Harmony Research, LLC 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.
At Harmony Research, LLC, Dr. Faria serves as the Co-Principal Investigator for the Ready Set Succeed early-phase Education Innovation Research (EIR) grant. Building off our long-standing partnership with Educare Flint, Dr. Faria and her partners in Flint, MI were awarded a 5-year federal grant to change the landscape of kindergarten transitions in Flint, MI. This grant focuses on the development of a new kindergarten transition intervention "Ready Set Succeed", as well as pilot testing, and a rigorous experimental evaluation of its impact across the Flint, MI community.
Ready Set Succeed is a community-wide intervention focused on improving the kindergarten transition. The intervention will engage community partners, preschools, elementary schools, preschool and kindergarten educators and teaching teams, families, and 4-year-old children. Ready Set Succeed strategically provides tailored content to each key partner in a child’s life (families, educators, school administrators, and the broader community) to support a more culturally competent transition to kindergarten. With a major focus on racial equity and elevating and amplifying the voices of Black families, Ready Set Succeed will change the ways families experience the transition from preschool to kindergarten.
Together, Harmony Research, LLC, American Institutes for Research (AIR), HighScope Educational Research Foundation, and our partners at the Community Foundation of Greater Flint and the Flint Center for Educational Excellence will co-create the intervention and test the extent to which it changes policy, practice, and outcomes for schools, families, and children in Flint.
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
We are dedicated to advancing scientific discovery and innovation through cutting-edge research in early childhood and child welfare. Check out some of our prior projects below.
Of the more than 680,000 children in foster care in the U.S., 31 percent are age 3 and younger. The Safe Babies Court Team™ (SBCT), created by ZERO TO THREE, is an approach that aims to reduce the time a child spends in foster care before reaching a permanent, safe home. The approach also aims to improve the long-term well-being of infants and families in the child welfare system. This approach connects babies and their families with support and services designed to promote healthy child development while working to ensure a safe and speedy exit from foster care. ZERO TO THREE provides support at the local level, such as training and ongoing technical assistance for each Safe Babies Court Team site. Local staff include the Safe Babies Court Team judge and community coordinator, plus two local teams referred to as the “family team” and the “stakeholder team.”
Dr. Faria served as the Principal Investigator on a mixed-methods experimental evaluation of the Safe Babies Court Team in three locations: Little Rock, Arkansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Des Moines, Iowa. This evaluation provides the first experimental evidence that the SBCT approach had a positive impact on maltreated infants and toddlers and their families.
The goal of SBCT is to achieve timely permanent and safe homes for maltreated infants and toddlers, and this experimental evaluation suggests that achieving both outcomes requires investment in the full SBCT approach.
In 2020, the Michigan Department of Education (MDE), Office of Great Start, received a federal Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five (PDG B-5). While at AIR, Dr. Faria served as the Principal Investigator on the statewide early childhood mixed delivery system needs assessment. The MI PDG needs assessment included a review of prevention service partnerships within Michigan’s child welfare system.
Across the state of Michigan, in 2020, 205,631 children were in families that were investigated for alleged child abuse or neglect. Of those investigations, 14% (27,894) were confirmed; as of 2020, 10,027 children were in out-of-home care. To prevent entry of children into foster care, the state of Michigan funds a robust collection of prevention services for families. These services are designed to address risk factors associated with entry of children into the foster care system (e.g., substance use disorders, domestic violence, mental health crisis), while simultaneously strengthening protective elements for family well-being. Partnerships are a critical tool for the effective provision of prevention services. Child welfare prevention service partnerships are agreements and collaborations between state, regional, and local organizations (both private and public) designed to address the risk factors that can result in foster care entry and strengthen the overall health and resilience of families and communities. Specifically, service partnerships ensure that families have access to needed services, such as parenting classes, in-home family preservation services, mental health services, and substance use disorder treatment. These partnerships vary widely in their formality, magnitude, and scope across Michigan, both within and across localities.
The needs assessment study, launched in 2021, answered four research questions:
This brief describes the methods used to answer the questions and shares initial findings.
In 2020, the Michigan Department of Education’s (MDE’s) Office of Great Start was awarded a Preschool Development Birth Through Five (PDG B-5) renewal grant. One goal of the grant is to strengthen partnerships in Michigan’s birth-through-age-5 mixed delivery system. Across Michigan, a variety of agencies serve and support young children and their families, including MDE; the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS); the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA); the Department of Technology, Management and Budget (DTMB); and community-based partners.
This brief examines how these agencies and community-based partners work together to achieve the goal of making Michigan the best state to raise a baby. Exploring the level of collaboration within the early childhood care and education (ECCE) mixed delivery system can inform efforts to strengthen partnerships among child- and family-serving agencies and thus promote more integrated service provision.
While at AIR, Dr. Faria served as the Principal Investigator on a series of projects that examined how staff across government agencies in the early childhood mixed delivery system collaborated. We collected survey data from 2,528 agency staff and community partners. The survey documented attitudes and beliefs about collaboration and how people worked together.
In the initial brief, Let’s Work Together: Documenting Collaboration in Michigan’s Early Childhood Mixed Delivery System, we used social network analysis to document and describe these relationships, with a particular focus on cross-agency collaboration.
In the second brief, we reported on follow-up social network analyses to provide a deeper understanding of collaborations in the early childhood mixed delivery system, with a focus on the Great Start Collaboratives (GSCs) , early intervention including Michigan's Early On services, intermediate school districts (ISDs), and publicly funded preschool. These descriptive analyses can help explain why staff may be more or less likely to work closely with colleagues and guide how to support collaboration at the staff level. We conclude the brief by synthesizing findings across the follow-up analyses and providing recommendations for improving collaboration in the mixed delivery system.
While at AIR, Dr. Faria recorded a podcast where she shared her lived experience to inform the ways in which the COVID pandemic affected the child welfare system. Recorded in July 2020, she discussed the ways in which the COVID pandemic made an already challenging role of foster parent even more challenging. She offered concrete suggestions for how to keep children and families safe at entry into care and how agencies could think about maintaining family bonds during the unprecedented health crisis.
Harmony Research, LLC
Copyright © 2023 Harmony Research, LLC - All Rights Reserved.
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.