Create concrete mechanisms for public participation

The California Cradle-to-Career system planning process created several ways for community members to provide input into the design of the data system.

• Open Meetings: All planning meetings were open to the public. Because the meetings were being held during the pandemic over Zoom, dozens of community members participated in most meetings and were able to contribute their thoughts by entering comments in chat or making formal public comment. Meeting materials, notes, and recordings were posted to the project website, with frequent listserv alerts about the timing and topics for planning meetings.
• Public Participation in Planning: In the Data Governance section of this website, you can read more about two key advisory groups that supported the planning process. In addition, community members were invited to serve on the various subcommittees to help shape recommendations. For example, staff from a regional data trust joined agency representatives on the Technology & Security Subcommittee to share lessons learned about data integration and research, and advocacy organization representatives sat on the Research Agenda Subcommittee to help identify priority research questions. The Community Engagement Subcommittee included 30 advocates, educators, and community organization representatives who made recommendations on how to create strong feedback loops with data users, support evidence-based decision making and analytical capacity, and ensure equitable access to actionable information.
• Legislative Staff: The planning team also made a concerted effort to engage legislative staff throughout the process by holding quarterly updates and talking through the developing recommendations to ensure that these stakeholders understood how they would address the priorities spelled out in the legislation that shaped the planning process.
• Presentations: The planning team made dozens of presentations to community organizations and at educator and research conferences. After a set of tools had been identified through the planning process, hundreds of people attended webinars in English and Spanish that outlined the information that would be made available through the tools and provided an opportunity for feedback on ways to make the tools more effective.

Some of the challenges with inviting broader input stem from the nature of the data held in state administrative data sets. State agencies have historically focused on information necessary for accountability requirements. This means that information is largely focused on fundamentals such as enrollment and completion. State data sets rarely capture process measures that would help to evaluate all the mechanisms that foster and constrain student success. When parties like teachers, parents, and advocates are invited to the table, they often focus on information that is not available through state agencies.

The planning for California’s data system happened during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. When the planning team first began engaging the public about the potential focus of the data system, educators and parents were desperate for information that could help address unprecedented challenges, such as whether students had access to the internet and whether family members had contracted the disease. Inviting this input, only to be forced to clarify that this type of information was not currently available, could generate greater frustration.

Therefore, the planners listened for global themes that could be addressed through available data. For example, requests for information on internet access highlighted the importance of students’ access to fundamental resources that allow them to learn. This led to prioritizing institutional measures that could offer context about student outcomes, instead of only measures of the outcomes themselves.

For example, in order to understand college readiness measures in mathematics for foster youth at a given high school, a user would need to know the proportion of overall students at that high school who take four years of math. If math options are limited for all students, then challenges that foster youth might experience related to mastering math concepts might be a reflection of educational opportunity more than inherent ability.

Similarly, the focus on health data indicated the need to look at educational outcomes in the context of other factors. This input redoubled the planning team’s commitment to finding a way to bridge social service, health, and educational privacy frameworks so that a more comprehensive picture of student context could be provided. So while the immediate needs identified by community members could not be met, the planning team identified new approaches for combining administrative data sets to better understand the factors influencing student outcomes.