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EEC unveils research agenda and public KPI dashboards to guide policy and increase transparency
Summary
The Department of Early Education and Care presented its first agency research agenda and the initial version of public-facing KPI dashboards covering family access, program stability and workforce supports; the dashboards are planned to go live in mid‑October.
The Department of Early Education and Care on Thursday presented its first formal research agenda and a set of public-facing key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards intended to make agency data and priorities more transparent and to support data-driven policymaking.
Amy Checkaway, the department's research lead, described Massachusetts as a "data rich" state and said the agenda is meant to align research partners, funders and stakeholders behind priority questions about family access, program stability, workforce supports, program quality and mental health. Ashley White, who led development of the agenda, said the document is intended to be a living "learning agenda" that identifies gaps, ongoing partnerships and areas where new research is needed.
The department also demonstrated an initial set of interactive dashboards, built in Power BI, that will display KPIs such as the percent of children enrolled in formal early education and care, the number of licensed programs and monthly openings/closures, the size of the educator workforce (derived from C3 applications), and childcare financial assistance caseload and wait-list metrics. The analytics team said the dashboards draw on EEC data and external sources (DESE and 3rd Sector Intelligence/3SI) and will be posted publicly in "dashboard 1.0" in mid-October, with ongoing enhancements planned.
Board members praised the agenda and dashboards as major steps for transparency, suggested further regional breakouts and educator-portal integration for future versions, and asked about update cadence and the role of AI. Staff said the dashboards were produced without AI using Power BI and that update frequency depends on the underlying data source (some daily, some monthly), with plans to add more disaggregation in subsequent versions.
What’s next: EEC plans to publish the research agenda and dashboards publicly, pursue research partnerships to answer priority questions, and continue iterative improvements to the KPIs and visualizations.
