Our members at Action for Children are opposing implementation of a proposed rule from the U.S. Department of Education that would rollback a significant amount of data collection in early education. Please read the below excerpt from Action for Children’s official public comment, and please consider submitting your own public comment by 11:59 tonight!

As the Child Care Resource and Referral Agency for Central Ohio, we have long advocated for policies, programs, and funding that expand access to affordable quality child care and early learning for all children. For us, this is the best way to assure children are well prepared for school and life beyond, families are strong and communities are vibrant.

We often turn to early childhood education data to make policy recommendations that address needed changes and improvements in our nation, state, and district’s early learning systems. This includes data currently available in the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) on whether schools provide early childhood or preschool services or programs; at what cost to parents, if any; and the demographic breakdown of the children served.

Given the importance and uniqueness of data provided by the CRDC as an essential source of education data, and the importance of this data to policy choices our districts and states make to ensure we can effectively and equitably serve the children in our communities, we strongly oppose these proposed changes to the collection of early childhood program data in the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Having seen the impact this data has had on our district and state, we are confident that its value far outweighs any data collection and reporting challenges.