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…

Educational practices that prove effective often involve a substantial investment of training and support time. Unfortunately, that is the very characteristic that makes it difficult and costly to expand the programs on a large scale. A key challenge when scaling up is to maintain high levels of effectiveness at an affordable cost.…