Strengthening School Readiness Through New York City's Pre-K for All: The Development of a University-District Partnership

• In Event: Research-Practice Partnerships for Quality Improvement in Early Education: Best Practices and Creative Solutions

Abstract

Based on research that early education is key to addressing children’s risk of academic failure, New York City (NYC) leaders in economic development, educational improvement, and early childhood education forged a remarkable political vanguard in 2014 to offer “Pre-K for All”. This program marked a commitment of NYC’s Department of Education under a strong directive from Mayor de Blasio’s office to provide free, full-day, high-quality pre-K to every NYC four-year-old child. Through Pre-K for All, the city transformed a system that originally served 19,000 students to one that served nearly 70,000 children in 2015-2016. While the speed and scale of this expansion is impressive by itself, what has been equally noteworthy is the city’s accompanying effort to building a strong quality infrastructure, with data-informed decision-making to differentiate supports such as on-site coaching and Professional Development (PD).

This project leverages the successful partnership that has developed over the past several years between researchers at the Steinhardt School at New York University (NYU) and NYC’s early education leaders in the Division of Early Childhood Education at the Department of Education (DECE-DOE). The partnership was initially designed to address relatively straightforward descriptive questions and present information in easy-to-read visual displays to help city leaders “take the pulse” of children and schools as they rolled out the historic program. It has since evolved to comprise co-development of an increasingly robust research infrastructure for ongoing quality monitoring of the program and embed a pilot evaluation of the PD system. This is the logical next step in the partnership—building in a rigorous analysis of a core component of the program.

The aim of this phase of the research-practice partnership project is to evaluate an innovative model of PD within the program. This jointly-conceived project evaluates a centerpiece of the program in which sites are assigned to one of four PD tracks that differ in area of focus and targeted teacher practice, while all supporting quality based on the NYC Pre-K for All Quality Standards (PQS) and the NYS Prekindergarten Foundation for the Common Core (PKFCC) learning standards. Our goal is to examine the impacts of three primary PD tracks, each with a clear and differentiated focus. We do so by leveraging natural occurring lotteries that assign children to “treatment” and others to “control” through NYC’s pre-K application process.

In sum, this study provides the kind of information the city needs: the broad goal of our work is sustained, partnered work that facilitates bidirectional influence of rigorous research and policy/practice in ways that are useful to the city (first) and to wider policy and education science communities (second). By helping NYC leaders answer questions of high practical relevance with rigor as the programs are being implemented at scale, we aim to provide the kind of information that NYC policymakers overseeing the initiative need to strengthen the program and thus meet its long-term goals of supporting the learning and development of all NYC children through universal pre-K.

Authors

• Pamela Morris, New York University

• Josh Wallack, New York City Department of Education

• Elise Cappella, New York University

• Rachel M Abenavoli, New York University

• Natalia Rojas, New York University

• Ailish Brady, New York City Department of Education