For many decades, Massachusetts has been a national leader in the provision of early education and care for its young children. Consistent with this historically prominent role, Massachusetts has recently begun a thorough and systematic analysis of its early learning and development standards. The analyses include an evaluation of the ways in which the current standards for young children, birth to age five, are aligned with the state's kindergarten standards and other national standards documents, notably the Head Start Child Development and Early Learning Framework (HSCDELF), which applies to children enrolled in the nation's Head Start program, and the kindergarten-level Common Core standards. In addition, Massachusetts has sought to better understand if its standards for young children are aligned with the assessments it may be using to gauge the development of young children's competencies and learning. This ambitious effort to create a coherent continuum of the highest-quality standards that can be used as the basis for a comprehensive birth-to-third-grade system of early education reflects the state's continued national leadership in how best to serve its youngest citizens and their families. As part of this effort, Sharon Lynn Kagan, Catherine Scott-Little, Jeanne Reid, and their teams at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, respectively, have been working as consultants for the Department of Early Education and Care to conduct an 18-month analysis of the content and alignment of the Massachusetts early learning and development documents. To do so, a suite of studies was conducted; these have been presented in four deliverables. This document, the fifth and final deliverable, briefly summarizes the methods and overall findings from the suite of studies, provides recommendations for how Massachusetts might use the findings to strengthen its standards and assessment system, and suggests the sequence that Massachusetts might follow to use and implement the standards and the recommendations pertinent to them. (author abstract)