MDRC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research firm, released encouraging results today from a demonstration, funded by Robin Hood, of two aligned interventions in New York City: Making Pre-K Count, a high-quality math curriculum in preschools, and High 5s, supplemental small-group “math clubs” provided to kindergartners outside of regular instructional time. Together, the two years of math instruction closed more than one-quarter of the achievement gap in math skills between low-income children and their higher-income peers.

Beginning in 2013, the Making Pre-K Count program provided pre-K teachers in New York City public schools and community-based organizations with a high-quality math curriculum called Building Blocks and ongoing teacher training and coaching over two years. The High 5s kindergarten supplement was created to help children continue to develop their mathematical understanding by offering another year of aligned math instruction to children in public schools who had received Making Pre-K Count in pre-K.

This report from MDRC’s random assignment study looks at results at the end of the children’s kindergarten year. The highlights are:

  • The impact of Making Pre-K Count alone: One year after participating in the pre-k program, when children were in their kindergarten year, they had slightly better math scores (although this finding was sensitive to how the outcome was measured), as well as better attitudes towards math and better working memory than children who were not in the pre-k program.
  • The impact of Making Pre-K Count and High 5s combined: The effect of both programs (Making Pre-K Count in pre-k and High 5s in kindergarten) was equivalent to closing 29 percent of the math achievement gap between low-income children and their higher-income peers on one of two measures of math achievement.

Read the full article about reducing the achievement gap at MDRC.