BOSTON ― Sixteen 4-year-olds are standing side by side inside a brightly decorated classroom, grinning and giggling and fidgeting only a little bit as they prepare to sing about the sun. They are rehearsing a performance for their upcoming “graduation” from their year in one of Boston’s free pre-kindergarten programs. When the song starts, they move nearly in sync: rocking from one side to the other, putting their hands in the air to wave and then picking up pictures of the sun they have drawn.
But to Jason Sachs, longtime director of Boston’s pre-K system, it’s not the choreography that matters. It’s that artwork.
“Look at the pictures,” he tells me excitedly. “Each one is quite different.” One sun is big, round and yellow, and has a happy face on it. Another is just a crescent peeking over some brightly colored trees. It shows that the children are learning to think for themselves, Sachs explains, even in the context of a carefully planned group activity. “That’s all intentional,” he says. “It’s how we design the curriculum.”
Over the next few hours, at this program and another in a different part of town, Sachs will point out dozens of more details that, he says, reveal Boston’s pre-K strategy. There are the things we can see, like the activity stations with the illustrated labels stressing the skills kids are supposed to develop through play. And then there are all the things we can’t see, like the high pay designed to attract and retain the most skilled instructors.
Sachs thinks all of this adds up to a formula for pre-K that works — and that can work in other communities, too. He’s not alone.
“Universal pre-kindergarten,” generally understood to mean free, government-financed preschool for 4- and (sometimes) 3-year-olds, typically has several interrelated purposes. It’s a way to make sure all kids are ready for kindergarten, with a special emphasis on low-income children and others who might not get that preparation without some kind of government assistance. It’s also a source of reliable, quality child care for parents who want or need to work ― and, relatedly, a way to shore up the labor force, which can be good for the economy.
Versions of universal pre-K already exist in more than a dozen states, and it’s not just the usual liberal suspects. Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee all have programs. The widespread, bipartisan enthusiasm is one reason advocates had high hopes for a 2021 proposal to take the concept nationwide. The idea was that the federal government would pick up the bulk of the financing for any states that wanted to try it.
The initiative was part of a broader early childhood agenda in the legislation that President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders were calling “Build Back Better.” But the hundreds of billions of dollars in newly proposed spending for those programs was too much for Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and a handful of other conservative Democrats ― to say nothing of the Republicans, for whom the sum was a total non-starter.
And it wasn’t just the dollars causing problems. Among policy experts, there were some underlying questions about whether a massive pre-K initiative would even produce favorable results, given a litany of discouraging findings from studies of some existing programs.
To overcome the doubts and make nationwide pre-K a reality, advocates could use more proof that such programs can work ― not just in small, carefully controlled pilot programs but also at large scale, over a lengthy period of time. Sachs and his colleagues think they have done just that in Boston.
They make a good case. Seeing the classrooms, listening to the instructors and administrators, speaking with those outside analysts, it’s not difficult to believe that Boston’s program is succeeding where some others have failed. But the story of Boston also comes with some important caveats, like the importance of a local political environment that will support and nurture pre-K, and give an initiative the resources it needs to succeed.
A Boston Tradition, Four Centuries Old
Boston’s commitment to education is nearly as old as the city itself. It was Bostonian Puritans who in 1635 established the nation’s first public school and then four years later its first public elementary school. In the early 1800s, their descendants were among the civic leaders and philanthropists who created “infant schools” to help young, indigent children who might not be getting what was deemed a properly nurturing upbringing at home.
The impulse to provide for very young children never went away. In the 1990s, Boston launched a pre-K program within the public school system, targeting a few hundred low-income kids. Then, in 2005, Mayor Thomas Menino proposed making the program available to any family that wanted it, regardless of income. It was an audacious promise, and not simply because of the dramatic expansion it would entail. No city had tried anything this big before.
With the help of some outside funding, Boston set aside enough money to launch the initiative so that by the time Menino left office in 2014, it was serving about 2,000 kids. Marty Walsh, Menino’s successor, set aside yet more money for pre-K and expanded the program so that private, nonprofit organizations could participate if they showed they could meet the system’s standards and agree to operate with oversight from Boston Public Schools.
Today, 4,000 kids, or about two-thirds of the city’s 4-year-olds, attend one of the public or private programs that make up Boston’s pre-K system. City officials say that there are enough slots for any family that wants one, with the caveat that these slots aren’t always open in the areas where families need them. As a result, some parents have to choose between putting their kids in a nearby private program (which can be very expensive) or a faraway public one (which requires the time and money associated with transportation).
The situation can be particularly tough on lower-income families, the very ones that need the most help. The city has responded by improving outreach (surveys showed that many of these parents didn’t know free pre-K was even available) and making enrollment easier — and by further expanding the program as well.
A new, $20 million investment will create slots for 3-year-olds and allow small, in-home child care programs to participate if they hit the system’s benchmarks. The hope is to serve 1,000 more children, with special attention to currently underserved neighborhoods, as part of new Mayor Michelle Wu’s agenda to make Boston “the most family-friendly city in the country.”
A Focus On Quality ― And A Reliance On Research
While program oversight has varied from mayor to mayor and from school board to school board, Boston’s enthusiasm for early childhood programs in general and pre-kindergarten in particular has been constant. One of the most visible signs of that enthusiasm has been the support for Sachs, whom Menino first tapped to run the city’s then-newly created early childhood office in 2005.
“I’ve always had a straight line to the superintendent, a straight line to the mayor,” Sachs told me.
It helps that Sachs has never been a true outsider. Menino hired him from the city’s Department of Education, where he was already monitoring the early, targeted preschool programs. Sachs also had a doctorate from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, where he’d written a dissertation on whether preschools with higher quality ratings have better results, with a particular focus on the disparate impact for low- and middle-income children.
That research helped convince him that pre-K can make a big difference in the lives of kids, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, but only if the programs have the right structure. Over the next few years, he and his growing team have focused on making that happen.
In other cities and states, the overwhelming priority has been on simply creating enough pre-K slots for all the families who want them, according to Christina Weiland, a University of Michigan professor and expert on early childhood programs who has studied Boston’s program closely. And even some of the places that have made quality a priority haven’t applied the available research rigorously, Weiland told HuffPost.
“Boston has been really, really focused on quality for a long time, and very specific about what that means, in a way that not a lot of places have been,” Weiland said.
To do this, Boston has drawn on preschool curricula developed by some of the most well-respected early childhood researchers around the country and then adapted them over the years based on its own internal research into what works and what doesn’t. If there’s a single underlying principle, it’s the idea that 4-year-olds are capable of advanced learning and thinking — that, even at 4, children can develop analytical skills they will use later in life.
The emphasis is still on play-based learning, with lots of activity in colorful, hands-on “centers” around the room that attract the kids’ attention naturally. But the activities all have substantive themes, in a sequence the curriculum lays out over the course of the year. The curriculum also builds in phonics, vocabulary and counting, which teachers introduce through storytime and other group exercises and which the activity centers then reinforce through artwork, music and games.
The curriculum also stresses critical thinking skills, by — for example — having the children write plays, present them and then get feedback from the other kids.
“These guys have a play based curriculum that is focused on all of the different things that are important for those little brains that are growing,” said Kristin McSwain, director of Boston’s early childhood office and a senior adviser to the mayor. “So it’s not just about reading and writing and math. It’s about reading, writing and math ― and sharing and experiencing new things and learning. I think that’s a huge piece of why this works.”
An Emphasis On Teachers ― And Paying Them Well
A cornerstone of Boston’s pre-K is the uniformity of concepts. At the programs I visited, I spotted the same activity stations focusing on light and shadows as part of a curriculum phase designed to introduce kids to science. But the system also allows individual programs to customize their approach based on the specific needs of their kids and communities.
That is no small thing, given Boston’s diversity. The city is 10% Asian, 20% Hispanic, 24% Black and 44% non-Hispanic white, according to the Census Bureau. It also includes several immigrant communities full of kids from families where English is not the first language ― or, in some cases, is not spoken at all.
One of those is the heavily Vietnamese neighborhood where I saw those singing kids, who were attending the Âu Cơ Preschool, which operates inside a nonprofit community organization. (Âu Cơ is a maternal figure in Vietnamese myth.) The performance was in Vietnamese, as was the story I saw a teacher read aloud. Signs around the room were nearly all bilingual.
The success of that curriculum depends entirely on the people implementing it, and a major goal of Boston’s program is to attract qualified teachers. All of them must have a bachelor’s degree and, if they are in one of the programs that Boston Public Schools runs directly, they must (like all Boston public school teachers) have a master’s degree in child development or education within five years of starting.
“You can have a great system,” TeeAra Dias, who since 2015 has been one of Sachs’ top deputies at the early childhood office. “But if you don’t have the right people implementing it, it’s not going to be great — it’s going to be useless.”
Recently, there’s been debate about whether credentials really matter in early childhood care, especially at younger ages when ― some say ― the care and attention kids need might come just as reliably from somebody without formal training. But at least for pre-K, Sachs and other leaders in Boston’s program say, the training is absolutely essential given what they’re trying to accomplish.
And it doesn’t stop with the degrees that instructors get in college. The program maintains a staff of full-time coaches who visit classrooms regularly, offering teachers feedback and guidance. The idea, officials told HuffPost, isn’t simply to make sure teachers are using generic “best practices.” There’s an ongoing, clear focus on whether the curriculum’s lessons are getting through to the kids.
That may sound tedious, and it’s easy to imagine a version where the instructors resent the process. However, a recent study from the Boston Early Childhood Research Practice Partnership, which a group of outside scholars run with the city’s help, found just the opposite.
Teachers said they liked the coaching in part because the communication goes both ways. They have a chance to weigh in on what they think is working and not working, with that information going back to the main office. Program administrators then use that information, along with what they are hearing from program directors, to refine the curriculum.
“I think they’ve done a really good job of listening to the people in the field, the ones with the experience,” said Mary Kinsella Scannell, who has been working in child care for more than 30 years and who oversees pre-K at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Dorchester, where she is senior vice president.
It helps that the personnel in Boston’s program are making relatively good money. Instructors in the Boston Public School programs are part of the teachers union and are paid on the same scale as K-12 teachers. Instructors in the private affiliates aren’t unionized, which means, among other things, that they don’t get the same benefits.
That’s a source of ongoing tension within the program. But starting salaries are the same, and instructors still get a bump from what private pre-K typically pays in other parts of the country.
“Boston salaries are just very high,” Greg Duncan, a University of California, Irvine, professor and longtime researcher of early childhood programs, told HuffPost. “It’s hard to know exactly what difference it makes, but it certainly can’t hurt and it probably helps a lot.”
Weiland agrees and thinks this is among the most important lessons Boston can teach the rest of the country.
“It’s hard to imagine that you’re ever going to get pre-K to a place where it’s respected, and teachers do have the wages that they deserve, without getting them to pay parity with K-12,” Weiland said. “And if you don’t do that, then you also face this kind of leaky bucket where, once your folks do get the degrees … they’re just going to leave, so all those quality investments that you’re going to make are going to drain away because the turnover is higher in these systems that don’t have parity.”
The Mixed Message From Researchers
In academia and in politics, most of the conversation about whether pre-K “works” has focused on its ability to improve outcomes for kids from low-income backgrounds. Some of the best evidence that it can comes from a famous pair of 1960s-era experiments, the Perry Preschool in Michigan and Abecedarian Project in North Carolina, where kids not only did better in school but went on to greater success in adult life.
Those results are one reason pre-K became so popular, with so many programs popping up around the country. But researchers following these newer, bigger programs frequently found they didn’t produce the same results. Kids might enter kindergarten with improved literacy or math skills, but the effect faded within a year or two. Studies of one program in particular, Tennessee’s, produced an even more discouraging result: evidence that some kids actually ended up worse off after a few years.
Early studies of Boston’s program by Weiland and other researchers produced a mixed picture of its own. Kids showed up in kindergarten with marked improvement in language, literacy and mathematical ability, as well as the underlying “executive function” and “self-regulation” skills that undergird future success in school and adult life. But by the end of the third grade, the effects were much smaller. Research showed that most of the fade-out was in kindergarten and that, by the end of third grade, the boost had lasted only for students in schools with higher test scores overall.
A likely culprit, researchers reasoned, was the type of education kids were getting once they started kindergarten, where lesson plans focused on developing many of the skills the Boston pre-K graduates had already acquired, but through a relatively bland, less interactive style of learning and without the same rich content.
With that evidence in hand, Sachs and his colleagues worked with Boston Public Schools to create a new office of early childhood education with a mandate to revamp school curricula up through second grade to reinforce the skills and techniques that pre-K was developing. Weiland, who is conducting studies on the outcome, says the early results are promising, if still tentative.
Another source of encouraging news about Boston was a separate paper, published two years ago from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The study behind it (still ongoing) follows kids who were part of the embryonic, 1990s version of the program, and has found the familiar “fade out” of skill improvement after a few years. But researchers also found that, later in life, the kids who went through pre-K were significantly less likely to spend time in juvenile detention and more likely to go to college.
The findings are consistent with the theory that pre-K teaches skills that lead to future success, which is what studies of Perry and Abecedarian found — and some newly published research on Head Start found, too.
Challenges Ahead, In Boston And Beyond
Whether all of this adds up to a compelling case for funding pre-K is obviously a complex question. Even Duncan, who has a lot of praise for the Boston program, warns that the evidence tells a complex story, with many unanswered questions about precisely what impact it’s having and what it takes to make sure the early gains from successful pre-K programs stick.
Given that uncertainty, it’s not hard to see why some policymakers might prefer alternative uses of government money, whether it’s for smaller, more targeted early education programs or for unrestricted, direct cash subsidies to families. Plus, there’s always the option most conservatives prefer: not appropriating the dollars at all in order to reduce government outlays and eventually the taxes it takes to support them.
But Boston officials seem convinced that they are on the right path, and not simply because of what the program can do to close the achievement gap.
Mayor Wu loves to talk up the economic importance of pre-K as a way to help working parents find and keep jobs ― and to keep young families from leaving the city. “Child care is absolutely necessary infrastructure, for our economy and our community,” Wu told HuffPost, citing her own experience as a working mother of two young children. “In my mind, it’s in the same category as affordable housing and reliable public transportation.”
Wu also talks about pre-K in loftier terms, as an example of the kind of “public good” that the citizens of Boston have valued throughout their history.
“It reflects our legacy as a city,” Wu said, “recognizing what happens when we invest in public goods ― when people can benefit from places and programs that are free and available to all, not based on what you can afford. … It’s been nearly 400 years where we recognize that when all people have what they need to grow and learn and thrive, it’s our entire community and society that benefits.”
That kind of enthusiasm for universal pre-K doesn’t exist everywhere, not even in some of the bluest parts of America. New York City’s new program, which was the signature policy achievement of former Democratic Mayor Bill DeBlasio, is now in trouble because his successor, Democrat Eric Adams, doesn’t support it.
Adams has said he’d prefer a smaller program, focusing on lower-income residents. In the meantime, his administration has been slow to pay providers, to the point that some are saying they may have to shutter, as articles in Bloomberg and The New York Times have detailed.
As it happens, Boston’s program now faces a big transition of its own. Sachs is leaving after 18 years at the helm in order to join the Gates Foundation. The city plans to conduct a search for a permanent replacement. In the meantime, Dias is stepping up to serve as interim executive director.
That’s a lot of responsibility. But Dias is no stranger to the program or what it does. A Boston native, she has a degree in early childhood education and spent years working for private providers, eventually running her own, before coming to work for the city. She is another example of Boston attracting veteran, qualified talent — and one more reason to believe the city has hit upon an approach that can work elsewhere, as long as the community and its leaders are fully committed to success.