About "Pre-K for All"
An established and growing body of evidence points to early childhood education as key for preventing school failure and lasting achievement gaps. But scaling up high-quality programs has proved challenging. In 2014, the NYC Department of Education undertook a dramatic expansion of full-day universal pre-kindergarten, known as Pre-K for All. By the following school year, more than 68,000 children were enrolled in Pre-K for All programs across the City. This initiative, based in the nation’s largest school district, is providing a unique opportunity to learn about both the benefits and challenges of making early childhood education widely available.
About Our Partnership
Since 2014, leaders at New York University and the NYC Department of Education Division of Early Childhood Education have been engaged in a research-practice partnership that is supporting the roll out of Pre-K For All and providing evidence to help improve the quality of pre-k programming. The Research Alliance plays a vital supporting role in this partnership by assisting with the development of rigorous research designs and providing access to longitudinal data to examine trends in student assignment and enrollment in pre-k programs and to assess impacts on a range of student outcomes. For more information about the partnership’s work, please see “Strengthening the Architecture for High-Quality Universal Pre-K.”