Maine Preschool Development Grant — Evaluation & Systems Learning

ECA, in partnership with RMC Research Corporation, conducted the evaluation of Maine’s Preschool Development Grant Birth to Five Renewal, a multi-year initiative designed to strengthen the state’s early childhood system. ECA directed the evaluation design, data collection, analysis, and reporting.

Our work included:

• Evaluating a diverse portfolio of statewide initiatives addressing workforce development, family engagement and access, professional learning, leadership, inclusion, quality improvement, data use, transitions, and cross-sector coordination.
• Designing a common evaluation framework using 12 core evaluation questions to examine initiatives with different purposes, populations, implementation strategies, and stages of development.
• Using multiple sources of quantitative and qualitative data, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, document review, program and participation data, and initiative-specific evaluations to assess implementation, emerging outcomes, feasibility, and sustainability.
• Producing individual outcome evaluations and a system-level analysis, allowing state leaders to understand both what was happening within individual initiatives and what the collective findings revealed about Maine’s broader early childhood system.
• Moving from initiative-level evaluation to system-level learning, developing a framework that organized diverse investments according to their role in building the early childhood system and identified patterns, connections, gaps, and leverage points for future investment.