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Brian P.
Gill, Jake Dembosky, Jonathan P. Caulkins
RAND was
commissioned by the Heinz Endowments to evaluate the vision, organization,
administration, and operation of the Early Childhood Initiative (ECI), a
major effort to improve early care and education (ECE) for low-income
children from birth through age five in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the
surrounding communities of Allegheny County. ECI was conceived and
designed from 1994 to 1996, and operated under the auspices of the United
Way (UW) of Allegheny County from 1996 through 2000. Its quality of
service and child welfare outcomes are being examined separately by a
research team from the University of Pittsburgh and Children’s Hospital in
Pittsburgh.
RAND’s
research effort involved, first and foremost, approximately one hundred
intensive, confidential interviews with a diverse group of stakeholders:
United Way managers, ECI staff, members of the foundation community and
other funders, neighborhood representatives, early childhood service
providers, business leaders involved in ECI, government officials,
academic experts, and early childhood advocates. RAND also obtained and
examined a substantial amount of written documentation pertaining to ECI,
primarily through the assistance of ECI management and neighborhood
agencies.
That team’s
findings to date are reported in S. J. Bagnato, Quality Early Learning—
Key to School Success: A First-Phase Program Evaluation Research Report
for Pittsburgh’s Early Childhood Initiative (ECI), Pittsburgh: Children’s
Hospital of Pittsburgh, SPECS Evaluation Research Team, 2002. iv A "Noble
Bet" in Early Care and Education: Executive Summary to examine its
enrollment and costs. Finally, the RAND study team explored existing
empirical literature on ECE.
Although ECI
led to the establishment of new, high-quality ECE services in several
communities, it failed to achieve many of its major goals, despite the
good intentions of everyone involved and despite the support of a wide
array of community leaders. This volume summarizes Brian P. Gill, Jacob W.
Dembosky, and Jonathan P. Caulkins, A “Noble Bet” in Early Care and
Education: Lessons from One Community’s Experience, Santa Monica, Calif.:
RAND, MR-1544- EDU, 2002, which relays the results of RAND’s evaluation.
We sought both to explain why ECI was not more successful and to suggest
how future initiatives might produce better results. The report describes
ECI’s goals and objectives and articulates the breadth of the initiative’s
ambition to create a comprehensive new system for delivering ECE to
low-income children in Allegheny County. It also presents a critical
analysis of ECI’s business plan and operations, explicating a number of
reasons that the initiative fell short of its goals. Finally, since the
report aims to be more than a postmortem analysis, it offers lessons for
the future, alternative models for ECE initiatives, and public-policy
implications. This report should have relevance not only for ECI’s
stakeholders in Allegheny County, but also for funders, program
developers, and policymakers around the country who are working on
large-scale initiatives related to a variety of social service reforms.
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Full Text available at:
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1544.1/MR1544.1.pdf
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The research described in this report was performed under the auspices of
RAND Education.
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