A Noble Bet in Early Care and Education: Lessons from One Community’s Experience-executive Summary

Lessons learned from Pittsburgh’s bold but troubled Early Childhood Initiative; The Early Childhood Initiative (ECI), an ambitious effort to provide high-quality early care and education services to at-risk children, failed to achieve its goals, although participating children may have derived substantial benefits from it. This report summarizes ECI’s organizational history, analyzes and explains its critical weaknesses, and articulates lessons to inform the design and implementation of future large-scale reform initiatives.