In recognition of our 50th anniversary, we are highlighting examples of where the work of MDRC and its partners is making a difference.

A few years ago, Parisa Spitaleri was riding the New York City subway when a familiar-looking young woman addressed her as “Ms.” followed by her former surname. For a moment, Spitaleri could not place the face, but then it dawned on her: this was “Maria,” one of her long-ago pre-K students, now all grown up.

In the short time they had to catch up, Spitaleri learned that Maria was in college and on track to graduate. “A sense of pride came over me,” Spitaleri said. “To know that I had made an impact on this young lady—enough for her to remember me after all those years—was truly an unforgettable moment.”

Spitaleri felt especially proud when she recalled how Maria, whose family spoke Spanish at home, had struggled to learn English during her early days in pre-K. Yet Spitaleri and her aide had worked diligently to boost her confidence. When Maria, in one memorable instance, spoke in gibberish—mimicking what English sounded like to her—they knew from their training to celebrate this first attempt to communicate in a new language, not to correct it. By the end of the school year, Maria’s verbal skills had improved dramatically in both English and Spanish, preparing her to excel in later grades.

For Spitaleri, who now works as a leadership coach in the New York City public school system, Maria’s story illustrates why early childhood experiences, both inside and outside the classroom, are crucial to the long-term trajectory of children’s lives. It also underscores the importance of treating early childhood educators as just that—educators, not babysitters—and giving them the training they need to equip students with foundational skills.

Spitaleri’s views align with a growing consensus about the formative role of early childhood. Yet educators, administrators, service providers, and policymakers have sometimes struggled to understand exactly how to leverage this powerful window for impact.

That is where researcher-practitioner partnerships, including collaborations with MDRC, have been pivotal. From testing how coaching can improve teachers’ effectiveness, to studying how best to integrate services for disadvantaged families across different settings, an emphasis on evidence is increasingly shaping the conversation around early childhood policies and programs. It is also helping the field transcend more simplistic and polarizing discussions, uniting people around the mission to create high-quality environments that set children up for success.

Looking Toward the Next Generation

MDRC first focused on young children in its evaluations of welfare-to-work programs in the 1980s and 1990s, examining how parents’ employment status and income level could affect their children. MDRC’s Next Generation study, for instance, showed that children’s academic and life outcomes modestly improved when parents’ earnings increased. These findings suggested that investments in improving the environments in which children grow up, including the adults who are part of those environments, can pay dividends for children’s long-term outcomes.

Meanwhile, a growing body of research showed the importance of early childhood experiences—and effective and supportive programs and policies—to later success in life. In particular, work across a range of fields, from neurobiology to the social sciences, revealed how early educational and economic disadvantages can persist or even worsen into adulthood. These problems, experts noted, were ripe for better policy solutions. The seminal 2000 book From Neurons to Neighborhoods, for instance, called for a “fundamental reexamination of the nation’s responses to the needs of young children and their families.”

MDRC was ready to join with others to heed that call. In 2004, it established a new “Families and Children” policy area to explore interventions targeted directly at young children both in and out of school. One of its maiden projects, Foundations of Learning, tested strategies to help pre-K and Head Start teachers in Newark, NJ, and Chicago manage their classrooms more effectively, applying insights from the latest literature on social-emotional development. Results were sufficiently encouraging to prompt a larger-scale follow-on project, Head Start CARES, that tested additional approaches to supporting children’s social and emotional development. Like its predecessor project, Head Start CARES affirmed that strong curriculum and professional development empowered teachers to improve their classroom management and further their students’ social-emotional growth.

Better classroom management, however, was only the first step. As MDRC’s Shira Mattera recalled, Foundations of Learning “showed that you could make more space in the school day” by helping teachers improve students’ behavior, thereby reducing disruptions, “but then what should you fill that space with?” In other words, how could the pre-K classroom give students a better start academically?

Setting Children Up for Success

Enter MDRC’s Making Pre-K Count (MPC) study. Undertaken in partnership with the antipoverty organization Robin Hood, MPC unfolded in New York City classrooms that primarily served families living in poverty. It was inspired by evidence suggesting that early elementary math knowledge is an especially strong predictor of high school and college graduation rates, and by mounting concern among policymakers about deficiencies in U.S. math education in a global, high-tech economy. Using a random assignment design, in which one set of preschools received the MPC intervention while a comparison group proceeded with their usual preschool programming, the study tested a simple hypothesis: that an effective, engaging, hands-on approach to pre-K math education could put children on a long-term path to academic success.

MPC’s starting point was Building Blocks, “the most evidence-based early childhood curriculum in the history of this country, and possibly the world,” as education policy researcher Christina Weiland later described it. Yet MPC theorized that participating teachers would need help adopting a math curriculum designed to be interactive and play-based. So MPC teachers received ongoing training and coaching in their use of the lessons, games, and activities at the heart of Building Blocks — all geared toward helping kids actively understand math concepts and explain their thought process as they applied their knowledge. For instance, teachers were encouraged not only to ask students questions about the material, but also to follow up with another question after the child answered: “How do you know?” Such strategies sought both to improve children’s math skills prior to entering kindergarten and to boost their “executive function” (that is, their ability to manage their thoughts and behaviors) as well as their language and reasoning — all skills that would potentially help them sustain their pre-K gains into later grades.

For Parisa Spitaleri, who participated in the first MPC pilot launched in 2012, the coaching made all the difference. Because the Building Blocks activities “had a lot of nuances” that were easy to miss when just reading the instructions, she explained, sessions with her coach “allowed us to unpack the curriculum together and ask questions and make sure that we were [teaching] it with fidelity,” even as they also gave her the confidence to adapt activities and routines for her classroom’s unique needs. Above all, the experience affirmed both her and her paraprofessional aide as true educators — at a time when aides in particular were rarely seen as substantive contributors to classroom learning.

Beyond simply designing the study, MDRC staff created an entire coaching and training infrastructure in New York in the process, which included finding a coaching partner to hire coaches and setting up a supervision system. And they remained actively involved in implementing the program while the study was in progress. Their focus was listening to feedback from MPC teachers, coaches, and team leaders, such as Katherine Baldwin of Bank Street College of Education, to understand what was happening on the ground and how it might be improved. “What they really wanted to hear was, ‘What was going well? Why might that be? And where were there challenges and why might that be?’” Baldwin recalled. The goal was to apply not just quantitative but also qualitative insights to future interventions — and to ensure that MPC left participating teachers and classrooms better off than when they began the study, no matter the statistical outcomes.

Even as field reports from MPC were promising—teachers described students excitedly chattering about sophisticated concepts like rhombuses—MDRC had already begun planning a follow-on project. That study, dubbed High 5s and launched in partnership with the University of Michigan, aimed to help students from MPC classrooms sustain their math skills, and their enthusiasm for school, as they advanced into later grades. This time, the focus was not on coaching teachers. Instead, trained facilitators pulled students who had participated in MPC the previous year for small-group instruction, using the same kinds of interactive, play-based approaches to teach kindergarten-level math.

The hunch that an additional year would cement long-term impact for students proved correct. Results of both the MPC and High 5s studies showed that while third-grade math outcomes were small but positive for students who had participated in MPC alone, they were more pronounced for students who had participated in both MPC and High 5s.

The ultimate goal of all this work, of course, was not only to create impact for teachers and students who participated in the studies, but also to promote more widespread, sustained use of the interventions they revealed as effective.

While that story is still unfolding, progress is building. MPC was at the forefront of a larger sea change in the field, focused on the use of teacher training and coaching to ensure effective adoption of high-quality curricula and instructional strategies. (MDRC has evaluated other uses of training and coaching, including in the Boston and Washington, DC, public school systems and in Head Start programs across the U.S.) Meanwhile, teachers who participated in MPC and High 5s have continued to use the instructional strategies from those studies, suggesting it is possible to do so even without the additional resources the studies provided. Lindsey Barnard, a teacher in Taylor, Michigan, who participated in a standalone version of the High 5s study, relies on those same methods now that she teaches first grade. “A lot of the games [from High 5s are] meant for small group instruction, [but] I’ve been able to put them out there as a center choice,” she said—referring to an instructional strategy where teachers create stations in their classrooms, known as “centers,” with activities kids can do in their downtime.

As University of Michigan professor Robin Jacob noted, experiences like Barnard’s suggest that interventions like MPC and High 5s can be scaled even in schools with limited resources—and, indeed, that early childhood education is becoming a kind of laboratory, innovating and testing strategies that will prove even more effective when continued into later grades. “At the beginning of the year, teachers say, ‘This is never going to work. I’m not going to be able to do this in my classroom,’” Jacob said. “And then a couple of months in, they say, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s actually working really well.’…Our vision for long-term scaling is that this really is something that teachers can implement” on their own, as long as they have the right support getting started.

Beyond the Classroom

Not every child will attend preschool before entering kindergarten. Some spend their time in other center-based settings like daycare, for instance, while others might be cared for by parents, relatives, or neighbors. But all children engage with adults during their first five years of life—and these interactions and environments, just like pre-K, are opportunities to set children up for long-term success.

MDRC has embraced this insight by focusing on how we can create—and help families access—high-quality environments for children outside as well as inside the classroom, regardless of where those children receive care or who their caregiver is. This approach has not only helped build broader coalitions for effective early childhood interventions; it also reflects an understanding that children’s earliest life experiences, regardless of the setting, have profound implications for their ability to learn once they do begin school.

A central pillar of this work has involved studying and improving home visiting programs serving families with young children. One of MDRC’s largest studies in this vein, the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE), is examining the longitudinal effects of federally funded home visiting programs. Women enrolled in the study through home visiting programs in 12 states when they were pregnant or had a child less than 6 months old, and the study found positive effects for families when children were 15 months of age. MDRC is now studying effects for children and families when these children are in kindergarten and in third grade.

Similar work has continued through MDRC’s partnership with Child First, a nonprofit that supports families from pregnancy through early childhood. Those families work with a therapist as well as a care coordinator who helps them access other services to meet their needs. Child First serves “multi-stressed families,” National Clinical and Training Director Rebecca Parilla explained, who are often “coping with multi-generational trauma, poverty, racism—things that really can wear down the fabric of a person.” One reason for addressing these challenges is to prevent them from undermining other positive interventions, including high-quality education. “Young children will take their relationship with their caregiver and bring it right into the classroom,” Parilla said. “Social-emotional wellness is incredibly important for instructional wellness to happen and for children to really optimize their time in school.”

Child First has worked with MDRC over the years to study and hone its programs in changing circumstances. For instance, the two organizations worked together to take Child First’s services remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then to study the outcomes. (That project helped Child First realize that while it could go remote when necessary, it preferred to deliver services in person.) Yet what stands out most to Parilla is not the research and technical assistance, but rather the ways MDRC staff have supported her and her colleagues in work that can often be emotionally taxing. “It’s a parallel process to what I hope our families are experiencing from us, the way we connect with MDRC and the way we feel held and seen by them,” she said. “It’s not just research. It is heartfelt.”

Yet another partnership focuses on pioneering work in Guilford County, North Carolina, where MDRC is collaborating with a “backbone organization” called Ready for School, Ready for Life (shorthanded as Ready, Ready) to evaluate an ambitious initiative bringing together different strands of early childhood services, all geared toward the collective goal of kindergarten readiness.

“Let’s say that there’s an organization out there that provides prenatal nutrition guidance and food assistance to pregnant women,” explained Ready, Ready spokesman Doug Jackson. “Let’s say that there’s another organization that helps deliver babies at the hospital, and yet another organization that helps children learn to read. What we’re here to do is make those connections among them all and then facilitate a way for families to go through the entire system seamlessly. That way they’re not having to figure out how to hopscotch through it—somebody’s there to guide them.” To that end, a big focus for Ready, Ready is being “parent-informed”—both to give families a voice in communicating their needs, and to identify barriers to access that might otherwise be overlooked. That might be as simple as changing the location or time of an in-person event so that parents can actually attend.

While the Ready, Ready initiative is just now being launched, it is partnering with MDRC in the hopes that it can eventually provide a roadmap for similar work in other locations. That includes documenting the implementation of the initiative as it rolls out. “Because we’re doing groundbreaking work, there’s not really much we can benchmark ourselves against,” Jackson said. “We are out there identifying the obstacles and hurdles and strategies so that other organizations that follow us won’t have to do that. That’s the value of data and analysis, and having partners that provide that.”

As all these projects show, outside-the-classroom interventions are necessarily more varied—tailored to families’ individual needs and challenges. Combined with high-quality early childhood education, these and other family-centered strategies add up to a multilayered approach befitting the complexity of childhood itself. And that, after all, is the point: to meet families where they are, improve whatever environment a child inhabits, and create the best possible chance for long-term success.