History of Boston’s Department of Early Childhood

In his State of the City Address on January 11, 2005, Mayor Tom Menino declared that he would “direct the Boston Public Schools to provide all four-year-olds in the city with full-day school within five years. Boston will be the first city in the nation to achieve this.”¹ Prior to Menino’s announcement, the city had already made some strides in offering early education to its four-year-old population. In 1998, Boston opened three public early education centers and eventually added three more, serving a total of about 350 three- to five-year-olds from low-income families. A handful of the city’s elementary schools offered half-day programs for four-year-olds, serving about 400 children in all.² But Mayor Menino’s pledge to provide universal pre-K by dramatically expanding the number of pre-K classrooms across the city within five years was a bold call since Boston is home to approximately 6,000 four-year-olds.³

Later that same year, under the leadership of Superintendent Thomas Payzant, Boston Public Schools took an important step toward expanding K1 access by creating the Department of Early Childhood. The early childhood team started with a staff of only three people and jurisdiction over only K1 programs. Jason Sachs, the department’s executive director, was its first official hire.⁴

One of Sachs’s first tasks was acquiring funding to support the growth of K1 throughout the city. While Menino strongly supported the growth and improvement of K1, Sachs knew he would need outside money to supplement city funds to build up his staff and make the kind of wide-ranging reforms he envisioned. Sachs turned to the Barr Foundation, a private, Boston-based foundation for support. The Barr Foundation agreed to contribute $3 million over three years to allow the early childhood department to purchase research-backed, domain-specific curricula, pay for coaches to mentor teachers, and open more K1 classrooms as long as the district matched its investment.

The Barr investment was one of several that made it possible for K1 to expand rapidly across the city, going from serving 750 children in 38 classrooms in 2005 to more than 2,000 children across 110 classrooms in 2010.⁵ The city helped create Countdown to Kindergarten in 1999, an effort that includes 28 local organizations working together to support children’s transition to kindergarten. In 2008, Mayor Menino and the United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley launched Thrive in 5, a sustained, citywide movement to ensure all children are ready for school success.⁶ Since its launch, Thrive in 5 has generated $23 million in new resources for Boston’s early childhood community, the vast majority of which has gone to local organizations working with families.⁷ Some of the money helped establish weekly play to learn groups in BPS schools to support children between the ages of birth to three.

K1 continued to expand and improve in quality over the years. A 2013 Harvard study of the impacts of the K1 program found students made improvements in language, literacy, math, executive function, and emotional development skills. Some of the study’s impacts were the largest found to date in evaluations of large public pre-K programs.¹³ But the BPS early childhood team knew there was still work to be done to improve the quality of K2 and first and second grade. A 2006 evaluation that showed promising improvements in the K1 program found that the same positive results were not evident in K2 classrooms across the city.¹⁴ A 2012 needs assessment found that the quality of BPS first-, second-, and third-grade classrooms was much lower than that of K2.¹⁵

In order to sustain the gains students achieved as a result of a strong K1 program, real work had to be done to improve the quality of the grades following K1.

These findings convinced DEC that, in order to sustain the gains students achieved as a result of a strong K1 program, real work had to be done to improve the quality of the grades following K1. “There was a realization that doing universal pre-K meant you then needed to change kindergarten, then first grade, and so on to sustain those gains,” Morales said.¹⁶ K1 expansion had proceeded at an impressive pace, growing from 750 students in 2005 to more than 2,800 students in the 2017–18 school year¹⁷ with a waitlist of almost 1,000 children.¹⁸ And the BPS early childhood staff had grown rapidly as well, from a team of only three to a staff of 26, made up of curriculum writers, coaches, and project leaders.¹⁹

In 2015, DEC was given the opportunity to fulfill its vision of improving not only K1 and K2, but also the early elementary grades. This expansion would have important implications for sustaining the gains children were making in their earliest school years. The staff fought for reorganization that would allow for bottom-up alignment, spanning K1 to second grade, arguing that their success in K1 and K2 proved its methods worked and that DEC needed control of first and second grade to continue to build off that success. When Tommy Chang came on as the new superintendent in March 2015, he agreed to allow K1 through second grade curriculum decisions to be made by the early childhood team.²⁰

Despite the fact that there have been two different mayors and six different BPS superintendents since the early childhood team was established in 2005, one constant has been Sachs as the Executive Director. His continuous, steady leadership over the past 13 years has a lot to do with DEC’s success in fulfilling the goals Sachs set out at the outset of his tenure. Since its inception, there has been a clear vision for BPS early childhood rather than a series of priorities that shift every few years based on changes in district leadership.

While passionate and focused leadership by Sachs and a committed DEC team have certainly been important to BPS’s progress so far, these are not the only important elements. Below we discuss how the BPS early childhood team has transformed what and how children learn, the classroom environments in which children spend their days, and how teachers interact with and engage children in rich learning opportunities.

Since its inception, there has been a clear vision for BPS early childhood rather than a series of priorities that shift every few years based on changes in district leadership.