Giving Compass' Take:

• Five cities are going to replicate the successful Providence Talks early childhood education program, winner of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, an innovation competition for cities.

• How can donors support the new cities in replicating these programs?

• Read about the power of education data for early ed. 

The five cities that are replicating Providence Talks are: Birmingham, AL; Detroit, MI; Hartford, CT; Louisville, KY; and Virginia Beach, VA.

Providence Talks was the first-ever Grand Prize Winner of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, an innovation competition for cities. The winners of the challenge are cities with bold, inventive ideas that address urgent challenges and have the most potential for impact and the ability to spread to other cities.

“Providence Talks shows just why we launched the Mayors Challenge: to help cities take on big challenges, test innovative ideas, and then spread what works best,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies and the 108th Mayor of New York City. “Providence Talks has had promising results, helping thousands of young children increase their language development. Today, we’re glad to help five new cities adapt the program and work to achieve similar progress.”

A Brown University evaluation of Providence Talks found:

  • Children who participated in the program made significant gains in the number of words they heard and turns they took in conversations and in language development.
  • In the Home Visitation model, 56% of all children showed growth in the number of adult words they heard and 42% increased their number of turns taken in conversations.
  • In the Playgroup model, 73% of all the children showed growth in the number of adult words they hear daily and 56% increased their number of turns taken in conversations.
  • The largest gains were seen in children who started the furthest behind. These children, on average, showed a 51% growth in the number of adult words they hear daily, going from an average of 8,000 to over 12,100 words per day.
  • By the end of the program, children in the program showed, on average, a 15 percentile point increase in the Developmental Snapshot score, a tool used to measure a child’s development progress (or language skills).

Read the full article about early childhood education at Bloomberg Philanthropies.