Shine Early Learning

Vision

At Shine Early Learning, we envision a world where children become champions of their own making; where historical biases and systemic inequities no longer stand in the way of their infinite promise.

Mission

Shine Early Learning designs and delivers inclusive, anti-bias, and rigorous approaches to eliminate the gaps between young children’s inherent potential and their achievement in school and life. With our partners, we accelerate child and family outcomes that honor the aspirations and cultures of the communities we serve.

Data-informed Learning 

We commit to continuous improvement, as we use data inclusive of our lived experiences to inform organizational strategy, both programmatic and operational. Striking this balance ensures that we understand information in context, and in turn empower all stakeholders to engage in informed decision-making with agency that facilitates change.

Transparent & Open Communication 

We demonstrate integrity, openness and transparency as a means by which to build trust among our team and the communities we serve. Decision making spaces are places that not only welcome but also solicit ideas; share power as appropriate and remove barriers of positional power across the organization in order to further promote diversity of thought, equity of voice, inclusion of ideas, and full transparency.

Growth Mindset 

We believe talents can be developed.  Challenges and barriers are opportunities to refine skills, solutions, and approaches.  We serve our children, families and partners with intention and quality by developing and engaging in innovative professional development, providing equitable support, and leading with a can-do attitude.

Dismantling Inequities

We never settle for the way things are and we are impatient for change. We know that too many children and families are excluded from our early learning systems. We disrupt historical ways of thinking and doing in order to create spaces of radical inclusion so that individuals and communities are better. We provide children, families and the staff and leaders who serve them with the knowledge, skills and tools needed to partner with us as disruptors of these systemic inequities. We start by holding up the mirror to ourselves as individuals and as a company. With this as our charge, we are committed to advancing equity and disrupting inequity at every level of our work.

Caring Teams & Community

We recognize that we can not be successful in our mission without building authentic, trusting, caring relationships that connect us through our shared humanity. As such, we value the inherent worth, dignity, and abilities of all individuals, families, groups and communities. We establish strong bonds with co-workers, peers, and others grounded in compassion and concern for both who they are as people and what they do as professionals. We actively seek out others’ perspectives and feelings and take time to understand. By working together in solidarity, building on strengths, and valuing the inherent worth and abilities of all people and groups, we improve access, experiences, and outcomes for our stakeholders: children, families, employees, partners, funders, and the communities we serve.

Dr. Lydia Carlis leads and shapes the programmatic vision for Shine and Acelero and Shine through her work with the Executive Team and the following programmatic teams: Early Learning; Equity, Inclusion and Belonging; Family Services & Health; Human Resources; Monitoring, Systems, and Analysis; and, Professional Development. She formerly served as principal consultant for eyemaginED on a variety of P12 projects designed to bring an equity lens to schools and education-facing organizations’ curriculum, instruction, leadership and organizational development. Lydia holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Howard University, master's degree focused on bilingual special education from The George Washington University, and doctorate of philosophy in special education from The University of Maryland, College Park.

Dr. Carlis plays a unique and essential role within Shine/Acelelro. As a member of the Executive Team, Lydia leads, connects, and collaborates with all of the organization’s leaders to shape our programmatic vision. In her role of Chief Program and People officer, she oversees many of the functions that support Shine and Acelero’s efforts to improve practices and outcomes, in particular the Monitoring, Systems and Analysis team and the Professional Development team.  Lydia’s leadership of the project will be supported by Charlie Geier, Senior Vice President of Shine Early Learning.  Charlie has been integral to all phases of the creation, implementation and expansion of SPARK, and more than anyone else within the organization understands both the specifics of each project as well as how they are interconnected.  Supporting both Lydia and Charlie will be Ken Taylor, Vice President of Shine Public Systems, which is the division within Shine where the SPARK projects are located. This leadership team will be responsible for ensuring that the LEAP project team has access to all of the available data and staff expertise required to make the LEAP Project sprint effective.

The SPARK team is very used to high activity sprints in their work.  Most of the team members were present during the start up phase of their respective projects, which is very much a sprint.  In addition to its start up, Indana SPARK had a significant program expansion that also required a sprint.  The entire SPARK team is primed and able to support the LEAP Project sprint.

Shine co-creates locally relevant, best-practice based, scalable solutions to eliminate the gaps between young children’s inherent potential and their achievement.

The Shine solution solves three interrelated problems. It addresses the problem of racial and income disparities, the problem of under-investment in quality early childhood education, and the lack of progress by public systems over the past decade to change this dynamic.

1. The United States has a huge racial income and wealth gap, with white families having roughly six times the amount of wealth of Black families. The educational achievement gap that perpetuates that inequality exists before Kindergarten. Test scores for low-income kids (who are disproportionately children of color) are already a standard of deviation lower when they enter Kindergarten.

2. Early childhood education is an essential means to address the achievement gap.  Research shows that the quality of early childhood education is particularly important in improving outcomes for low-income children. For example, one study shows that the incomes of low-income children who received high-quality early learning were $7,000 higher at age 26 than their low-income peers who received lower-quality services. The opportunity for impact is heightened during their early years because the brains of young children are developing so quickly. The brain science on the importance of the early years is very strong and compelling.

3. We know that high-quality early childhood education can be game-changing because there are examples of programs that fundamentally alter the life trajectories of their participants.  In fact, Shine’s parent company, Acelero Learning, has programs that exemplify that opportunity. In addition, the Nobel Prize winning economist, James Heckman has a project called The Heckman Equation dedicated to demonstrating the power of high-quality early learning. But the early childhood education field is not collectively delivering on its promise and potential for a number of reasons. One of the challenges confronted by the field is that there are significant gaps in the understanding of the effectiveness of Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS), which are one of the main mechanisms used to improve the quality of early childhood education. Research shows that QRIS rating systems do often align with well-regarded and commonly used measures of classroom quality (e.g. Environment Rating Scales [ERS]). However, most studies also suggest that higher QRIS rating levels are not associated with improved outcomes for children in the form of academic skills, learning related behaviors, or school readiness. Additionally, there are also significant questions about how QRIS may reinforce historical and present biases and inequities. There is clearly additional work required to determine how best to improve the quality of early childhood education and QRIS’ role in achieving that goal.

Shine Early Learning (Shine), a subsidiary of Acelero, Inc., is committed to demonstrating that every child can succeed at the highest levels and that high-impact, evidence-based approaches can help early childhood programs make a difference in a child's life, particularly those who are low-income and/or most vulnerable. 

Our solution considers the unique needs, types, and levels of support for the children, classrooms, and providers we serve. We understand that in order to improve quality, it is essential to address all aspects of learning variability, including within-person, within-group, and contextual variability. With coaching and technical assistance based on meeting teachers and programs where they are, and supporting their self-identified needs and the needs of their children, Shine addresses the specific types of variability that individual programs are confronting.  Additionally, we leverage our data-informed learning approach to inform the design of solutions at scale within the systems we serve. 

For the past 12 years, Shine has built a track record of supporting early childhood education systems and providers. We provide training, technical assistance, coaching, and consultation services nationwide to state and municipal early childhood systems, as well as to individual programs. Today, we contract with the states of Indiana, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, the City of Philadelphia, the New York City Department of Education, the School District of Philadelphia, and more than 40 individual early learning providers. 

Three years ago, Shine created a new Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) solution and is now the only multi-state QRIS provider in the country.  Our comprehensive solution, SPARK, is now being implemented in three locations, two states (Indiana and Wisconsin) and one city (Philadelphia). The programs supported by SPARK serve substantial numbers of low-income children of color, many of whom come from some of the most marginalized communities in the nation. The SPARK solution provides  an equitable,  multi-tiered technical assistance approach that allows providers to leverage asynchronous professional development, tools, and resources; to participate in virtual and in-person peer learning communities; and receive intensive individual supports, all according to the provider’s individualized needs and aspirations and the variable needs of the children they serve. We understand that for providers to be successful, we must leverage their experience in their communities and foster additional provider-to-provider, community-based connections. Peer networks, communities of practice, and local/regional advisory councils all underpin a community-informed, comprehensive solution that provides equitable and proven strategies. SPARK also leverages Shine’s national network to connect and collaborate with leading organizations in the field to supplement our offerings at the local and state level.

The intent underlying SPARK is supported by the National Academies of Science, who just released a consensus study report titled: Closing the Opportunity Gap for Young Children. One of their recommendations is to establish“inclusive, intentional quality standards that are aligned with scientific evidence - as a right afforded to all children and families who need and want services.” 

One of the main ways Shine demonstrates the effectiveness of our SPARK coaching and technical assistance solution is through performance monitoring and management. We  closely monitor agreed-upon contract deliverables with our public sector clients.  For example, as demonstrated in a recent annual report for SPARK Indiana, we had seven objectives for that project, and we met or exceeded each of those objectives. Our metrics include a mixture of inputs dosage and effectiveness. A similar story can be told for our work in Philadelphia, and we are still in our first year of implementation in Wisconsin and so do not yet have performance indicators to report on.

Another example of our efforts to learn about and demonstrate SPARK’s effectiveness is through an engagement we have with the Center of Evaluation, Policy & Research (CEPR) at Indiana University.  CEPR is conducting a research study about the effectiveness of a newly implemented mental health and business components of our SPARK project. This is a mixed method study that uses data analysis, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and surveys. Based on their findings, CEPR made recommendations to improve our practice and performance, which our project team has begun taking under consideration for ongoing refinement and improvement for the upcoming year.

In addition, Shine recently engaged with Professor Alicia Robinson, from American University and a group of graduate students enrolled in an education policy seminar, EDU-686 Proseminar in Education Policy and Leadership. For this seminar, students conduct a field-based project with an educational organization on a pressing issue of policy or practice.  Shine worked with them to conduct a literature review of early learning evaluation frameworks, including the HeadStart Parent, Family and Community Engagement Framework, various state-level frameworks (Colorado, Washington, North Carolina, and Georgia), and Educare (a national network of 25 early learning programs in disinvested communities). In addition, they created a proposed Evaluation Model based on their literature review that contains three domains: 1) Growth and Achievement, 2) Equity, and 3) Communication and Stakeholder Engagement. We believe that this work is an excellent starting point for our engagement with LEAP and taking our evaluation efforts to the next level to inform the national discussion about the role of QRIS in improving quality and the linkage of improved quality to improved outcomes. 

There are also a number of summative research studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of the centers we operate directly through Acelero. Acelero is recognized as one of five national exemplar Head Start programs out of 1,800 nationwide. During the pandemic, which has been deleterious to the field of early childhood education, a study conducted by Brown University researchers found that children enrolled in our programs — both in-person and virtual — still achieved significant child outcome gains. This track record of excellence is unique in the early childhood space and provides us with a unique opportunity to share the learnings from our high quality Acelero centers with the providers we are supporting through SPARK.

One of our core values is data-informed learning and implementing this value means Shine intentionally learns from its ongoing performance monitoring and management practices and project implementations. As a learning organization with a growth mindset, we actively engage in open and honest assessments of our performance and learn from them to improve in the future. 

As mentioned previously, we have annual contract objectives that we monitor and manage closely, as demonstrated in the annual report for SPARK Indiana.  The data we collected for that report informed substantial project reforms and major enhancements. Our performance monitoring and management focus drives the day-to-day management of our projects, and we regularly refine, revise and prioritize our efforts based on our progress, or lack of progress, on our objectives. This process led us to prioritize five areas for improvement next year. 1) SPARK coaching services will be more accessible and available when programs need them. 2) SPARK’s services will be available in multiple languages that represent the linguistic diversity of our early childhood and out of school workforce. 3) SPARK will prioritize services and support for topics that programs struggle with the most including challenging behaviors, mental health, and trauma. 4) SPARK will diversify its feedback mechanisms so that the early childhood education workforce is better able to give voice to their needs. 5) SPARK will reach a wider audience and more equitably meet needs by providing training in the preferred modality based on providers’ feedback.

The design and implementation of our most recent SPARK project (in Wisconsin) were influenced by our previous implementations and were significantly enhanced and stronger as a result. We are still in the midst of the evaluation process with Indiana University and have already made adjustments based on their interim findings. As that research project draws to a close we will take a deeper dive into its findings and recommendations to glean all that we can and apply it both to the specific work in Indiana, and also more generally across all the SPARK projects.

With our data-informed learning and growth mindset values driving our actions, Shine uses data to inform a continuous quality improvement approach. To date, much of our focus has been on the process of implementing our SPARK solution, and our data monitoring and management has thus been more process and input focused. Now, with a few years of implementation under our belt, we are primed to make the next step in the development of our evidence base to include program outputs and child and family outcomes.

Our goal for hosting LEAP Fellows is to help us design and implement a secondary data analytic and evaluation strategy that effectively utilizes the many diverse data sources we already have access to, and to use this data to measure key aspects of our program effectiveness for children and families across our three sites with a particular focus on learning variability at the child, classroom, and provider levels. We request support to define the outcomes we are able to measure and create the strategy and tools to replicate this measurement process in other SPARK projects as we continue to scale. With valid and reliable data analytic methods we can celebrate our successes and continuously improve and refine our tools and services. In addition, we plan to use our findings to make the broader case about the efficacy and importance of investing in high-quality, well-designed, efficient and effective training and technical assistance services to improve the quality and equity of early childhood education provision and to transform the field more broadly. 

Our belief that now is the right time to engage with LEAP in this project is two-fold.  First is that we now have three SPARK projects implemented with plans to continue to expand. Those projects provide a basis to better understand both the similarities and differences between different locations and allow us to collaborate with LEAP to build a data analytic framework that can form the foundation for future SPARK implementations.

Perhaps even more importantly, for a number of reasons the early learning field in America is at an important point of inflection.  One contributor to this is the impact of the COVID pandemic and the heightened realization by many of the essential nature of early learning.  Another contributor is the fact that most QRIS systems are now about a decade old, and over the next few years the field is going to engage in an assessment process about their effectiveness. This will then inform and drive revisions to the initiatives across the country, in essence creating a QRIS 2.0. Most QRIS systems are homegrown and hyper-local. While there are some important strengths to that model, it also makes it more difficult to generate best-practices at scale to advance the field as a whole. Shine’s SPARK projects are uniquely positioned to make a contribution to the evolving national discussion about how we actually improve the quality of early learning service provision. LEAP’s support to help develop an analytic and evaluation strategy would be important in the effort to do that. 

1. What quality improvement services or processes have the most significant impact on child and family outcomes, and how do those services address learning variability?

2. Is there variability in the success of quality improvement services and processes across different dimensions?

   1. Learning variability: within-person, within-group, contextual

   2. Location:  State, Urban/Suburban/Rural

   3. Provider Types: Center-based, Family-based

   4. Demographics: Race/ethnicity, Socio-economic status

3. Is there variability in the child and family outcomes across those same dimensions?

All of these questions are important for SPARK to understand, and will also impact the  entire early childhood education field as it works to improve its QRIS efforts.

The output that we desire for our LEAP sprint is the creation of a data analytic and evaluation strategy that utilizes the project’s various data sources to broaden our focus from inputs and implementation to measurement of key aspects of our program effectiveness and outcomes for children and families across our three sites. We request support to describe and define the outcomes we are able to measure and create the strategy and tools to replicate this measurement process in each of our current SPARK projects and additional SPARK projects as we continue to scale. We are interested in developing a strategy to assess our programs’ effectiveness as it relates to learning variability.  We are also interested in assessment with outcomes disaggregated across various dimensions, including demographics, location and provider type. 

We plan to use our findings to contribute to our continuous quality improvement initiative for our SPARK projects. In addition, we will use the findings to help make the broader case about the efficacy and importance of investing in high-quality, well-designed, efficient and effective training and technical assistance services to improve the quality of early childhood education provision. With valid, reliable and disaggregated data analytic methods, we can continuously improve our offerings and can demonstrate our successes to our staff, our clients, and to the early learning field in general.

Shine’s Data-Informed Learning value states:  “We commit to  continuous improvement, as we use data inclusive of our lived experiences to inform organizational strategy, both programmatic and operational. Striking this balance ensures that we understand information in context, and in turn empower all stakeholders to engage in informed decision-making with agency that facilitates change.”

In support of this value, Shine is committed to implementing the data analytic and evaluation strategy that would be created during the LEAP sprint that would demonstrate SPARK’s effectiveness and help improve our ability to address learning variability and achieve more equitable outcomes for the diverse clientele pur SPARK projects serve. This will inform the performance measures we use in our continuous quality improvement process, will help us make comparisons across our projects, and will inform the field as we engage nationally in QRIS reform discussions.

At Acelero we have partnered with outside organizations such as Bellwether and the Annenberg Center at Brown University to evaluate our programs’ effectiveness and drive program improvement efforts and outcomes for children and families. We are hoping that our LEAP sprint will jump-start our ability to do something similar with our SPARK projects. 

Shine and Acelero are in the process of strengthening our capacity to implement the data analytic and evaluation strategy that would result from a LEAP project and are hiring two new positions that will be leading this work.  The newly created Vice President of Performance Implementation and Impact, and the Senior Director of Solutions and Impact will both have the responsibility to use data and analysis to improve our effectiveness.

Because the output of the LEAP Project sprint will be the creation of a data analytic and evaluation strategy, the short term outcome will be to implement that strategy.  Because we have multiple years of experience in providing SPARK services, we will begin with a retrospective application of the evaluation framework to gather the learnings from our work to date.  This will supplement the data analysis we conduct already that informs our continuous quality improvement efforts. 

Once we implement the analytic and evaluation strategy we will focus on the following outcomes:

• Meaningful improvements in all leading indicators/metrics in the priority areas.

• Increased understanding of the different components of learning variability and how they influence improved outcomes.

• Increase in diversity of programs achieving highest level ratings, reflective of location, provider type, and demographics of children and families served.

Over the long term, we plan for our engagement with LEAP to lead to improved outcomes for the children and families served by SPARK. Effects we would like to see include:

• Children and families served by providers who receive SPARK supports are kindergarten ready to thrive, succeed, and excel.

• Providers served by SPARK achieve sustained self-sufficiency, compliance and overall quality of operational and pedagogical programs.

• Provider cultures are focused on addressing learning variability through more inclusive  and equitable practices, focused on  and committed to continuous learning.

The ultimate impact we would like to achieve is to contribute to the transformation of QRIS and the early childhood education field.

• The SPARK network has a strong infrastructure and community which supports high-quality early care and education that addresses learning variability at all stages and in all settings.

• QRIS systems that lead to improved, equitable outcomes for children and families.

• Increase the diversity (type, population served, composition of the program, etc.) of providers to address learning variability and meet unique family needs.

• High-quality early care and education leads the way for all children to thrive and live to their full potential.

• Narrowing of opportunity gaps: disparities and opportunity gaps by race, place, and immigrant status begin to narrow.