Maryland Early Care and Education Coalition (MECEC)

The Maryland Early Care and Education Coalition (MECEC) is a multi-organization coalition structured around a collective impact model that is helping to address the State’s significant early care and education issues.  C-IMPACT serves as the backbone organization, and provides management, coordination, support, and facilitation.

Background on the current state of Maryland’s ECE System

Maryland has long enjoyed recognition as one of the nation’s leaders in education. From 2009 to 2013, the state was ranked number one in Education Week’s Quality Counts report, with early childhood historically cited as one of its strengths, but structural challenges have given rise to a declining state of Maryland’s Early Care and Education (ECE) system.

Maryland’s Kindergarten Readiness Assessment’s (KRA) validity came under scrutiny and is being replaced, dropping school readiness to an average of 44%.  Efforts to increase quality ratings for child care providers lagged over time with 90% of child care programs remaining below a level 3 of the 5-point scale more than 10 years after the launch of its Quality Rating and Improvement System.  COVID came and devastated Maryland’s child care system, with a loss of 15.5% of its total child care supply and a nearly 27% reduction of the ECE workforce.  Those shortages persist today, and Maryland has frozen its Scholarship program, creating more economic challenges for all ECE providers and families.  As noted by the State Comptroller, the access issue, atop affordability, where Maryland is the eighth most expensive state in the nation for cost of care, adds up to an albatross on Maryland’s overall economy – suppressing Maryland’s return of women to the workforce and seeing the state lose billions.

Amid these challenges, a bright spot for the state has been its robust community of advocacy and support organizations. From policy and service organizations to advocacy and outreach, Maryland’s ECE system has benefitted from the wide array of skills, foci, and perspectives these independent organizations bring. Yet a major gap still exists that diminishes these organizations’ efficacy and the overall state’s ability to address the challenges it faces. A lack of coordination. Despite having statewide and county level opportunities for convening and coordination like the Maryland State Early Childhood Advisory Council and local counterparts, the Office of Child Care Advisory Council, local management boards, and numerous other outlets, there has been an undercurrent of misalignment, siloed efforts, and redundancy.  

An unspoken reality that all have acknowledged is the scarcity model from which most nonprofits operate promotes a competitive mindset which contributes to trust deficits. It is hard to engender collaboration, the basis for coordination, when organizations are never sure if a colleague is representing its interests alone or that of the system.

Addressing Maryland’s ECE Challenges Together

A key aspect of MECEC that makes this coordination attempt more viable than past efforts centers on C-IMPACT serving as the backbone while not having any directly competing initiatives with any of the coalition members. Dr. Swanson is one of the authors of Maryland EXCELS, has developed workforce registries deployed in Tennessee and Alabama and is supporting Montgomery Moving Forward’s current efforts, and is an internationally recognized expert in early childhood systems, so he can contribute to the discourse around best practices and legislation, but C-IMPACT intentionally will not develop initiatives in isolation from the coalition.

Instead, as an organization, it operates from a collaborative systems change model as espoused by the National Research Council in its seminal piece: Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation (Committee on the Science of Children, 2015). As such, C-IMPACT functions to help identify and support opportunities for Coalition partners or other entities to implement solutions that create a comprehensive, effective, and efficient ECE system in Maryland. In this way, the convening organization’s only vested interest is in the efficacy of the system and helping the partners with their contributions toward that.

Representatives of key, non-governmental organizations, that are contributory to Maryland’s early care and education (ECE) system through advocacy, direct services, and/or supports. Each organization represents major initiatives, constituencies, and/or components within the broader ECE ecosystem. The goal of the Leadership group is to define majority recommended positions and efforts reflective of the Coalition. Each represented organization contributes their respective areas of expertise and focus toward the collective efforts, and all remain free to pursue their own agendas, but the aim is to seek alignment, deconfliction, and coordination across those independent efforts so there is a more effective totality from the sum of the individual organizations.

A “coalition position” exists only when it has been explicitly discussed, tested, and affirmed through the majority vote. Positions are decided through transparent consultation and documented discussion and information review, with a goal of seeking consensus but an allowance of a majority vote to proceed. When full agreement is not reached, C-IMPACT, as the backbone, will clearly document areas of alignment and difference, rather than forcing uniformity, so that minority views remain visible and the coalition can move forward with clarity and trust.

The Coalition partners are listed below (click the logo image to be taken to each partner’s webpage):