The early childhood system in California has a filing cabinet issue that has persisted for many years. You can find data if you walk into the offices of any state agency that oversees programs for children under five, such as the Department of Social Services, the Department of Education, or the Department of Developmental Services. A lot of it. Sitting in silos that have hardly ever communicated with one another, they are meticulously gathered and detailed. Three different state agencies may be contacted by a child enrolled in subsidized childcare, receiving developmental services, and taking part in a nutrition assistance program; none of them would be aware of what the other agencies were seeing. That is not a small administrative annoyance. That is a structural flaw concealed within billions of public expenditures.
A direct reaction to that failure is AB 2092, which is presently making its way through the California Legislature. The bill would create the California Department of Social Services’ Early Childhood Integrated Data System, or ECIDS, with the goal of connecting data from all programs that assist children from birth to age five. Additionally, it would establish an Interagency Early Childhood Data Task Force, which would include representatives from First 5 California, health agencies, education departments, and even a data privacy specialist. This task force would oversee the development of the system, the data it gathers, and the degree to which the families whose information passes through it are protected.
This could be interpreted as bureaucratic housekeeping. An additional task force, acronym, and coordination commitment. California has a long history of enthusiastically launching data initiatives, only to see them stall in the middle of the implementation phase. However, there is something about AB 2092 that feels different, at least in terms of how specific it is. There is more to the bill than just “share data.” It outlines memoranda of understanding with eight different state agencies, ranging from the Office of the Surgeon General to the Department of Housing and Community Development, and forbids CDSS from gathering data elements that materially deviate from what is permitted without first requesting approval from the Legislature. That is not a recommendation; it is a structural guardrail.
Here, the background is important. Twenty-two states already linked data across some or all early childhood programs, according to a 2018 Early Childhood Data Collaborative survey. Mississippi and Georgia were fully integrated. California, on the other hand, was among the twelve states that announced plans to do so; however, these plans remained mostly unfulfilled years later. The Cradle-to-Career Data System was approved by the state in 2019, and since then, it has integrated over a billion data points from ten years’ worth of records from nine agencies. However, even C2C recognizes the disparity: some early childhood indicators, such as the age at which a child enters subsidized childcare, the number of hours a child actually spends in care each week, and the length of enrollment, are still absent.
As you observe this from the outside, you become aware of the specific annoyance ingrained in that void. Programs are not lacking in California. Funding isn’t completely lacking, at least not completely. It lacks the connective tissue necessary to determine whether any of it is effective. What happens to a child after they leave your preschool is a question that AB 2092 raises, one that the state has been subtly avoiding. The task force would have to submit yearly reports to the Legislature, which is not as exciting as it might seem until you take into account the fact that there isn’t currently any kind of unified accountability system in place.
Many things remain unclear. The fiscal impact of the bill has not been examined. It is costly to build and maintain a system that connects sensitive personal data, such as income, health information, learning milestones, and home addresses, throughout a state this size and complexity, and proper funding requires ongoing political will. The bill addresses legitimate privacy concerns by mandating that only the bare minimum of data be gathered and that it not be used for purposes other than those specified. Depending on who is watching, that may or may not hold true in real life.
This is most likely the honest reading: California ought to have taken a significant structural step long ago with AB 2092. The early childhood system won’t be improved by it alone. If properly constructed and adequately funded, it could finally provide the state with a clear-eyed view of what’s happening to the youngest citizens it purports to serve. That’s not all of it. However, it’s more than California has ever had.
