Data & Measurement

Data & Measurement

Data & Measurement

Ready Ready uses data in a number of ways as a backbone organization. In general these fall into three main categories:

  1. Understand the needs of families in our community, so effective strategies can be created to address them.
  2. Gather stakeholders to align on resource priorities.
  3. Measure progress and highlight the status of Guilford’s early childhood development indicators.

Understanding The Challenge

The system-building work of Ready Ready and partners in Guilford County has been grounded in data from the start, beginning with a series of focus groups in 2014 with parents of young children and the providers who worked with them. This data informed the earliest priorities of Ready Ready.

A more recent effort, the Early Development Instrument (EDI), will illuminate the early developmental experiences of Guilford County children before they arrive at kindergarten. The EDI is a well-researched population measure of school readiness that is administered by UCLA. In 2025 Ready Ready and Guilford County Schools (GCS) implemented the EDI for the first time to establish baseline data on the percent of young children who are developmentally vulnerable and developmentally on track across five domains (physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive skills, and communication skills and general knowledge). UCLA will provide reports to our community later in 2025, with this information mapped across neighborhoods to describe how well the early childhood system has been supporting children in the preparation for kindergarten.

The EDI is typically administered every 2-3 years. With community partners, Ready Ready will set a target for improvement once this year’s data is available.

Measuring Progress

Guilford ROCS: The Duke Endowment has contracted with MDRC, a non-profit evaluator, to conduct an evaluation of the work Ready Ready is doing with partners in Guilford County. The evaluation is called the Guilford Readiness of Children for School study (Guilford ROCS) and includes both an implementation study and an outcomes monitoring study.

The Guilford ROCS implementation study includes a range of primary data collection activities across multiple stakeholder groups, including surveys, interviews, and focus groups, as well as reviews of administrative data. This study is closely tied to initiative activities and stakeholders and is used to learn and adjust along the way.

The Guilford ROCS outcomes monitoring study – which will answer questions about how outcomes are changing within and between birth cohorts in Guilford County – aims to recruit 1,300 families with newborns in 2025 for the first cohort. These families will be recruited to participate in surveys annually until their children are 3 years old. MDRC will report on the overall population, as well as disparities within subpopulations, and in addition to exploring outcomes across domains such as language and literacy and social emotional competencies, they will also gather data about access to services. Children born in 2025 will be growing and developing in real time along with the evaluation, so outcome data for 3 year olds is expected after 2028. In the shorter term, we will see and learn from MDRC’s review of administrative data from sources such as Vital Records, Medicaid, the NC Early Childhood IDS, and school records.

Community Navigation Evaluation: While MDRC is conducting an evaluation of the broader initiative (not focused on any single component) Duke University is leading an evaluation of Community Navigation. Again, this includes two parts: an implementation study of prenatal Community Navigation in Guilford County, and, because implementation of this program in Guilford County is universal, a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Community Navigation is being conducted in Durham. This has required close collaboration to ensure the model being implemented and evaluated in Durham is as close as possible to the program that was designed here in Guilford County.

The early findings from this RCT are promising, including positive family outcomes, positive health outcomes, positive developmental outcomes, and positive parent-child interactions – a testament to how the relational support from a navigator can translate to the relationship between a parent and child.

While Duke University did not conduct a RCT in Guilford County, the implementation study completed here showed very strong findings, with 98% of participants reporting being helped by the services and 89% stating they were now more willing to advocate for their needs and their families’ needs, which makes us feel confident that the positive findings in Durham apply here as well.

Telling The Story

With a rich network of data resources—including Routes to Ready insights from the Integrated Data System, data shared directly by partners, evaluation findings, EDI reports, and other community data—Ready Ready has a vital responsibility as a backbone organization to track and interpret the many data points that reflect the well-being of young children and families. The EDI data source is particularly exciting because cross-reference how prepared kindergarteners are with the neighborhoods where they live. Because of the wealth of data available to us in Guilford County, we will be able to more precisely see gaps that must be addressed for children to flourish in school.