Kindergarten readiness reflects how children develop across early learning, health and social-emotional domains. These domains are shaped by the experiences and supports they receive in their earliest years. In Boston, preparing children for kindergarten is treated as a shared responsibility, one that depends on how well systems work together to support families long before children ever walk into a classroom.
This belief guides Boston Opportunity Agenda, a StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network member that works to ensure all Boston residents can access the education they need to succeed in the region’s economy and lead secure, fulfilling lives. The partnership focuses on long-term, citywide change. By aligning resources, expertise and influence around a shared agenda, partners strengthen Boston’s cradle-to-career educational pipeline by building conditions that improve outcomes for today’s learners and for generations to come. And for the Boston Opportunity Agenda, that cradle-to-career work begins with kindergarten readiness. 
For many children in Boston, access to high-quality early education and care, health supports and stable environments have not always been evenly distributed. These challenges can shape children’s development years before they ever enter a classroom and influence whether they arrive at kindergarten ready to learn.
That reality drives Boston Opportunity Agenda’s commitment to kindergarten readiness and the work of the Birth to Eight Collaborative, which has focused on this outcome since 2017. Convened by the Boston Opportunity Agenda, the Birth to Eight Collaborative brings together parents and more than 200 representatives from early education centers, family child care centers, nonprofit organizations, schools, public health, philanthropy, government and medical institutions. Together, these partners share a common purpose to ensure all young children in Boston, especially those facing the greatest challenges, are ready for sustained success in kindergarten and beyond.
Grounding Kindergarten Readiness in Community
Improving kindergarten readiness begins with understanding where children face the greatest challenges to being ready for school. Data from the Child Opportunity Index 3.0 highlights differences in access to early education, health services, safe spaces for play and economic stability across Boston’s neighborhoods.
Boston Opportunity Agenda uses this data to focus kindergarten readiness efforts on children and families in communities with fewer resources. These efforts include co-designing neighborhood-specific supports for early childhood developmental services and advancing place-based, neighborhood-focused cradle-to-career strategies. This approach ensures strategies are shaped by local context and informed by the experiences of families and providers working closest to you children.
Family engagement is central to this work. Partners engage with parent and communities through leadership opportunities that support the co-creation of programs and services. Parents and caregivers build skills, access information and feel connected to early learning systems. When families are supported as partners in learning, children benefit from stronger early experiences and smoother transitions into kindergarten.
What Boston’s Data Shows About Kindergarten Readiness
As Boston has strengthened coordination across early learning systems, progress is beginning to show in kindergarten readiness outcomes. Since 2019, Boston has tracked readiness using MAP Fluency, with DIBELS used prior to 2019, providing a consistent way to understand how children are entering kindergarten across Boston Public Schools.
Over the past three school years, the percentage of kindergartners achieving the MAP Fluency benchmark has steadily increased. In school year 2022–23, 66.7% of assessed students met the benchmark. That figure rose to 72.5% in school year 2023–24 and 74.4% in 2024–25. While enrollment and assessment conditions vary from year to year, the upward trend signals that more children are entering kindergarten with foundational literacy skills.
For Boston Opportunity Agenda, these gains reinforce the importance of keeping kindergarten readiness at the center of early learning efforts. Each increase reflects children benefiting from earlier supports, stronger transitions and more coordinated experiences across early education and care settings.
Using this data through StriveTogether’s Know Your Number framework, the partnership estimates that 7,086 additional children could be ready for kindergarten by 2030, compared to the 2022–23 baseline. This projection underscores the importance of sustaining momentum and continuing to strengthen the systems that support readiness.
Aligning Strategies from Birth Through Age 8
Through the Birth to Eight Collaborative, partners have aligned their work around three shared outcomes that reflect the pathway to kindergarten readiness:
- Children from birth to age 3 have access to quality early childhood educational experiences and supports
- Early education and care providers support curious, confident and engaged learners ages 3 to 5 to prepare them for kindergarten
- Institutions and community-based organizations that serve children from birth to age 8 place family engagement at the center of their work
To move these outcomes, the Collaborative identified core metrics that help partners understand whether systems are improving conditions for children and families. These shared measures allow Birth to Eight partners to track progress, identify gaps and adjust strategies to better support readiness.
The Collaborative also leverages community-wide initiatives that strengthen early development. One is the Boston Basics Campaign, which supports parents of infants by promoting everyday interactions that build children’s language, reasoning and confidence starting from birth. Another is DRIVE, a developmental screening initiative led by the United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley in partnership with state and city agencies. DRIVE focuses on identifying children’s developmental strengths and needs early and connecting families to supports that can improve readiness before kindergarten.
In addition, partners work through five committees to align resources and move change faster. These committees focus on family engagement and parent skill building, coordinated developmental and behavioral screening, and using data and publications to support system change and strong education from birth through third grade.
Together, these efforts reflect a shared understanding that kindergarten readiness is built over time, through aligned systems, informed families and consistent support from birth through the early elementary years.
Looking ahead from first steps to strong starts
Boston Opportunity Agenda’s work on kindergarten readiness reflects a citywide commitment to starting early and working together. Using shared measures like MAP fluency, the partnership has seen an eight-percentage-point increase in early literacy outcomes over three years. This progress shows that when partners share responsibility for readiness and stay focused on children facing the greatest challenges, outcomes can improve at scale.
There is still more to do. Partners continue to refine shared measures, strengthen transitions into kindergarten and ensure families experience a connected system of support. From first steps to strong starts, Boston is building the conditions that help more children arrive at kindergarten ready to learn, ready to thrive and ready for what comes next.
