Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

Springfield is having a $12 million, early education dream come true, MassLive.com reports.

The city is opening a new Educare early childhood center in its Old Hill neighborhood.

Educare is a high-quality, research-based early education model that works with young children and their families for multiple years. “The Educare program includes longer days for the children and is year-round,” MassLive says.

“The new center will serve 141 children who will be selected from the Head Start program based on factors including income and need. The early childhood program is for children ages just past birth to 5 years old.”

This work isn’t new for Springfield. From parents to early educators to schools superintendent Dan Warwick, the city has made a powerful commitment to educating its youngest children.

“I know as a former elementary school teacher that if you don’t have this type of program coming in (at the beginning of a child’s education), a lot of people don’t experience (high school) graduation,” Warwick told MassLive last month.

To finance the new center, the Irene E. & George A. Davis Foundation and two other anonymous donors raised a total of $13.5 million.

“We are very excited to be able to partner with the Educare Learning Network as well as our local partners, HCS Head Start, and Springfield College to  offer this state of the art, national model of early education and care to  children and families in Springfield,” Mary E. Walachy, the Davis Foundation’s executive director, told us.

Educare brings its history to Springfield. Launched in 2000 as a single school in Chicago, Educare now has schools across the country that “use research-based, high-quality practices to help children develop the academic and social-emotional skills essential for success in school and life.” An Educare Learning Network ties the individual program sites together to share emerging research and best practices.

Educare is one of the model programs featured in journalist Paul Tough’s book, “Helping Children Succeed.”

“The Educare centers I visited, in Tulsa, Chicago, and Omaha, were all beautifully designed and smoothly run, full of natural light and well-constructed play structures, and staffed by trained professionals,” Tough writes.

“Even if conditions in the children’s homes are chaotic and stressful, Educare’s directors believe, the large dose of responsive care they experience each day at the center will allow them to transcend the potential ill effects of that instability.”

One of the many characteristics that makes Educare unique is its research component. The program’s implementation study has been tracking quality as well as parent and child outcomes since 2005. Among the findings:

• students “outperform low-income peers on vocabulary assessments,” this includes English Language Learners

• more time in Educare “is associated with higher ratings of social-emotional skills, including teacher-rated self-control and initiative, among most children,” and

• children who start Educare at younger ages “have higher levels of receptive vocabulary skills at kindergarten entry than children who start Educare later”

These and other results are used by program staff to make improvements — and by policymakers, practitioners, and funders who want to demonstrate the benefits of high-quality early education.

These results have also fueled Educare’s National Research Agenda for Early Education, which has four key areas of inquiry:

• data utilization

• professional development

• high-quality teaching practices, and

• intensive family engagement

In addition, Educare is being evaluated by independent researchers from the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as researchers from the University of Chicago, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Nebraska Medical Center and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

This study “consists of a randomized sample of 239 children and researchers compared those children who attended Educare to those who did not.” Researchers are “tracking children through age 5, and researchers are continuing to analyze data to determine results as the children grow up.”

The good news for Springfield is that its children will get high-quality, evidence-based early childhood programming that builds on the city’s commitment to making sure that even its littlest citizens succeed.