Kindergarten readiness is a key predictor of school success, but quality early learning settings are too often out of reach for families living in poverty. The City of Boston engaged Shared Cause to create a plan to make all Boston children ready for kindergarten.

The Challenge

A superintendent told us once that when he sees a child show up for kindergarten not ready – intellectually or emotionally – to learn, he knows he is looking at a future drop out risk.

Research has singled out kindergarten readiness as a key predictor of school success.  It also is a sensitive measure of the inequity faced by so many families living in poverty.  Too often, quality early learning environments, family support and essential child health services are beyond their reach.

Finding the Solution

The City of Boston set out to change that for its children and families.  The Office of the Mayor engaged Shared Cause to create the conditions that would enable all Boston children to be ready for kindergarten in 10 years’ time.  The result was “Thrive in 5”, a now nationally recognized and replicated initiative.

In a field that is famously fractured, success would mean defining new ways of working and charting a common path.  Our first step was to empower parents to an unprecedented degree.  We established an all-parent/guardian leadership team whose charge was to envision what an ideal system of support for children and families would look like.  That vision would then inform how planning teams — made up of parents, educators, city officials, health professionals and community advocates – would bring it to life.  The work would be grounded in real-life perspectives and the approach created a uniquely powerful form of accountability: planners aiming to meet parents’ expectations.

The parent leadership group ultimately described the need for parents to be better connected to useful information on child development, to other parents facing child-rearing stresses and to experiential learning opportunities throughout the city.  For educators, the group spelled out a need for better training and resources for teachers and caregivers at neighborhood and friends-and-family child care centers.  Parents also identified that earlier, more widespread screening for development delays would help everyone, but delivery of such services was so scattered.  Last, the group called for moving early care and education up the public policy agenda.

From the leadership group’s work, Shared Cause fashioned an organizing principle called the School Readiness Equation.

“Ready Families” became an innovative approach called Boston Children Thrive.  The goal was to build knowledge, experience, and connection so parents could confidently take on the role of being their child’s first teacher, to be Ready Families.  Focusing on neighborhoods with concentrations of young children, Boston Children Thrive enlisted community “hub” organizations, each with its own parent leadership team.  They build connections among families, equip them with guidance and learning activities, improve their access to services, and help them prepare their children for the transition into kindergarten.  They were especially effective at engaging families marginalized by poverty, language or other factors.

The use of data has been particularly pioneering in Boston Children Thrive.  As a way to incentivize family participation and collect more useful data on the families served, families receive a card to scan each time they participate in a school readiness activity.  These data give the hub agency a much clearer picture of the families they serve, the depth of involvement, and the demand for different services.  It also helped identify families that were not yet being served, pointing the way to targeted outreach.

The “Ready Educators” group created ways for Head Start, center-based, and family-friend-and-neighbor providers to learn more about the science of child development and to tap into successful Boston Public School early pre-K curriculum and practices.  Community-based providers also could choose to pilot a comprehensive quality improvement model for education and care of children from birth to preschool. 

The “Ready Systems” element of the formula forged agreement among health providers on a tool to flag and address developmental delays early in children.  This engaged Boston’s hospitals and community health centers in universal screening and rapid remediation to alleviate problems that undermine children’s ability to learn.  One of the innovations was to train a corps of parents to perform the screening for children right in their own neighborhoods.  The peer-to-peer effect was powerful.

The “Ready City” part of the guiding equation encouraged the adoption of an early childhood focus in ongoing municipal planning.  Equally important, it introduced the indicators to guide and refine progress:

  • Percent of families living in poverty
  • Indicators of family and parental access to resources
  • Indicators of family isolation/chronic stress
  • Child-level school readiness indicators related to cognitive, pre-academic, and emotional development

Adopting these indicators connected stakeholders at the city and neighborhood levels, helping to align efforts toward the common goal of preventing the achievement gap before it starts.

The Result

Over a decade, Thrive In Five succeeded in:

  • bringing 4,500 families with 5,310 children into the Boston Children Thrive constellation (a study showed that 55 percent of families enrolled speak a language other than or in addition to English, 80 percent of those enrolled were families of color, and 47 percent had educational attainment of a high school diploma or less);
  • creating a parent engagement model that family-serving agencies still use today;
  • raising kindergarten readiness to 63% (2014);
  • introducing proven pre-K curricula and practices, as well continuous quality improvement to preschool and child care providers serving more than 1,000 children;
  • screening more than 3,000 four-year-olds for any necessary early interventions;
  • involving more than 400 community leaders, parents, educators, and policy makers in the process of making quality early care and education a given.

A United Way report on Thrive in 5 said, “In many ways, Thrive in 5’s approach was ahead of its time.”  But from our perspective, the process and structure for planning Thrive in 5 was pretty much the way we always work.  Shared Cause is proud that the Thrive In 5 approaches have became part of the mainstream in the way Boston serves young children and their families.