A robust body of evidence over the past half a century has documented the importance of early childhood experiences for adult outcomes. From maternal prenatal care to early intervention in infancy and toddlerhood, and through high-quality care and educational experiences in the preschool years, support services and programs for families and young…

Decades of research on early care and education have shown that four-year-old children who enroll in prekindergarten (pre-K) programs start kindergarten scoring higher on assessments of academic skills than those who do not. A handful of long-term follow-up studies of pre-K have also found that these programs can have lasting beneficial impacts on…

There is clear evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic had significant negative effects on the learning and development of school-age children in the United States, with disproportionate impacts on children from racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically marginalized groups. There is less consistent evidence on the extent to which the pandemic…

The Boston Public Schools (BPS) district is the first large school system in the United States to design and implement a curriculum and professional model--called "Focus on Early Learning"--to align instruction across its well-known, high-quality public school pre-K program and early elementary school grades. Schools opt in and can…

Research shows that high-quality pre-K can have lasting impacts on children's learning and development, with the largest effects clustered among children of color, multilin­gual learners, and children experiencing poverty. Yet policymakers, administrators, and teachers often wrestle with the complexities of providing these programs on a large…

As the availability of high-quality, center-based prekindergarten (pre-K) has increased, so too has the attention given to children's learning experiences in the summer between pre-K and kindergarten. Investment in summer learning programs may help sustain the effects of pre-K and also boost the outcomes of children who don't enroll in a formal…

Many early care and education (ECE) institutions--including Head Start, state quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS), and school district pre-K programs--use classroom quality observations in their quality improvement or monitoring processes. As many states expand their ECE programs, they grapple with questions about how best to use data…

An investment in early childhood education pays off when the benefits continue into adulthood. Although many recent preschool interventions have had positive, short-term effects on young children's language, literacy, mathematics, executive function, and social-emotional development, studies show that related gains in cognitive and academic skills…

Improving the quality of teaching and instruction takes time and planning and may be costly and require intensive work. This is particularly true when trying to make improvements among multiple preschool sites, because preschool systems often lack a cohesive infrastructure for supporting high-quality implementation of curricula and teacher…

Early math ability is one of the best predictors of children's math and reading skills into late elementary school. Children with stronger math proficiency in elementary school, in turn, are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college. However, early math skills have not historically been a major focus of instruction in preschool…

In this paper we use data from students who participated in the oversubscribed Boston Public Schools (BPS) prekindergarten program as a window into variation in the program's medium-term effects. We first examine whether, for the sample of students who applied to oversubscribed BPS prekindergarten programs, there is variation in the effects of the…

As school choice expands in different states and districts, it appears in several different forms: (1) open enrollment policies among traditional public schools; (2) charter schools available to students regardless of their neighborhood (including online charter schools); or (3) school vouchers that families can use to enroll in other districts or…

Early childhood interventions can be highly cost effective when positive impacts are sustained into adulthood. Yet while many recent preschool interventions have been found to have short-term effects on young children's language, literacy, mathematics, executive function, and social-emotional development, studies show that impacts on cognitive and…

In the context of a persistent achievement lag among low-income children despite substantial investments in early education, policymakers and practitioners continue to seek ways to improve the quality of children's preschool experiences. The Making Pre-K Count study addresses whether strengthening prekindergarten (pre-K) instruction in math,…

Growing investments in preschool at the federal and state levels--particularly in evidence-based approaches to language acquisition and reading--are predicated in part on the hope that high-quality preschools might help close the gap between the school achievement of low-income children and their more affluent peers. Indeed, the problem is…