From Startup to Sustainability: The Adaptive Challenge of New York City’s Pre-K for All Initiative

Abstract

In 2014, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his commitment to provide free public pre-kindergarten (pre-K) to all of New York City’s four-year-olds. With “Pre-K for All,” New York City has undertaken the most ambitious pre-K expansion in the country. The Division of Early Childhood (DECE) in the New York City Department of Education is responsible for implementing Pre-K for All. Now in its second year of expansion, the DECE has shifted its focus from infrastructure development to quality improvement and sustainability. In my Residency, I worked to develop a quality improvement mechanism called the “Foundational Support Visit” (FSV), a new process for diagnosing need across every Pre-K for All program. The DECE used findings from the FSV to inform the allocation of coaching supports to all pre-K programs. As part of the FSV initiative, I worked closely with the Division’s 125 Early Childhood Social Workers, the DECE’s largest team of school-based support staff and one of two teams responsible for conducting Foundational Support Visits at Pre-K for All programs. In my Capstone, I describe the evolution of the Foundational Support Visit, from design to implementation, and analyze how the process impacted Social Workers’ perception of their evolving role during Pre-K for All’s expansion. I explore the question of how a growing organization can support people on the ground to adapt to be effective during a period of rapid change and argue that the FSV process generated important losses for the DECE’s Social Workers. I describe my efforts, as a developing leader, to restore Social Workers’ confidence in their value through the creation of a feedback mechanism and a monthly working group meeting. In my analysis of my own leadership, I consider my initial struggle to diagnose the losses at stake for the DECE’s Social Workers, and I explore how leaders can approach organizational change in a way that acknowledges loss and helps people adapt to new environments. I conclude with a series of implications for my own leadership, for the DECE, and finally, for the education sector.