Quality, Not Just Access, Important in the Kindergarten Debate

Barriers to full-day kindergarten exist throughout the country, and the recent cuts to full-day kindergarten in Pennsylvania are just the most recent reminder. But although access is a crucial component to ensuring that the positive effects of quality programs reach students, it matters only inasmuch as those programs are worth attending. Given that quality in full-day programs so often gets overshadowed by (important) questions of student access, it is worth examining why program quality matters and which specific quality metrics matter most when designing kindergarten programs.

One implicit assumption in the singular focus on access is that the biggest disparity in student outcomes will be between those students who have and have not had access to full-day kindergarten. But a group of researchers at Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Northwestern University mined the records of over 11,000 students from Tennessee’s STAR Project and found that differences in classroom quality, measured in a few different ways, also had a profound effect on student outcomes in the long term. The researchers took advantage of the STAR Project’s design, which randomly placed students into classrooms from kindergarten through third grade, to see how class size, teacher quality, and other metrics related to adult outcomes such as college attendance, earnings, savings, home ownership, and marriage.

The first classroom quality measure the researchers used was class size. From their analysis of the data, the authors concluded that students in classes of 13 to 17 students were more likely than their peers in comparatively large classes (20 to 25 students) to attend college at age 20 and to have a 401(k), an indicator they were well-employed. The researchers also found that teacher experience could have a big effect on eventual earnings for students. Students with teachers who had more than 10 years of experience earned on average $1,093 more than their peers between the age of 25 and 27.^[1] Crucially, however, this effect was only true for students who entered the program during kindergarten, suggesting that the importance of teacher experience for student outcomes declines after the kindergarten year.

Beyond those specific differences, the researchers also developed a broad measure of classroom quality – “classroom effects.” This aggregate measure includes the broad array of unobservable features of a given class, which the authors say might include “the effects of teachers, peers, and any class level shocks,” and is approximated with student test scores. The researchers found that moving students to a class one standard deviation better meant an estimated earnings increase of more than $39,000 over a child’s lifetime. These findings suggest what might seem obvious: Differences in a child’s kindergarten class do make a difference in his life, even in the long term.

Aside from the Harvard-Berkeley-Northwestern study, though, research on the specific characteristics of high-quality full-day kindergarten programs is sparse. Nevertheless, some researchers and policy organizations have suggested some specific quality benchmarks on other grounds.

In their 2005 review of full-day kindergarten in the United States, the Education Commission of the States (ECS), noting that “reliable research is not available on specific dimensions of program quality,” chose to define its suggested program quality metrics by those two areas it saw as best for state policymakers to control: learning standards and teacher qualification.

And the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) has developed quality standards by which it measures state pre-kindergarten programs in its annual State of Preschool reports. They focus on 10 standards in the four broad categories of teacher qualification, class size, provision of standards for early learning, and provision of supplementary services. But NIEER, too, recognizes the uncertainty of research on quality, admitting that “limitations of research are such that judgment inevitably plays a role in setting specific benchmarks based on evidence.”

Still, the research-based pre-K criteria might be possible to extrapolate to kindergarten – or might at least suggest qualities worthy of further kindergarten-specific research. And one analysis of data from the from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 suggests that length of day for kindergartners might itself be a quality predictive of better outcomes.

Ultimately, though, the amount of kindergarten specific research on quality leaves much to be desired. Though observers often note the fade-out effect associated with test-score gains made by pre-K and kindergarten children, the growing evidence for the reemergence of benefits in adulthood of certain childhood experiences means that short-sighted research or analysis might miss many of the most important effects of some kindergarten programs. Comprehensive studies are complex, expensive, and lengthy, but this impediment to quality research, however, should not discourage a discussion of full-day kindergarten that emphasizes not just access, but quality.