Wisconsin's Early Childhood Excellence Initiative was a $15 million public policy effort designed in 2000 to increase child care quality for low-income children. An evaluation revealed significant improvement in classroom quality, the quality of caregiver interaction, and caregivers' beliefs about children following a complex multi-faceted intervention in 28 selected child care centers. The evaluation also revealed higher quality in Centers for Excellence relative to Comparison centers. Research over the past 35 years has demonstrated that high quality early care and education is one of our best hopes for optimizing the long-term developmental outcomes of infants and young children in poverty. Positive results from this evaluation suggest that it may be within the power of state government to raise the quality of early care and education, should the commitment be there to do so.