Prologue

Sixty parents clustered in the cafeteria of the Eliot K–8 Innovation School, some balancing toddlers on their hips, others finishing their morning coffee. “Welcome to the best public school in Boston!” Principal Traci Griffith greeted them, warmly and without the ego that one might imagine to accompany such a statement. It wasn’t long into her overview, which she had been giving for months during similar school tours, before an anxious parent asked, “How many pre-K spots do you have for next year?” “We have thirty-two seats,” Griffith replied smoothly, quickly adding, “But we have four kindergarten classrooms, so that means there are forty-four new seats in kindergarten every year.” That provided little reassurance for the parents who would soon be entering their four-year-olds in the Boston Public Schools (BPS) lottery. Griffith didn’t have to say what many already knew: all but three of the Eliot’s current pre-K students had been virtually guaranteed a spot because they had a sibling already attending the school.

The odds were long for Luca Murthy, but he was blissfully unaware of the stress his parents and so many others were carrying. Luca was only three and was more concerned with Legos than lotteries. But he would turn four before the next school year, making him eligible for one of the nation’s most successful public pre-kindergarten programs, or what the Boston Public Schools call K1. (The grade traditionally called kindergarten is known as K2.) Luca, his family’s firstborn, wouldn’t have the advantage of a sibling spot at the Eliot, and he wasn’t guaranteed a K1 spot at all. The Boston program serves only about twenty-five hundred children, around half the city’s four-year-olds.

Above the cafeteria, in Jodi Krous’s classroom, it was easy to see why parents wanted to send their children to the Eliot for pre-K. Sixteen children were engrossed in activities set up at tiny natural-wood furniture and in woven baskets full of books, puzzles, and art supplies. They were energetic and talkative, but calm and focused. On the rug, some used large wooden blocks to experiment with ramps and how fast toy cars would go depending on the angle of the blocks. At the easel, Krous asked two girls what they were painting and wrote their responses on the bottom of the paper so that when she hung it up later, everyone could see their thought processes. A quiet, reluctant boy got a hug from Krous and a reminder that his mother would be coming home from a business trip that night. “Yesterday you made a great double-decker bus out of Play-Doh. Do you want to make another one?” Krous suggested. “Oh, look, your friend wants to know what a double-decker bus is!” She bent down, gently touching the boy’s shoulders, encouraging him to look directly at the other child and share his expertise with her. Krous had told me that she chose to teach at the Eliot because “you feel a lot of joyfulness here,” and the parents on the tour seemed to sense it, too.

Krous seemed to accomplish the impossible task of noticing everything happening in the room at once, providing just the right question or comment to nudge the children to think a little more deeply. When a child proudly approached her with a book he had made using familiar story characters, she shared his enthusiasm and then prodded him to write down the words the characters might say. Watching children mixing and painting with watercolors, she asked them, “What happens when you use different-sized paintbrushes?” When she used the word “water” while talking about painting, she noticed that a nonverbal child used sign language to say “drink,” showing she heard Krous’s words. Another boy came over to show her how he had pasted the letters of his name on cardstock. “Wow, you have eight letters in your name!” Krous exclaimed. “Do you have the longest name? Go find Olivia’s name. Find the one that starts with an O . Now count how many. What about Matthew?” When she asked him how he got his correct answer of seven, he cheerfully replied, “I counted already!”

It was obvious that every moment of the school day was thoughtfully planned to facilitate children’s learning, and that appealed to Luca’s mother, Maria Fenwick. An educational consultant and former Boston Public Schools teacher, Fenwick had done her homework. She had long known about the Eliot and been drawn to the hands-on experiential learning that is a hallmark of the school. She had heard that Griffith and her staff were knowledgeable and dedicated, and that was clear in Room 105, from the rhyming songs Krous led during morning meeting to build vocabulary and language skills (“How are you, caribou? I’m fine, porcupine!”) to the way she asked children to tell her stories that would be transcribed and later acted out by the class. Fenwick was particularly impressed with the way that evidence of the students’ learning covered the walls. At children’s eye level were detailed self-portraits they had drawn during a unit on color, birth certificates created for pretend infants during a unit on families, photographs of block architecture annotated with descriptions of how the children made them. Each child’s contribution was unique and creative, no evidence of photocopied worksheets anywhere.

Almost any parent would walk into Krous’s classroom and want to send her child there. But few get that opportunity. The thirty-two spots at the Eliot, a nearly hundred-year-old school located in the city’s historic North End, are among the most coveted in the district. “When I call parents to tell them they have a spot at our school, I get to tell them, ‘You have won the lottery—literally,’” says Traci Griffith. Less than ten years ago, however, the Eliot was undersubscribed, ranked near the very bottom of the city’s schools, a site of hopelessness and apathy that had been abandoned by neighborhood families. Less than a block away from the Eliot are a statue of school alumnus Paul Revere in the spot where he began his famous midnight ride, and the Old North Church, where patriots hung lanterns to give the “one if by land, two if by sea” signal. The change that has taken place at the Eliot has been less fiery than the war fought by the American patriots, but no less transformational. The introduction of the K1 program was not solely responsible for the transformation, but it played an important role, drumming up parent interest in the school, building early and long-lasting relationships between children and staff, and laying the crucial foundation for school success that high-quality preschool can provide.

The Boston Public Schools’ K1 program is part of a growing national movement for public pre-kindergarten, or pre-K. Every year, over one and a half million American children are enrolled in pre-K programs funded by public dollars, and thousands more attend private preschools, for a total of about 66 percent of the nation’s four-year-olds. But for most of the remaining third of children, preschool is out of reach for financial or logistical reasons. Unlike most other industrialized countries, the United States has not made a serious commitment to early childhood education. We rank twenty-eighth out of thirty-eight countries in the percentage of four-year-olds enrolled in programs, in large part because we do not fund pre-K for everyone. In countries like the United Kingdom, research has convinced policymakers and the public that pre-K should be a universal right, with guaranteed funding just like kindergarten through twelfth grade.

But there is growing demand for pre-K in the United States. (Parents and educators use a variety of terms, including “pre-K,” “preschool,” and “nursery school,” and there is no standard definition. For example, in the Boston Public Schools, three-, four-, and five-year-olds can enroll in K0, K1, and K2, respectively, while in charter schools I visited in Washington, DC, three-year-olds were in classrooms called preschool, while four-year-old classrooms were called pre-K.) In recent surveys, around 90 percent of parents believe that the preschool years are a critical period of development, and policymakers are beginning to agree. Cities from Seattle to New York have allocated public funding for municipal and district pre-K programs, housed in elementary schools, early childhood centers, or a combination of settings. Most of these programs are limited in size or eligibility criteria, but a few offer a pre-K spot to any family who wants one, like New York City, which created slots for nearly seventy thousand four-year-olds, and Washington, DC, which is one of the only places that offers a free spot not only for every four-year-old, but every three-year-old as well. States are in the pre-K business, too: more than forty states fund some sort of pre-K program at a cost of over $6 billion. And the federal government has supported tens of thousands of new slots via grant programs.

Public investment in pre-K has surged because of research showing how critical the early years are for later success in school and life. of many lives. Children who participated grew up less likely to be incarcerated and more likely to be earning incomes that could sustain a family. Today, the research base goes far beyond those studies of small, intensive programs, showing that high-quality programs run by cities and states can make a difference for children that lasts well into the school years.

In Boston, children who have been in classrooms at the Eliot and other public schools have entered kindergarten about a half year ahead of their peers in language and literacy, math, problem-solving, and self-control skills like paying attention and resisting the impulse to talk out of turn. Those kinds of behavior skills are even more important than knowing letters and numbers, according to a survey of kindergarten teachers, because when kids know how to wait their turn, deal with frustration, and get along with others, it’s easier for teachers to teach and for children to learn. In New Jersey, which has another model program that has been running longer than Boston’s, the positive results continue to roll in as children get older. The most recent study showed that fifth graders who had gone to pre-K were doing significantly better in school than their classmates. Similarly, children who attended state-funded pre-K in North Carolina are more competent in math and reading in fifth grade than their peers, and they are almost 50 percent less likely to be placed in special education. Graduates of Michigan’s Great Start Readiness Program are more likely to pass state tests, take challenging math classes, and graduate from high school.

Maria Fenwick knew about the research on the benefits of pre-K and understood from her own experience in the classroom how important it is for children to be prepared for school. She knew Luca would learn his colors and letters whether he went to K1 or not, but she wanted him to learn how to be part of a class, be exposed to experiences he wouldn’t get at home, and get excited about school and learning. Pre-K can set the tone for a child’s entire educational career. Seeing schools as a fun, exciting, and caring place can lay the foundation for lifelong curiosity and learning. On the other side of the coin, students who have negative experiences with school early on can carry those feelings with them forever.

Although Fenwick was doing all she could to get Luca into K1, she recognized that pre-K is even more crucial for students like the ones she had taught, whose families have fewer resources than hers. In Boston and elsewhere, the benefits of pre-K are particularly striking for children from low-income families, who tend, on average, to be behind their peers even before they start kindergarten. Achievement gaps across income appear shockingly early—some studies have found they are present as early as nine months of age in behavior and cognitive skills—and they are well established by kindergarten, when children in the highest income groups significantly outperform children in the lowest income groups. Achievement gaps are also evident across racial and ethnic groups, with white and Asian American students outperforming African American and Hispanic students, although those gaps shrink considerably after income is taken into account. The good news is that achievement gaps are narrowing, in large part because of investments in early childhood education and care (defined broadly as daycare, preschool, and home-based services like having trained educators visit with and support parents). The bad news is that the gaps remain significant, and a child who starts off behind is likely to stay behind. School readiness gaps across income levels narrowed over the past twenty years “only about half as quickly as they opened in the 1970s and 1980s,” according to Education Week coverage of research by Stanford professor Sean Reardon, who analyzes national data on achievement gaps. If that slow rate of progress continues, it could take another hundred years for the gap to close completely, the article pointed out.

pretty quickly.” In 2013, Obama proposed an unprecedented investment of $75 billion over ten years to ensure that all four-year-olds have access to pre-K. That’s an almost unimaginable number, and it hasn’t been realized. But Obama did allocate about $250 million in the form of federal-state partnership grants to develop and expand pre-K programs for low- and moderate-income children, referring to them as “among the smartest investments that we can make.”

That claim is based on studies showing that children’s outcomes translate into financial benefits for society. In the long run, pre-K saves the government somewhere between $3 and $8 for every dollar invested, because people who went to pre-K are less likely to be on welfare or involved in the criminal justice system and more likely to be working and paying income taxes. Those findings are particularly striking given that they were produced by economists, who were interested in the bottom line rather than in a “moral argument” for pre-K, as one researcher put it. Several unlikely figures have become vocal pre-K advocates based on the financial argument, including Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and Nobel Prize–winning economist James Heckman. Heckman points out that it is more efficient to invest when children are young than to remediate problems that arise later because of inadequate education, and that the success of later interventions depends on whether children have gotten a solid start. Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, a nonprofit of law enforcement leaders, puts it more bluntly: “I’m the Guy You Pay Later,” they titled a report advocating for investments in pre-K.

The economic case hits closer to home for many parents, including Maria Fenwick. Luca was already enrolled at a private preschool just down the street from his family’s apartment, which had a stellar reputation and a waiting list of its own. His mother was thrilled with the school and had become a board member in addition to the expected parent volunteer duties. But the tuition was almost $11,000 for only a few hours a week, ten months a year. Fenwick found the free tuition offered by BPS enticing, especially when she considered that Luca’s little sister, Marin, would be starting preschool soon, too. Fenwick knew she was lucky to have good options in both the private school and the public system, but “we could be saving for a house instead of paying tuition,” she dreamed.

At a time when wages are stagnating and income inequality is at its highest rate in nearly a hundred years, many Americans are finding it increasingly difficult, often impossible, to pay for childcare and early education. For parents like Fenwick, childcare eats up a huge portion of their income. In more than 60 percent of families with a married couple, both parents work outside the home, and most single parents do (70 percent of mothers and 80 percent of fathers). But early childhood care and education costs more than public university tuition in more than half of the United States, and even exceeds rent in many communities. For the average family making minimum wage, the costs constitute 64 percent of their salary, and in some states that percentage is considerably higher. Parents today know that public pre-K gives their children a solid start in school, but they also know it gives their families a life raft in an economic storm. In New York City, almost half of parents surveyed about their experiences with the pre-K program said they would have had to work fewer hours if free pre-K hadn’t been available, and 12 percent said their children’s participation enabled them to enter the workforce. Pre-K is about far more than childcare, but childcare is an undeniable part of the equation.

For Fenwick, as for many parents, there was an even more powerful factor than finances in the decision to enter her almost-four-year-old in the BPS lottery: getting a spot in a choice school for K1 would guarantee her children seats in a good school all the way through middle school. In many cities like Boston and Washington, DC, pre-K is the entry to the public school lottery system that determines where children will go to elementary school and sometimes even middle and high school. The competition for the best public schools can be fierce, and as districts have incorporated pre-K at ages four and even three into the public school system, the opportunities to throw one’s hat in the ring have been pushed down to younger and younger ages. Fenwick, like many parents, felt she had to take “every shot we can get at a good BPS spot.” She hadn’t always felt that way, especially when she was teaching in some of the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods. “Before I had kids, I said I wouldn’t take a K1 spot from a disadvantaged kid,” she recalls. “But now I feel like we have to do it, because we can’t afford private school on the other end.” Fenwick and her husband had moved to Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood specifically because the area was zoned to have priority for the Eliot. For them, school quality was the most important factor in deciding where to live. But choosing the charming and rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of brick buildings and historic gas-lit streetlamps put some financial stress on the family, and it meant renting an apartment rather than saving up to buy one.

Fenwick and her husband also wanted Luca and Marin to be educated in a diverse environment, with children from different cultures and all points on the economic spectrum. Luca wasn’t getting that yet. When one of his preschool classmates came over to play, he was shocked to discover that Luca’s apartment didn’t have a playroom. Fenwick and her husband didn’t want their children to grow up in an environment where that kind of privilege was assumed or where most of the children look the same. Luca, whose father is Indian American and whose mother is white, was the sole dark-haired, dark-eyed child in his class’s morning meeting circle when I went to visit.

For Luca’s family, public school was a given. The only questions were when he would start and where. When it came time to enter the lottery, the Eliot would be a no-brainer first choice. But what about backup schools? Parents are able to enter up to ten school choices, but Fenwick and her husband didn’t want their shy, quiet four-year-old who was used to a part-time program to have to take a school bus across the city twice a day, so they ended up choosing only two schools, both close to their apartment. They crossed their fingers and hoped for the Eliot. If Luca got a spot at their second choice, they would have a tough decision to make: take the spot or try for the Eliot a year later. If he didn’t get a K1 spot at all, Fenwick would implement her backup plan of keeping Luca at the private preschool for another year. But that backup plan carried a hefty financial risk. Like most private preschools, Luca’s required that parents put down a deposit for the following year before hearing back about the public school lottery. Some schools also apply withdrawal fees if a family signs up but then opts out when they get a public school spot. It is an understandable business practice for preschools nervous about filling their seats as they lose more and more families and revenue to public schools. (Spots become harder to fill as the summer approaches, as large numbers of families have already made their decisions.) But it puts families in a tough position, essentially forcing them to pay a high-priced insurance policy to make sure their children aren’t left out of a formative year that many parents and educators are coming to see as the foundation of a child’s formal education.

•　•　•

That kind of insurance policy wasn’t an option for Ayannah Hilton. Hilton, a single mother struggling to make ends meet while finishing a community college degree, also hoped for a K1 spot for her son, Jeremiah. Jeremiah is a bright, outgoing child with a broad smile, and his mother wasn’t worried about his ability to adjust to a new school. But she wanted to make sure he would get a solid start in pre-K, especially in developing his language skills. As a toddler, Jeremiah had been slow to talk, and he eventually began receiving speech services through an early intervention program. At age four, he was talking more, but his mother wanted to see him speak in more consistent sentences and expand his vocabulary. She hoped he would get those skills in a K1 classroom. When the lottery results were announced, she learned he had gotten a spot at a school down the street from their apartment in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. But when Hilton looked into the school’s schedule, she concluded that she couldn’t get Jeremiah to and from school and be at her job and classes on time. “You have to make the schedule that works for you. It’s hard because there’s so many limitations,” she lamented.

Hilton decided that a community center with childcare and preschool would be a better option, especially since Jeremiah and his two-year-old sister, London, could be in the same place. But that wasn’t a straightforward choice either. Jeremiah and London had already tried three centers that Hilton found lacking in organization, cleanliness, and nutritious food. One had been shut down by the state a week after her children started attending. Around that time, Hilton was working out at her local YMCA when she noticed that it had an early childhood program. She was able to get spots for both children, along with substantial financial assistance. The hours and location were convenient, the facility had tight security, and the meals were more varied and nutritious. Jeremiah started in the preschool classroom, dubbed Young Achievers, during the summer he was four.

The Roxbury YMCA is about five miles and a world away from the Eliot, located in one of Boston’s most violent and disadvantaged neighborhoods. It provides early childhood programs as well as fitness and health programs to families from surrounding communities. Most of the children who attend are from families that economists call insecure: they don’t always know if they will have dinner or where they will sleep. Some children, like Hilton’s, have a stable and loving parental figure, but others have seen more than a lifetime’s worth of stress and trauma. Some children have lost parents and other family members to violence. A few mothers worried about getting their children to and from school, because they had to pass through gang and drug territories. Like the parents at the Eliot, the parents at the Roxbury Y wanted the best for their children. And like their peers at the Eliot, the children at the Y were in preschool to build relationships and skills to get ready for kindergarten. But they had far more pressing issues on their minds, like how to handle the fear and anger building up inside of them and all too frequently bubbling over in the classroom.

When I first visited the Roxbury Y’s four-year-old classroom, children ran around the room shouting, biting, and hitting one another. They pounced from one corner of the room to another, strewing books and tossing Play-Doh at classmates. Feelings of anger and distrust were palpable, and everyone seemed to be resorting to their most base instincts for self-preservation. Making the situation more chaotic, the classroom environment was the virtual opposite of the Eliot’s serene space. Classroom materials were sparse and old, signs on the walls arbitrary and difficult to comprehend, and the space disorganized and dingy. But over the following year, the Young Achievers classroom would undergo a transformation of its own. When Hilton inquired about spots for her children, the Roxbury Y’s early childhood director told her that the four-year-old classroom would be partnering with the Boston Public Schools to offer the same curriculum children would be getting if they were attending K1 at an elementary school. That was good news for Hilton, who had wanted a K1 spot all along. Not only would Jeremiah be getting the skills he needed for kindergarten, he would be getting them free of tuition, just as if he were in a public school.

Unbeknownst to Hilton, BPS’s early childhood team had long been grappling with how to handle the unmet demand from thousands of would-be K1 families who hadn’t gotten spots in the lottery. The number of children served in the K1 program is tiny compared to New Jersey’s forty thousand or New York City’s seventy thousand. Many families who apply for K1 seats are turned away, in part because the school buildings in Boston’s old and densely populated neighborhoods don’t have space for more four-year-olds. District and city leaders had long aimed to close the gap, and they were now tapping into community centers to build capacity and quality.

In Boston, and across the country, the early childhood education landscape is a patchwork of diverse public and private options, including public schools, community-based organizations, for-profit childcare centers, Head Start programs (which use federal funds to serve low-income children), and home-based early care settings. That fractured landscape has a number of pitfalls, not the least of which is confusion for parents, but it has some upsides, too. Community-based organizations provide a set of services and strengths that public schools typically do not, like the ten-hour day so important to working parents like Hilton, proximity to families’ homes and workplaces, comprehensive services that can include healthcare, and staff who share families’ home languages and cultures. Many parents feel more comfortable sending their three- and four-year-olds to settings like the YMCA, the Boys and Girls Club, or the neighborhood childcare center than to public schools, and such centers often have more opportunity to engage parents in informal conversations at drop-off and pickup times. These factors were critical for Ayannah Hilton. She needed the extended hours offered by the Y, and she liked having the opportunity to talk to her children’s teachers every day. On the other hand, school districts have some advantages, including the resources and infrastructure to put quality improvement plans and processes in place. For example, they already have systems set up for conducting assessments and evaluations, and for making hiring and promotion decisions in a standardized way. That may help to explain the consistency found in programs like Boston’s K1, and in New Jersey’s Abbott districts, where some programs are located in Head Start centers or community organizations but all are supported, coached, and assessed by the public schools. But critics argue that K–12 schools are already struggling to provide a consistently good education to elementary and secondary students, and they worry that schools will have similar problems with pre-K.

Leaders in Boston were trying to find a middle ground in which community centers remained independent but received guidance and support from the school district. With the help of a federal grant, BPS hired extra early childhood staff to help the Roxbury Y and other community centers implement the K1 model, tweaking, improving, and, in some cases, transforming the way teachers taught four-year-olds. The centers were chosen specifically because they serve high percentages of low-income, high-needs children—in other words, the children who stand to gain the most from pre-K. For many teachers and children, the program turned out to be a revelation. But BPS staff immediately bumped up against big infrastructure challenges that are endemic to early childhood education, especially in centers that serve low-income neighborhoods, where children need the most but often get the least. As everyone involved would learn, high-quality curricula and teacher training are essential, but not sufficient, to ensure that deeply entrenched, problematic practices improve, and so do children.

•　•　•

Early childhood education is at a crossroads in America. Pre-K has more research and political support than ever before. We know that children can and do benefit. We also know that many don’t get that chance. Despite the large increase in public and philanthropic investments, the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) estimates that if the current rate of growth in pre-K enrollment continues, it will take fifty years to serve all low-income children and even longer to serve everyone. In those fifty years, tens of thousands of children could fall behind—children who could otherwise have the potential to become the next president or the researcher who will cure cancer.

In the United States, there has always been some degree of wariness about early childhood education, a view that it amounts to government overreach during a period in development when children should be home with their mothers. That perspective is tied to politicians and advocates who wrapped them into larger reform initiatives because they knew there would be too much resistance to public funding of early childhood education if they took a more transparent route. One of the country’s first universal programs is in Oklahoma, one of the most conservative states in the country. To pass the legislation that funded it, lawmakers and business leaders behind the bill had to sneak it in as part of a larger education reform bill because their previous attempts had provoked claims of a “nanny state.” Today, Oklahoma’s program is one of the most popular in the country and three-quarters of four-year-olds are enrolled, but some other states continue to fight difficult political battles for pre-K.

Even among supporters of pre-K, there has been a heated debate about who should have access: all children or just those from low-income families. problematic. After all, these children tend to start behind, and one of the goals of public pre-K programs is to narrow achievement gaps. That can only happen if low-income children and children of color gain more than their peers. There is another compelling argument about the benefits for middle-class children: many educators and parents like Luca’s mother, Maria Fenwick, believe that their children learn valuable social lessons from going to school with children who come from different backgrounds.

Ensuring access to pre-K won’t help children of any background unless their classrooms are high in quality—and not all preschoolers are currently enrolled in enriching classrooms like Jodi Krous’s at the Eliot. In cities and towns all across the country, the quality of pre-K programs varies widely, and that should worry parents, regardless of their income or neighborhood. Overall, quality is disappointing, whether you look at public programs like Head Start or private programs like for-profit childcare chains. Researchers find that only a minority of programs are of truly poor quality, but excellent-quality programs are also rare. Most programs operate somewhere in the middle, with considerable room for improvement.

Quality matters. That might sound like common sense, but pre-K studies have often been framed as answering the question “Does pre-K work or not?” ignoring the essential questions of why, when, and for whom. Studies show that children benefit from pre-K only when the programs they attend are rated as good or great, especially in how well their teachers provide age-appropriate instruction. Children like those in Jodi Krous’s classroom do better than those in classrooms without engaging teacher-child conversations. States with more comprehensive quality standards do better than those without. Even countries with stronger financial investments in pre-K and higher-quality scores outperform others.

Children from middle-class and affluent families are more likely to get high-quality early education than their peers from low-income families, but even for them it isn’t consistent. In communities all around the United States, some children are in programs where they learn very little or, conversely, where they are expected to learn and perform well beyond what is appropriate for three-, four-, and five-year-olds. The anxiety of parents applying to the Eliot is understandable. Still, it is nothing compared to the stress of parents of lesser means, who often struggle to find or afford a spot at all.

Quality should not be a luxury, and it doesn’t necessarily look luxurious. In fact, it doesn’t look like what many parents assume. Parents want the best possible education for their children, but few are trained educators like Maria Fenwick, so most of us don’t know which questions to ask or what to look for when considering pre-K classrooms. The things that are easiest to see aren’t usually the things that matter most for kids. An alphabet sign on the wall doesn’t mean kids are really engaging with reading and learning. A daily email with a photograph of your daughter is nice to have, but it doesn’t tell you much about whether the teachers are talking to her in a supportive way or sparking her curiosity about science. And in their earnest desire to see children learning, parents sometimes forget that a pre-K classroom shouldn’t look like a third-grade classroom. It should have play areas instead of desks, and for most of the day, an audible hum instead of silence. Some educators worry that the components that matter most are getting lost as pressure to meet the demands of achievement testing get pushed down to earlier and earlier ages. Locating pre-K in public schools may exacerbate the problem in some cases, because many school administrators aren’t familiar with early childhood development and best practices.

The real question is not whether pre-K matters. The real question is: How can we make sure that Jeremiah, Luca, and all preschoolers get what they need to succeed in school and life? That is the question at the heart of this book. It takes a journey into model programs in Boston, New Jersey, and Washington, DC, looking at what effective pre-K teachers do and why. It delves into how young children learn reading, math, social skills, and the other building blocks of school and life success. Following children and parents who have—and have not—been lucky enough to find excellent programs, it examines where we are and where we need to be to give all children a solid start in school. If we have the curiosity, the money, and the will to follow the lessons of the nation’s successful programs, it just might be possible to make high-quality pre-K a reality for every child.