A New Year for Federal Reviews

September 10, 2021 1pm Cathleen Armstead, Ph.D.

This year is a new year for federal reviews. For the 2021–2022 fiscal year, Focus Area One (FA1) reviews will be conducted as usual, in a virtual format, starting in October 2021. However, unlike last year, Focus Area Two (FA2) reviews will be conducted in person (if possible and if local conditions allow) beginning in January 2022.

Grantees will be asked to describe the changes in the delivery of services during the pandemic—whether that delivery was virtual, face-to-face, or a hybrid. For programs providing virtual services, it will be important to describe how resources were allocated to ensure children had equitable access to digital technology. It will also be important to describe how teachers and other caregivers were trained to provide virtual services. Face-to-face instruction will require a focus on how children were brought to class safely, how social distancing occurred, and the types of sanitizing equipment purchased and used.

Grantees will also be asked to explain the use of funds received from the CARES Act, the CRRSA Act, and the American Rescue Plan. Funds from the CARES Act supported early childhood development for essential workers, with many childcare programs supporting or funding digital equity initiatives. Grantees might be asked if such initiatives were requested in your plans, and if so, how did you measure the impact? The challenges of the pandemic, the differential impact of the pandemic on Head Start/Early Head Start participants, and the pivoting in place are essential topics to think through and discuss for your review.

Focus Area One Reviews are intended to focus on the structure of your program, including program design and management, quality education and child development program services, quality health program services, quality family and community engagement services, and effective ERSEA strategies and fiscal infrastructure. The FA1 is a review of how you design your services with intention and corresponding to data.

Focus Area Two Reviews will begin on-site in January 2022 (local conditions permitting). Focus Area Two builds on the understanding of the program provided in the FA1 review. Focus Area Two examines how well you are implementing your design with intention and corresponding to data.

Data Tours

For both FA1 and FA2, the use of data—and data tours—is crucial. Federal reviews require that grantees collect, analyze, and explain data in all aspects of the Head Start/Early Head Start program.

Data can be thought of as a detailed description. With the facets of your detailed description, you will tell a story: the data tour.

Community Assessment

The community assessment is central to designing services. With fine-grained detail in your community assessment, you will be able to focus your efforts and target your services to the people who need them most. Your community assessment should indicate the types of poverty in your community (e.g., rural, urban, multi-generational, immigrant, industry closures) along with the absolute figures as well as rates of poverty. Be prepared to identify census tracts where poverty is concentrated and be able to describe the population (e.g., young, single mothers, multiple families crowded into single-family homes, a community that is linguistically isolated). Understanding the data at this level of detail is key to providing necessary services, and you will want to be able to explain the connection between the needs and the services. If you have a high population of teenage mothers, are you partnering with the local high schools or do you have a Prenatal Academy? If you have a linguistically isolated community, are you providing English classes on-site? This is the data and the data connections you want to highlight in your Federal Review (both FA1 and FA2).

A second source of data or detailed description will examine the staffing structure. Do teaching staff and family service workers speak the languages in the community and understand the culture, including cultural barriers to seeking help?

Tell the story of how you employ former and current parents; tell the story of how long your employees stay with you and their loyalty. You will present data on longevity (loyalty), wages and salaries (employee satisfaction), and employee engagement (survey).

Connect the Dots

Importantly, the program will describe how monitoring and program data are used to inform continuous improvement. Head Start/Early Head Start programs collect a wide range of data; what is important is how the data is used to make decisions. Data on attendance can reflect who is absent, who is chronically absent, and average daily attendance. More important will be to connect who is absent or chronically absent to other sources of data. Does your community assessment indicate a transportation need? (Have you obtained free bus passes?) Is the data on attendance specific to a single center or even a classroom?

Data on child outcomes and teacher performance need to be connected. CLASS scores are meant to drive targeted professional development. Your program should focus on whole-group training when a specific dimension or domain is lower than expected.

Your program should also focus on individual coaching with teachers who have an unexpectedly lower score. Targeted professional development can be implemented easily with the use of myTeachstone™, an online program that relies on CLASS data to present resources to each teacher.

Child Outcomes

Child outcomes are an important way of planning for each individual child’s growth. Child outcomes also need to be aggregated—and disaggregated. How are the children growing in each classroom? Are these growth outcomes related to teacher performance? How are children who speak another language in the home learning as compared to their peers? Data does not speak for itself. You need to understand the data and then tell the story. Your classroom activities should speak to your data—your story. If science is a key goal, how are you incorporating gardens into your daily activities? How are you measuring growth in science and nature? If language acquisition is a key goal, how are your teachers encouraged and coached to use expanded questions and talk to children during transitions and throughout the day?

Family outcomes also tell a singular story. Further, these family outcomes are not isolated but can be collected and compared to attendance data and child outcomes data. Are families engaged (attendance data, family satisfaction surveys)? Are families uncommonly impacted by trauma (COVID-19)? Are families seeking additional resources? Your family assessment should be brief and targeted and reinforce those areas of need found in the community assessment.

Foundations of Data Tours

Plan

Your plan is based on your goal. What do you want your children and families to be able to do at the end of the year? Where are they beginning (baseline data)? What will you do (intervention)? What will you measure (data)? What changes will you make if it is not working (course correction)? Which successful strategies will you expand (appreciative inquiry)?

Policies

Your policies govern that plan. The first and most important policy is to make sure all participants, staff, parents, community members, and managers feel safe providing data that may not be optimum, expressing concerns, sharing uncertainties, and celebrating successes. Data shows what is going on and what to improve; importantly, it also shows what is being done well. Celebrating optimal data is as important as improving processes.

Procedures

Procedures are the nuts and bolts of your policies. The procedures state who collects the data and when. They indicate how often the data is analyzed and how it is communicated.

Data Analysis

Data is often overwhelming to people. The first step is to make it familiar; data should be seen as another form of words. One strategy is to begin with a general brainstorming session of what data is collected for each component, who will collect it, and how it will be collected.

Using visual cues, such as whiteboards and flipchart paper, draw the connections between the data points. Decide which data is imperative, which is important, and which is desirable but not essential. A mind map, as illustrated, is helpful in visualizing the connections.

Once you have decided upon your plan and focus, and have visually depicted the data connections, you now need a time to meet. I recommend a meeting every six weeks for brainstorming/analysis. At these meetings, data is provided in the appropriate data box. Visually seeing your connected data allows for true understanding to emerge and the ability to make data-informed decisions.

To accomplish your goals, you need to adhere to the policies and procedures to help you stay the course. Once these policies and procedures are developed, you will need a system in place so that they are adhered to. A tour guide, such as an external evaluator or implementation planner, is often helpful.