Building an Early Childhood Ecosystem

Terri Sabol leads the Chicago area’s first effort to connect  early childhood researchers with families and providers

By Cornelia Grumman

Professor Terri Sabol presided quietly over a lively Zoom discussion focused on helping Chicago improve its early childhood education system. But the mix of undergraduate and graduate students in her research lab struggled a bit to understand some of the particulars.

Why do early learning settings have different standards from one another? How does the city let parents know which services are free? Are community- based programs considered part of Chicago’s universal pre-K program?

“I guess the whole story is that policy implementation is messy,” someone said as the meeting ended.

If this group is confused by the morass of acronyms, programs, standards, policies, and funding streams in Chicago’s system of early childhood care and education, so is everyone else. The nation’s childcare system is notoriously complex, inconsistent, and decentralized. Some politely call it a “spaghetti bowl” of programs; cynics call it a “hot mess.”

Enter Sabol, faculty codirector of an effort called the Early Childhood Research Alliance, or EC*REACH, to help unravel the noodles. Her approach combines data, research, academic disciplines, and geographic focus.

The alliance, launched at Northwestern in 2023, straddles SESP and the Institute for Policy Research to provide timely insights on Chicago’s early childhood system. The hope is that research findings will spark systemic and program-specific improvements.

 “I was so jealous of my K–8 colleagues who could go to Chicago Public Schools and get a pretty clear snapshot of what’s going on with children,” says Sabol,  associate professor of human development and social policy. “You can’t do that in early childhood.”

A Chicago research hub

 EC*REACH, a concept incubated by the Chicago nonprofit Start Early, is the first partnership made up of researchers, city and community leaders, families, and childcare providers to focus exclusively on children from birth through age five.

EC*REACH partners immediately set out to develop a coherent early childhood research agenda for Chicago, synthesizing input from city stakeholders. With faculty codirector Diane Schanzenbach, the team convened 250 people from 100 organizations—a mix of program leaders, policymakers, advocates, and researchers—to begin moving that agenda into action.

“We should know far more about our early childhood  system than we do,” Sabol asserts. “If you drive around the city, there are tons of childcare programs. Who is going to those programs, and where are kids not getting served?”

One of Sabol’s current projects helps Chicago Public Schools examine how students progress developmentally each year from preschool through second grade and how to better plan what’s taught in each of those years to boost student success.

One challenge involves data. The hodgepodge of federal, state, local, and private early childhood programs leads to a mishmash of data tied to specific funding streams but not integrated with the others.

Comprehensive views of early childhood systems, and the experience of young children in them, are virtually nonexistent. Policymakers are forced to make multimillion-dollar decisions on educated hunches, while practitioners are often so busy caring for children that they aren’t exposed to broader research about what they’re doing and whether it’s effective.

And although parents may have access to information that indicates a program meets minimal health and safety standards, rarely do they know anything about the quality of experiences their children will receive in classrooms. What should be straightforward questions may often be hard to explain without sophisticated analytical techniques.

Another challenge is what Sabol calls a “constantly changing denominator.” Some of Chicago’s most economically disadvantaged communities have seen dramatic population drops in recent decades, leaving a glut of often unfilled early childhood slots, while other communities have low capacity and long waiting lists.

A shift from the classroom

Sabol attended the University of Michigan before spending two years teaching first grade on Chicago’s South Side through Teach for America. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she says. “I remember giving this assessment, and the device just kept beeping red: ‘Your kid is behind!’ The kid is, like, seven. How could he already be behind? What were all the inequities that led to that moment? Or was the assessment biased?”

The experience planted a seed that shifted Sabol’s future focus. She left classroom teaching to pursue her PhD at the University of Virginia, where she would delve deeper into developmental assessments of young children.

She later joined Northwestern’s SESP faculty, drawn to a school where she could integrate child development with social policy.

“At Northwestern there are economists, sociologists, and political scientists all interested in similar policy-relevant questions, and that’s how we train our graduate students,” she says. By using various datasets and distinctive methodologies, researchers can provide nuanced and relevant answers to practitioners and policymakers.

EC*REACH interim executive director John Q. Easton says Sabol cares as much about delivering high -quality research as she does about developing her students. “Terri has a deep personal commitment to conducting research that can improve the lives of the most vulnerable children and their families.”

For Sabol, creating a central early childhood research hub is the critical first step in answering the difficult questions that arose early in her career. “There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense when you’re a teacher,” she says. “I wanted to understand what was driving everything around me.”

Though the process of collecting and cleaning messy data was long and tedious, she promised herself that if she received tenure, she’d focus on using those skills to help the city of Chicago. “Now the city will call us and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got this question. You’ve got data. Can you answer it really fast?’ We’re lucky they want to ask those kinds of questions.”