We are excited to announce that Child Care Aware® of America (CCAoA) is partnering with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago to build a website that compiles and standardizes child care data from across the nation. This effort will ensure that child care systems, policies and funding decisions are based on reliable data.
The Child Care Data Center (CCDC) project will be an interactive website and data center. The website will house data that answers fundamental questions about the availability of and the demand for child care from across the nation. It will allow users to access customized data visualizations to tell the story of child care in their state or local community. And it will also offer actionable tactics that users can use to advocate for change.
Last year CCAoA engaged a group of state and national partners to inform the development of the prototype, and over the next year we will engage a National Advisory Panel to support building it out.
The CCDC is being supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
This collaborative effort of CCAoA and NORC will fill a critical gap within the child care field. Our Chief of Policy, Research and Programs, Ami V. Gadhi, JD is excited about the upcoming project, saying that, “NORC has decades of experience building, operating and supporting secure data centers for public and private sector clients, and we are confident that together, we can support the child care workforce and families with this important data center."
Michael López, Vice President of Education and Child Development at NORC is also thrilled about the collaboration as it, “brings together CCAoA’s state-level child care policy and advocacy expertise with NORC’s early childhood research, data and survey expertise truly capitalizing on the complementary strengths of both organizations. NORC is excited to collaborate with CCAoA on this next phase of the development of the CCDC and to promote the shared mission of using high-quality data to inform decision-making around early care and education!”
NORC is a leader in conducting large national surveys, as well as more targeted state and local studies, harvesting reliable, actionable early childhood data, particularly data on early care and education. Their work in the area of early care and education is strong and expanding, particularly as educators and policymakers strive to better understand the many different factors that affect a child’s early learning and well-being.
What kind of data would you be excited to see included in the CCDC? How would you use reliable and accurate data on the nation's child care system? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.