The purpose of this presentation is to describe some of the activities of a partnership forged between NYU researchers and senior leaders in NYC that was intended to provide research infrastructure and capacity-building solutions while also addressing jointly identified research questions about the "Pre-K for All" (PKA) program. The focus has been to strengthen the research architecture so that the City can monitor and assess the PKA initiative. In addition, the authors have played a key role in providing technical assistance to the city in the roll-out of these early childhood services. As part of that technical assistance, one of the charges was to assist in the development and dissemination of a comprehensive set of quality standards for pre-K across all pre-K sites, as well as the development/refinement of a "snapshot" measure that can be used to assess PKA programs in meeting those standards. There are likely to be major benefits and risks for children entering the expanded PKA program. One major educational challenge for NYC is that the research architecture by which leaders can quantitatively monitor those potential benefits and risks is only in its earliest stages. The aim is to leverage the successful partnership that has been built over the past year of collaboration between researchers at the Institute of Human Development and Social Change at NYU and NYCs early education policy leaders in the Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO) at the Mayor's office and the Division of Early Childhood Education (DECE) at the Department of Education. The guiding principle of this work is to put "science to work" to jointly strengthen the research tools needed to answer policy and scholarly questions regarding the effectiveness of PKA while also enhancing the usability of those findings for the day-to-day work of practitioners and policymakers.