Beyond Silver Bullets: Pre-k Effectiveness and PK-3

There’s a substantial body of evidence documenting the short term benefits of pre-k programs. Children who attend quality pre-k programs enter kindergarten with stronger literacy, math, and social skills than similar peers who did not attend pre-k. There’s very little disputing this, even among individuals and organizations that oppose public investment in pre-k programs.

Short-term pre-k impacts are important, but policymakers and parents who invest in pre-k ultimately care most about the long-term impacts these investments have on children’s outcomes. That’s a more complicated question, as a back and forth I’ve been having with the Cato Institute’s Adam Schaeffer illustrates.

Let’s get this out of the way first: There is now extensive evidence for some long-term benefits from pre-k programs. Several studies that conduct medium- to long-term follow up on participants in pre-k programs (inlcuding publicly funded programs such as Head Start) find evidence that pre-k participation reduces grade retention and special education placements. That in itself can generate savings for taxpayers, not to mention lasting personal benefits for individual children who avoid retention or special education placement. Some longer term studies, of which there are fewer, also find positive impacts on high school graduation rates.

In a world where schools and educational interventions are increasingly judged based on student achievement results–test scores–and where individuals increasingly need strong academic skills to participate in the workforce, higher education, and mainstream society–that’s not enough, though. Unfortunately, the very real achievement gains students experience in pre-k too often fade out by the end of third grade.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Pre-k doesn’t exist in a vaccum. Quality pre-k programs can help narrow the significant achievement gaps that exist for low-income and racial/ethnic minority students at school entry, and they can help place students on a solid foundation heading into kindergarten. But the schools children attend after pre-k have to build on that foundation in order for children to maintain early learning gains. Children learn by progressively building new skills and knowledge on top of the skills and knoweldge they already possess. It’s an ongoing process. If schools aren’t effective in helping students acquire new skills and knoweldge, then even children who went to the best pre-k programs are going to slip behind. That’s why New America’s early education work focuses on quality pre-k as part of a larger education reform agenda that simultaneously seeks to improve public education at the elementary level and beyond.

Evidence from the Chicago Child Parent Centers (CPC) program illustrates the importance of continuing intervention beyond pre-k into the early elementary years in order to produce lasting educational impacts. The CPC study is a quasi-experimental, longitudinal study that followed a cohort of more than 1,500 children attending kindergarten in Chicago in 1985. Some children in this sample had benefitted from early education interventions carried out by Chicago’s Child Parent Centers, a program that provided quality pre-k, full-day kindergarten, and ongoing educational supports (reduced class size, parent involvement activities, enriched classroom environments) through third grade. Other children in the sample did not, allowing resarchers to study the CPCs’ impact. The CPC study is particularly valuable because it focuses on the impacts of a large-scale, publicly funded early education program. In other words, CPC isn’t a pie-in-the-sky “model program,” but a real world model that states could reasonably seek to replicate in their pre-k and school reform efforts.

Research demonstrating CPC’s positive long-term impacts on high school completion, grade retention, special education placement, and crime is well-known. Researchers have also used CPC data to separately compute the impacts of the program’s pre-k and elementary support components. (This analysis was possible because some students in the sample received only pre-k services, but not elementary interventions; some received elementary interventions but not pre-k; some received both; and some received neither).

This research finds positive impacts for both students who participated in pre-k only and those who participated in elementary interventions only. As the chart below shows, participating in just the pre-k program had significant positive impacts on high school completion and also reduced special education placements and grade retention. In other words, the CPC pre-k intervention had some positive impacts even when children didn’t receive sustained elementary supports. But the greatest benefits were for youngsters who participated in both the pre-k and the school-age interventions. Particularly important, students who participated in the full intervention had higher test scores at age 17–something that wasn’t true for the other groups.