“My ‘why’ is kids,” said Santrice Jones, director of early childhood initiatives in Harris County, Texas, the third most populous county in the United States, speaking on a panel at Stanford. “At the end of the day, is what we’re doing best for kids? That’s what I’ve been asking since my first day walking into a classroom, and if the answer is no, then maybe we need to reevaluate what we’re doing here.”
For five years, the RAPID Survey Project has been helping decision makers like Jones learn what young children and their families need in real time. The Stanford program provides timely and actionable insights for policies and programs that affect our youngest community members.
Founded on April 5, 2020, RAPID was initially an acronym for “Rapid Assessment of Pandemic Impacts on Development.” It was conceived in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, and the first surveys were designed, funded, and sent out in just three weeks to over 1,000 families from around the U.S.
“The last pandemic was in 1918,” said RAPID founder Philip Fisher, faculty director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, an initiative of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “There were few people alive who lived through that. We knew that if we could create a sort of living chronicle with high-quality data of what people across the U.S. were living through, who had young kids in their lives, that it would help people trying to develop supports.”
Now celebrating its fifth anniversary, RAPID has chronicled the well-being and needs of families and child care providers on a monthly basis. It has sent out 169 family surveys, gathering data from 60,000 parents of young children, and 122 workforce surveys, completed by over 13,000 child care providers. These national surveys, available in English and Spanish, have garnered responses from all 50 states. To report survey findings back to the community and to policymakers, the RAPID team has summarized the data in 90 fact sheets.
In honor of its birthday, RAPID brought together over 100 people who have been involved in the survey work for a celebration and strategy meeting on the Stanford campus. As a nod to the children they serve, conference goers’ tables included coloring pages and colored pencils – providing an outlet for creativity and even promoting mindfulness. During the day, participants heard from parent advocates, child care center owners, county and state policymakers, funders, researchers, and leaders of community-based organizations. Nearly everyone in the room had contributed to the survey’s design or dissemination, used its data, or both.
The RAPID survey is one-of-a-kind when it comes to university research. Its speed and frequency, its collaborative approach to survey design and participant recruitment, and its focus on real-time dissemination of results beyond traditional peer-reviewed publications set it apart.
Each survey contains five multiple-choice questions regarding well-being, open-ended questions (which have gathered 468,000 written responses frequently quoted in fact sheets), and “add-on” questions around thematic areas such as the impact of digital technology and extreme weather. Recruited through partnerships with national, state, and local organizations that have established trust with families, the participants fill out the survey through a link, which can be completed on a smartphone or tablet. They receive $5 compensation each time they participate.
The data are then shared in a monthly fact sheet, available to policymakers, researchers, and the survey participants themselves. The RAPID team posts the findings on their website, newsletter, and social media channels.
“In academia, we historically have relied largely on scientific journals to get information out there,” said Fisher, who is the Diana Chen Professor of Early Childhood Learning at Stanford Graduate School of Education. “But the scientific community was not our top priority in disseminating results from RAPID. We needed to get the information out there quickly.”
Rather than formal peer review, the fact sheets are vetted for accuracy by a research advisory group. “I think that the question of how to do something that’s as scientifically rigorous as possible, but doesn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, is a really important goal that we continuously straddle,” said Fisher.
Still, RAPID data has led to at least 11 peer-reviewed articles. It has also informed local and national media coverage in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, PBS, Newsweek, Forbes, USA Today, and more.
Becoming visible: Parents and child care workers
Parents and early childhood workers alike have found RAPID surveys to be a meaningful way to share their perspectives and needs with decision makers.
“After the survey, our voices get heard,” said Isabel Blair, owner and director of Mi Casa Es Su Casa Bilingual Family Child Care, a community-based child care center in Byron, Michigan. “We were invisible and we became visible … it’s like everybody in our society realized that we are the bone marrow for our communities. We realized how important the early childhood programs and educators are.”
Anthony Queen, a parent leader in Kent County, Michigan, emphasized that in order to spend precious time and energy filling out a survey, parents want to see impact.
“As we reach out to these families, I try to make sure that they trust me, and they know I’m not gonna put them in a situation where I wouldn’t put myself,” said Queen. “They’re willing to speak, but they want to know that their voice is being heard. They care about, are you going to listen to what we’re saying? They figure, if I do this survey, am I going to see the results of this survey? Am I going to read it back?”
Listening to key community leaders such as Queen and Blair, who provide input on the survey design from the perspective of its end user and vouch for the survey to prospective participants, has been key to RAPID’s success. So, too, has been keeping the promise of sharing the results back to survey participants.
“In every way, this is a story about partnerships, and partnerships with organizations that families trust,” said Fisher. “They are the glue that holds everything together.”
Promoting proximity: Data for policy making
“RAPID is absolutely the best political tool I’ve ever had in my back pocket,” said Sarah Simpson, the child and families program supervisor in Whatcom County, Washington. “I think it is the most powerful thing in the world. I’ve been doing this work for almost 20 years, and I’ve never felt so strong going to speak to elected officials to advocate for things that I’m pushing through ever before, because I can preemptively speak on the behalf of parents, because of the quotes, because of the data.” Simpson emphasized that the timeliness of the survey results is key to their value.
RAPID is absolutely the best political tool I’ve ever had in my back pocket.”Sarah SimpsonChild and families program supervisor, Whatcom County, Washington
RAPID data is frequently cited by policymakers when advocating for support for families. In the early days of the pandemic, then-Governor of Oregon Kate Brown told Fisher that she had allocated additional funding to childcare providers to cover their basic needs based on RAPID’s findings of economic hardship. Over the years, RAPID data have been requested by the White House and RAPID team members have briefed the staff of the Senate Finance Committee.
“RAPID operates to close the gaps between those of us who look at data to translate it into policy and programs, those of us who tell the story, and those of us who live the story,” said Ralph Smith, founding managing director of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. “RAPID promotes proximity by getting all of us much closer to the perspective of those who are closest to the challenge.”
The next five years
With the pandemic now in the rearview mirror, RAPID has expanded beyond national surveys to local and state surveys, often conducted in collaboration with community organizations or governments, providing even more targeted information to decision makers. International surveys are next: the first RAPID survey outside the U.S. will be conducted in Monterrey, Mexico, in the coming months.
With many federal early childhood programs facing funding challenges, actionable and real-time data can help lawmakers, particularly those at the community and state levels, direct funding where it’s needed most.
“The messages of hope that I’ve been hearing today are really important, for my own personal morale and that of my organization focusing on early education,” said Rosa Valdes, director of evaluation, accountability, and impact at the Los Angeles Education Partnership, which collaborates with RAPID, as she reflected on her experience at the anniversary gathering.
“It’s really critical to think about the long-term impacts of the work that we’re doing now. Hopefully, in five years, we’ll have stories about how the advocacy that has come from the messaging from the RAPID findings has resulted in some upward movement in terms of funding and positive policy changes.”
For more information
This story was originally published by Stanford Accelerator for Learning.