Building a Citywide P–3 System in Cambridge, MA

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Developing comprehensive 0-8 systems: aligning ECD and primary school education and care

Proposal

The City of Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Cambridge Public Schools established a P–3 Partnership in 2016. The Partnership was formed at the recommendation of an Early Childhood Task Force convened by the City Manager and the Superintendent of Schools. The Task Force conducted a review of the research on ECD and carried out an extensive needs assessment of ECD and primary school programs and services in the city. The Task Force identified three overarching priorities:
• Start early and attend to the entire prenatal through 3rd grade continuum.
• Quality is essential to improving outcomes.
• Build a coherent mixed delivery system across the full range of service providers, including the public schools, that is coordinated and aligned.

Informed by the needs assessment, the city and the local education authority jointly formed a P–3 Partnership to focus on four core areas: access to services, improving quality, strengthening family engagement and partnership, and health services. An Early Childhood Director, overseen by senior city and local education authority leaders and advised by a Steering Committee of local leaders, leads the Partnership.

The Partnership’s core programs in its first 2.5 years include quality improvement initiatives for private, community-based preschools and family childcare providers, a preschool scholarship program, the development of a citywide system to support home visiting programs, an assessment of parenting education programs, a transition to kindergarten plan, and implementation of a new kindergarten curriculum.

Cambridge’s experience has yielded a number of implementation lessons. The city’s Steering Committee and sub-committees represent one way to structure cross-sectoral governance and leadership arrangements. The Partnership has used a strategic plan to phase in initiatives over a multi-year period. Cambridge has designed innovative quality improvement initiatives for preschool, family childcare, and home visiting programs. And through its senior leaders the Partnership engages in an ongoing dialogue with political entities.

Cambridge has contracted with an outside evaluation organization to evaluate its quality improvement initiatives. Thus far 9 of 9 participating programs have advanced in Massachusetts’ quality improvement rating system. Cambridge also collects and manages data on the various programs it supports.

Cambridge will share lessons learned from its experience and reflections on how it would have structured its work differently. Early challenges the partnership has faced include managing the ambitious work of the partnership with a small operational staff, communicating with external stakeholders, the operation of three key sub-committees, and strengthening the linkages between preschool and early primary school educators.

Authors

• Lei-Anne Ellis, Cambridge Public Schools

• David L Jacobson, Education Development Center (EDC)