Launched in 2006, CityBridge’s Early Years Education Initiative was a five-year, $8 million effort to build a robust market for excellent, early childhood education in the nation’s capital. An intensive review of decades of painstaking scientific research convinced us that early educational intervention — in the form of high quality, content-rich preschool — is the single best way to markedly improve a lower-income child’s educational future. And because of DC’s small scale and favorable policy environment, early childhood education was an attractive, targeted place for a family foundation of our (small) scale to begin to make a meaningful difference.

Early Years had three major strategic components: Strong Schools; Building the Talent Base; and Public Engagement. CityBridge partnered with the city’s two highest performing charter middle school operators, DC Preparatory Academy and KIPP:DC to help build the kind of high quality settings that low-income children need to prepare for success in school.  Our investment of financial and intellectual capital enabled DC Prep to open an elementary school with 330 children—120 of whom are  three- and four-year-olds; KIPP:DC opened  three schools, which will eventually have a combined enrollment of 2,000 students, including nearly  600 three- and four-year-olds. CityBridge’s evaluation of these programs showed that economically disadvantaged children who entered these programs as three-year-olds graduate to kindergarten on par, academically, with their middle-class peers.

To build the talent base, CityBridge invested to expand the pipeline of talent into the classroom as well as to develop the craft of teachers already in place. CityBridge partnered in 2006 with Teach For America (TFA) to pilot an initiative to train and place TFA corps members in early childhood settings in DC. This pilot launched an explicitly designed early childhood practice area which will ultimately place 500 TFA corps members—who are identified through one of the most rigorous selection processes in the country—in early childhood settings throughout the country every year.

CityBridge also partnered in 2007 with Georgetown University’s Craig and Sharon Ramey, two of the country’s leading experts in early childhood education, and the University of the District of Columbia to secure a three-year, $4.5 million grant from the US Department of Education. The grant underwrote the intensive coaching and evaluation of dozens of teachers in DCPS, charter, and child care center classrooms on best practices in early literacy.

CityBridge anchored its work in policy by partnering in 2006 with Pre-K Now, a national organization, to help launch Pre-K for All DC, a campaign to make universal, high-quality pre-K a priority for the city. By rallying influential city champions—particularly from the business community—behind this idea, and presenting compelling findings from local and national research on the benefits of great early childhood education, Pre-K for All DC laid the groundwork for (then) City Council Chairman Vincent Gray’s successful early childhood agenda.