Our project's goal, borne out of an identified need from state partners, is to help advocates prepare for, develop, and ultimately implement a process for achieving a strong, supported, and diverse early childhood education profession. Recognizing that each state has its own complexities, the first step is to delve deeply enough to uncover a state's internal systems, structures, and regulations. We realize that to do this, advocates and policymakers will need a new tool, something akin to an MRI machine for scanning a state's policy and regulatory structures. We developed a comprehensive questionnaire to serve this purpose. The answers that come from this questionnaire can help people spot where opportunities, gaps, and blockages exist and where infrastructure is strong and weak, while also helping to establish paths for moving forward. To ensure this questionnaire tool uncovered the most useful information, we piloted it in early 2017 with three states: Indiana, New York, and Wisconsin. This particular brief, the first of a series, uses answers from those states to illustrate what types of new information can emerge from such a scan, particularly in the areas of governance, competencies, and preparation policies. These states share distinct similarities as well as important differences in their political climate, demographic composition, and history with early childhood and K-12 education. This brief teases out some of those similarities and differences, providing important information to the three participating states, while drawing lessons for the others about the kinds of questions to ask and answer when mapping out priorities and strategies for change. (author abstract)