Current Projects
Educare Flint Local Evaluation Partnership
The Flint Early Childhood Collaborative Research Program Partnership
The Flint Early Childhood Collaborative Research Program Partnership
Since 2019, Dr. Ann-Marie Faria served as the Principal Investigator of the Local Evaluation Partnership (LEP) for Educare Flint, As the local evaluation partner, Harmony Research, LLC supports Educare Flint, and their sister school, Cummings Great Expectations to conduct the Educare implementation and outcomes study each school year. The research partnerships focuses on 1) collecting a wealth of data to inform continuous quality improvement at the local site and 2) coordinating with the Educare Learning Network’s National Evaluation Partner—Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—to contribute to Educare’s national research agenda.
As the local evaluation partner, Harmony Research, LLC and its partners HighScope Educational Research Foundation and American Institutes for Research (AIR), :
- facilitate data collection and research activities to help program staff understand the early childhood ecosystem in Flint
- collect child-level data on early language, social emotional development, and school readiness
- collect classroom observations of classroom quality
- collect staff and family interviews and surveys
- co-interpret data with site staff to make meaning from the data
- conduct data dialogues with teachers, family engagement staff, and early childhood specialists to increase the data culture at both preschools
- disseminate our work at national and international conferences and research convenings
- draft infographics, briefs, and reports to share with key partners in Flint, Michigan and beyond
Check out some of our prior publications from Educare Flint and Cummings Great Expectations here:
- Voices Of Our Families! Findings From the 2020 Fall Parent Interview
- Family Needs and Experiences at Educare Flint (2022)
- Family Needs and Experiences at Cummings Great Expectations (2022)
- FLINT KIDS THRIVE: Educare Flint & Cummings Great Expectations Child Assessment Data from the 2019–20 School Year
- EDUCARE FLINT: An exciting first year supporting the children and families of Flint, Michigan
The Flint Early Childhood Collaborative Research Program Partnership
The Flint Early Childhood Collaborative Research Program Partnership
The Flint Early Childhood Collaborative Research Program Partnership
Harmony Research, LLC serves as a thought partner to the early childhood education community in Flint, MI to use data to inform practice and policy. The Flint Early Childhood Collaborative Research Program Partnership (RPP) emerged from an existing partnership between the Community Foundation of Greater Flint (CFGF) and Dr. Ann-Marie Faria that supports the work of Educare Flint and Cummings Great Expectations.
Today, the partnership includes members forming a broad coalition that includes school and district leadership, family engagement advocates, early childhood specialists, families themselves, community foundation members, funders, and local and national early childhood researchers.
RPP members generated research priorities together to ensure they are designed for the community by the community. They include:
1. Understanding intensive and authentic family engagement
2. Increasing equitable access to early childhood programs in the Flint community
Through these two agendas, the RPP hopes to build on the important work of engaging children and families at Educare Flint and Cummings Great Expectations and gain understanding about the successes and challenges to achieving equitable access to high-quality early learning experiences for all families in Flint.
We believe that all children in Flint are worthy of an excellent, equitable education that provides them with limitless opportunities to thrive, and that systemic racial inequity must continually be recognized and confronted to promote strengths and develop skills in children, families, and staff.
~ FECC Research-Program Partnership
Teacher Well-Being in Washington, DC
The AppleTree Public Charter Preschool Expansion Grant
The AppleTree Public Charter Preschool Expansion Grant
Harmony Research, LLC partners with Georgetown University as an independent research partner to analyze and better understand the ways in which job demands affect teachers' emotional well being. As a research partner, Harmony Research conducts sophisticated quantitative analyses (moderated structural equation models) to better understand the relationship between job demands and educator's emotional distress-- and how resilience, educators' relationships with caregivers, and job supports might moderate this relationship.
The AppleTree Public Charter Preschool Expansion Grant
The AppleTree Public Charter Preschool Expansion Grant
The AppleTree Public Charter Preschool Expansion Grant
Harmony Research serves as the independent evaluator for AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation on a federal grant examining the extent to which expansion of public charter schools improves equitable access to high quality preschool programing in the District of Columbia.
This 5-year grant will document the extent to which new replication public charter preschools maintain the same quality of instruction and learning outcomes as existing schools, during rapid expansion.
This quasi-experimental study includes a sample of nearly 500 preschool children and follows them throughout their PK3 and PK4 school years.
Community Education & Afterschool in Flint, MI
The Educare Early Childhood Workforce Taskforce
The Educare Early Childhood Workforce Taskforce
Harmony Research, LLC partners with the Flint Center for Educational Excellence to document the ways in which the Center provides ongoing support in community education and afterschool programming in Flint, MI. The Flint Center for Educational Excellence launched in summer 2023 and is dedicated to working with the community to help Flint kids thrive. The Flint Center focuses on six core pillars, all with an intention of creating a robust educational ecosystem to support children and families. These include:
- a community education initiative,
- afterschool programming,
- the Flint Early Childhood Collaborative,
- a parent collaborative,
- a community council on education and
- a Network for School Excellence.
This evaluation focuses on community education and afterschool initiatives. The Flint Center partners with schools serving Flint kids to provide after school programming with both a comprehensive academic approach and a clubhouse model, success mentoring, as well as two-generational (2gen) approaches to support all members of the family. The goal of these programs is to help students, families, educators, residents and community-based organizations to better work together to offer services that are well-matched with the needs of a given community. When implemented well, high-quality community education and afterschool initiatives can help students make gains in academics, as well as social-emotional development and overall school-connectedness. This is especially true for students from low-income families and communities. However, few programs nationwide meet students’ needs, due to a variety of challenges (e.g. limited funding, unclear mission, high rates of staff turnover, and a general lack of high-quality professional development for the staff how stay). The Center seeks to address these challenges and deliver high-quality after-school programming for all Flint kids.
As part of our ongoing partnership to support education in Flint, Michigan, Harmony Research, LLC serves as an independent research and evaluation partner to document the success and challenges of the afterschool and community education approaches launched by the Flint Center.
The broad Evaluation Goal is to document which features of community education and after school programs are most related to improved child and family well-being.
To achieve this goal, HRLLC proposed a set of connected research questions to be answered as part of the evaluation. Together we will used a mixed methods approach to understanding the roll out of community education and afterschool programming in Flint.
The Educare Early Childhood Workforce Taskforce
The Educare Early Childhood Workforce Taskforce
The Educare Early Childhood Workforce Taskforce
The promise and potential of early care and education (ECE) programs are not being fully realized due to a persistent workforce crisis. The topic is timely and essential to the early childhood field, given the dramatic workforce challenges facing the profession. We know that the ECE workforce requires higher and more respectful salaries, increased access to benefits like health insurance and paid time off, better access to career lattices that allow for meaningful professional growth, and improved access to pre-service and in-service training. We further know that our workforce is nearly half women of color, and that there are deep and persistent racial equity challenges that affect program staff across the nation and in our Educare network daily. Addressing the needs of our staff will have long-term benefits for our teachers, our families, and ultimately our students. However, knowing where to start with a workforce riddled with challenge can be a daunting task.
As such, the Educare National Network launched a Workforce Taskforce in 2024. The Educare network is in a unique position to further the field’s understanding of how we can innovatively address ECE workforce challenges. Educare’s model focuses on the integration of research and practice and is governed by research practice partnerships between individual schools and researchers. In Educare, we are constantly learning with and from each other, solving the problems of science and practice, and collaborating for the benefit of staff, families, and children. It is in this spirit that the Educare network launched the Early Childhood Workforce Taskforce.
The Early Childhood Workforce Taskforce brings together partners across the Educare network to tackle the most pressing workforce challenges we all experience. Taskforce activities include:
- Conduct a landscape scan of promising or effective workforce practice and policy across the Educare network
- Co-design and conduct a research study focused on workforce recruitment and retention
- Develop resources, guidance, and policy recommendations for the field and amplify these along with study findings to a range of audiences.
- Co-design processes and tools to spread, test, and scale effective workforce recruitment and retention strategies within and beyond the Educare Network.
Dr. Ann-Marie Faria at Educare Flint and Dr. Zachary Price at Educare Washington, DC are pleased to serve as the Evaluation Consultant to co-Design the Early Childhood Education Workforce Recruitment and Retention Study, as a part of the taskforce. In this role, Harmony Research will join and participate in the new Educare Workforce Recruitment & Retention Task Force and collaboratively co-design a study on ECE workforce recruitment and retention. Stay tuned for more information on this exciting project.
Safe Babies Court Team Evaluation
Transforming child welfare into prevention
and family well-being.
Prevention Connections: Preventing Entry into Foster Care
Understanding child welfare partnerships and how staff work together to prevent entry into foster care.
Let's Work Together: Collaboration in Early Childhood
A social network analysis of how state staff partner across Michigan's early childhood mixed delivery system.