monitoring performance, making information on quality performance easily available, rewarding superior performance, and using performance measures in purchasing and program decisions.

Going to Scale with High-Quality Early Education: Choices and Consequences in Universal Pre-Kindergarten Efforts
http://www.rand.org/publications/TR/TR237/
The movement toward universal pre-kindergarten (pre- K) presents policymakers and implementers with many new challenges. Drawing on a review of the literature and interviews with pre-K personnel in a representative sample of eight states, this Rand report describes the challenges confronting states that are seeking to create statewide public systems of high-quality pre-K services, as well as some of the progress they have made in doing so.

Helping Young Children Succeed
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This joint research and policy report developed by ZERO TO THREE and the National Conference of State Legislatures describes how state policymakers can support the healthy social-emotional development of young children from birth to age five. The brief defines early childhood social-emotional development; describes what can happen when children face emotional and behavioral problems; and outlines what actions can be taken at the state level to support healthy social-emotional development in babies and young children.

State Analyses
Several states have catalogued the state- and federally-funded programs for early childhood development as a first step to improving coordination among these programs.

Illinois’ Ounce of Prevention Fund describes federally and state-funded birth to three programs and initiatives in Illinois. This 83-page document includes information on over 25 programs, and 8 system development initiatives.
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Wisconsin Collaborating Partners shows how funds flow from the federal government, to state government to programs for children. This map includes Head Start, child care, IDEA, Title 1, and USDA funding streams for early education. Click on any program to find out more about the program.
http://www.collaboratingpartners.com/childcarechart.htm

Map and Track: State Initiatives for Young Children and Families (2000)
pp. 26-32, Download here
The National Center for Children and Poverty analyzes the system building efforts of states related to the care and education of young children ages 0-5. Map and Track divides state approaches into four groups: comprehensive, incremental, limited collaboration, and multi-age.

Build Initiative State Plans
http://www.buildinitiative.org/statepartners.html
Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have developed plans to create systems for children from birth through age five through the Build Initiative. Teams of state agency administrators, advocates, and service providers are working collaboratively to:

• reform existing state systems;
• test new models;
• connect programs and services that operate in isolation and/or at cross purposes; and
• help ensure that all young children have access to early learning systems that result in school readiness.

A Compendium of Multi-State Early Childhood Initiatives
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This compendium provides a brief description of multi-state initiatives with a strong focus on early childhood and at least some emphasis on state policy development to improve early childhood care and education. The compendium organizes the initiatives into one of the following four categories: comprehensive school readiness, early care and education, health and physical well-being, and family well-being and self-sufficiency. Not included are initiatives that focus upon only one state or that focus upon only community-level work.

Systems Change and School Readiness (2003)
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In California, systems change is being sparked by a $413 million School Readiness Initiative. This report was developed by the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities as a tool to help facilitate systems change efforts at the community level. It includes a discussion of the organizational and administrative changes associated with systems reform; the role of state and county leadership in facilitating systems change; and an overview of the change process, strategies for overcoming resistance to change and lessons learned from previous systems change efforts.

Building an Early Learning System. The ABCs of Planning and Governance Structures (2004)
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Download the companion policy brief
This publication, developed by The Child and Family Policy Center, in collaboration with the Build Initiative, shares state models and rules of thumb to consider in developing planning and governance approaches to create and manage an early learning system. The draft form was used as the basis for discussion at a Smart Start/Build meeting on early childhood system governance in August 2004 in New Bern, North Carolina. The Build Initiative developed a companion policy brief, which is intended for policymakers and others who may not want to read through all of the details in the full publication.

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Coordination of early care and education programs
State Initiatives to Promote Early Learning: Next Steps in Coordinating Subsidized Child Care, Head Start, and State Prekindergarten (2001)
Download the full report
Download the summary
Download state descriptions: Georgia, Massachusetts, Ohio
States often struggle with two key social goals: the need to promote school readiness for children and the need to support working families given increasing labor force participation among mothers with young children. This paper, written by Rachel Schumacher, Mark Greenberg and Joan Lombardi, describes the challenges states face in addressing these issues, responses to these challenges, and recommendations for the future. The findings of the paper are based on examinations of three states with significant experience in developing a major early education initiative and coordination of subsidized child care, Head Start and state prekindergarten systems. The profiled state initiatives are the Georgia Prekindergarten Program, Massachusetts' Community Partnerships for Children Initiative, and Ohio's state funding of Head Start and expansion of Head Start partnerships with child care programs.

Analysis of Potential Barriers to Creating Coordinated Absence Policies for Collaborations Between Head Start and CCDF and TANF-Funded Programs (2002)
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This report, commissioned by the Southern Institute on Children and Families, analyzes the statutory and regulatory provisions relevant to child absence policies in Head Start and in child care funded under the Child Care and Development Fund and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grants. It discusses some practical considerations for states interested in adopting coordinated absence policies. An appendix provides additional detail about current law and provides examples of current absence policy practices in the Southern states.

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