By: Mary Ann Bates, Executive Director, California Cradle-to-Career Data System and Marko Mijic, Undersecretary, California Health and Human Services
How does access to early education affect a child’s health and success later in life? What types of housing assistance programs most successfully help families? What behavioral health interventions best support children and youth in the classroom?
These are just a few of the many questions government must answer to effectively serve our communities. Too often, the information needed to answer them is locked in the silos of how services are delivered. A school has data on their students’ education, but lacks insight into the social services the children receive. Service providers serving children with disabilities lack data to know how they fare when they move on in their educational journeys.
Many researchers and advocates focus on policy-relevant questions that can impact people, but it can be hard for them to know what questions policy makers are prioritizing today. And it’s even harder for them to navigate how to get access to data—whether open source or de-identified data—that could let them tackle those important questions.
In partnership, the California Cradle-to-Career Data System (C2C) and the California Health and Human Services Agency (CalHHS) outline specific plans for how government can work with researchers, advocates, and philanthropies to identify key unanswered questions to aid in making policy and improve outcomes for communities.
How can we make measurable progress?
- 1. Government needs to communicate a clear learning agenda that is developed in an inclusive way.
- Government needs to make information available so it can be used to answer these questions. That means linking data across sectors, having aggregated data openly available, and having a clear process for requesting access to the underlying data.
- Government needs to welcome philanthropic communities and researchers to answer the key questions.
- Government needs to facilitate an open learning network to ensure that we can build a library of findings.
What’s a learning agenda?
Learning agendas are systematic plans for identifying and addressing priority questions. They are a way to identify the key unanswered questions. These are the questions that—when answered—would have the biggest impact on how government provides effective, useful services. Learning agendas can be developed in different ways, but here are a few key principles:
- Choose actionable questions—ones where the answer would let you take a different decision or implement a program differently.
- Develop the key questions inclusively, with communities having a decision making role.
- Share the learning agenda publicly.
- Update it regularly.
Our combined efforts at CalHHS and C2C have begun this work. For example, when the Cradle-to-Career Data System Act was first passed, the law included six specific topic areas (from the impact of early education to how education affects job outcomes) the data system should address, along with the priority of being able to break the data down by region, race, ethnicity, and gender. Additionally, the Center for Data Insights and Innovation at CalHHS has focused on key issue areas including behavioral health, homelessness, and whole child with the goal of bringing data sources together in a secure environment to generate greater insights into what is possible.
How should government make data available?
Answering the priority questions in the learning agendas is possible only if government makes the relevant data available. CalHHS and C2C are working together to make this possible.
First, we are linking data across silos. CalHHS is bringing together data across its 12 departments and 5 offices to ensure that Californians can receive holistic, connected services. The Cradle-to-Career Data System connects education and workforce data together with health and human services data. These combined efforts are breaking data out of their programmatic silos so that you can answer questions like: What are the later life trajectories of the children our program served? What supports and paths help people land jobs with livable wages? What are the key social drivers of health in communities?
Second, we are working to make aggregated data openly available. For example, CalHHS built its Open Data Portal to enable external partners, including researchers to further leverage the data to develop new insights, generate new technologies, and deploy new models of care and services delivery. At Cradle-to-Career, we are working to build a set of planned data dashboards that were developed through more than 100 public meetings and intensive community engagement.
Third, we have plans for a clear process for researchers to request access to de-identified data to conduct research studies. We expect those research studies to be an important way to answer the questions in the learning agenda.
Welcoming philanthropic communities and researchers to help answer the key questions
Government plays an important role in communicating the learning agenda that we develop collaboratively. Answering those questions needs the active participation of the philanthropic community and the researchers and nonprofits they support.
One way to do this is to welcome both the research community, backed by philanthropic funding, to bring the research and qualitative information that can shed light on these questions.
We can also be inclusive by having transparent processes throughout. For example, we are transparent about which data points we are already connecting and which ones are planned for the future. We will also be transparent about what data requests come to us, and which ones our data partners approved or denied. (The C2C Data and Tools Advisory Board will review all requests C2C received in a public meeting once a year.) We also plan to build a research library of the studies done with the data we host. This will let Californians learn from the studies—those that found encouraging bright spots and those that identified gaps or challenges.
In doing all this work, we at CalHHS and C2C are guided by the fact that the information we steward belongs to the people of California. We are working to build the tools and systems that will let Californians—and the people who serve them—have the information they need to build a California for All.
Mary Ann Bates serves as the Executive Director of the Office of Cradle-to-Career Data within the California Government Operations Agency. Marko Mijic serves as the Undersecretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency.