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…

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…

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…

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…

Early math skills are a strong predictor of later achievement for young children, not only in math, but in other domains as well. Exhibiting strong math skills in elementary school is predictive of later high school completion and college attendance. To that end, the Making Pre-K Count and High 5s studies set out to rigorously assess whether…

This report summarizes research conducted primarily over the past 10 years on how families' involvement in children's learning and development through activities at home and at school affects the literacy, mathematics, and social-emotional skills of children ages 3 to 8. A total of 95 studies of family involvement are reviewed. These include both…