Date: Friday, November 6, 2026
Hi! We’re Kristin Kappelman, director of research, and Samantha Reynoso, research and evaluation manager, with Milwaukee Succeeds, a collective impact that advances education equity in Milwaukee, ensuring all children have the resources they need to succeed. We aim to ensure our research and evaluation work is community-focused and policy-relevant.
Early childhood education (ECE) plays an important role in the health and well-being of children and families. Child care programs opening and closing can lead to instability in the ECE sector – which in turn contributes to workforce instability. When parents can’t find stable child care or if an ECE program closes, it can disrupt the daily routine of the entire family, causing parents to miss work and children to have their education interrupted.
As we started to plan this project, we noticed some strange occurrences in the data. Specifically, the number of ECE programs in Milwaukee kept increasing, while the remainder of the state showed a decrease. To the casual observer, it looked like the ECE sector in Milwaukee was thriving, but our ECE partners told us about programs closing and opening in their neighborhoods. This reminded us of student churn, where students move schools at non-traditional points, that can be experienced by school systems.
Based on this information and experience, we knew that our traditional method of evaluating ECE programs by counting the total number of programs was hiding the instability in the ECE sector. For example, if 10 ECE programs open and 10 programs close in a neighborhood, the net change is 0. But this doesn’t account for the hidden disruption experienced by parents, children, and community members that is happening with programs opening and closing. We aimed to shine a light on this long-term problem of hidden disruption in the ECE space by developing a method to evaluate the movement of ECE programs in Milwaukee via a series of churn, stability, and closure rates.
Our ECE-specific churn rate reflects the movement of ECE programs, showing both openings and closings in a calendar year and demonstrating the movement and instability that can happen over the course of 12 months.
Our stability rate accounts for programs that remain open for the entire calendar year, demonstrating reliability over the course of 12 months.
Our closure rate accounts for programs that end their business, demonstrating instability over the course of 12 months.
These metrics gave us concrete data around the instability that we had anecdotally heard from ECE educators, but we still didn’t know why this instability was happening. The metric development became the first step in conducting a more holistic evaluation of the ECE sector in Milwaukee. We’re also leading a grant where we will collect qualitative data from ECE educators around why they started their businesses, what supports have been most useful, and what can cause them to close. All of these results will be used to create a series of policy and procedural recommendations that will be shared with our partners in order to support ECE .
Remember to look beyond the standard measure or create one of your own, especially when it doesn’t capture what your community is experiencing.
To stay informed of our future work, join the email list and bookmark our research page, which contains more information about the stability metrics and our other projects.
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