In this study of Oklahoma’s universal pre-K program, the authors relied on a strict birthday eligibility criterion to compare “young ” kindergarten children who just completed pre-K to “old ” pre-K children just beginning pre-K. This regression-discontinuity design reduces the threat of selection bias. Their sample consisted of 1,567 pre-K children and 1,461 kindergarten children who had just completed pre-K. The authors estimated the impact of the pre-K treatment on Woodcock–Johnson Achievement test scores. The authors found test impacts of 3.00 points (0.79 of the standard deviation for the control group) for the Letter–Word Identification score, 1.86 points (0.64 of the standard deviation of the control group) for the Spelling score, and 1.94 points (0.38 of the standard deviation of the control group) for the Applied Problems score. Hispanic, Black, White, and Native American children all benefit from the program, as do children in diverse income brackets, as measured by school lunch eligibility status. The authors conclude that Oklahoma’s universal pre-K program has succeeded in enhancing the school readiness of a diverse group of children.

early intervention programs, all of which provided high quality, center-based early childhood education and family-oriented services. Three perspectives are brought to the topic: (1) the developmental outcomes of children who have been identified as being vulnerable due to environmental circumstances; (2) the processes underlying the links between circumstances such as parental poverty and low education and child well-being; and (3) the efficacy of early childhood intervention programs for altering vulnerable children’s success in school and beyond. The first perspective deals with the ways in which children develop that enable them to enter kindergarten with the competencies necessary to do well in school. The second considers the mechanisms that tie environmental conditions such as poverty and low parental education to child well-being. The third stresses the potential for early childhood education programs to alter school trajectories of vulnerable children. Concluding points are summarized for which there is consensus, by developmental researchers and policy experts, given the state of the evidence on the evaluation of early intervention programs. First, high quality center-based programs enhance vulnerable children’s school-related achievement and behavior. Second, these effects are strongest for poor children and for children whose parents have little education. Third, these positive benefits continue into the late elementary school and high school years, although effects are smaller than they were at the beginning of elementary school. Fourth, programs that are continued into elementary school and that offer high ‘doses’of early intervention have the most sustained long-term effects. It is unrealistic, given our knowledge of development, to expect short-term early interventions to last indefinitely, especially if

Attendance in U.S. preschools has risen substantially in recent decades, but gaps in enrollment between children from advantaged and disadvantaged families remain. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999, we analyze the effect of participation in child care and early education on children’s school readiness as measured by early reading and math skills in kindergarten and first grade. We find that children who attended a center or school-based preschool program in the year before school entry perform better on assessments of reading and math skills upon beginning kindergarten, after controlling for a host of family background and other factors that might be associated with selection into early education programs and relatively high academic skills. This advan-tage persists when children’s skills are measured in the spring of kindergarten and first grade, and children who attended early education programs are also less likely to be retained in kindergarten. In most instances, the effects are largest for disadvantaged groups, raising the possibility that policies pro-moting preschool enrollment of children from disadvantaged families might help to narrow the school readiness gap.

Previous research has demonstrated that attending center care is associated with cognitive benefits for young children. However, little is known about the ideal age for children to enter such care or the "right " amount of time, both weekly and yearly, for children to attend center programs. Using national data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K), this paper asks whether there are optimal levels of center care duration and intensity and whether these levels vary by race or income. We consider pre-reading and math skills as measured by assessments administered at the beginning of kindergarten, as well as teacher-reported social-behavioral measures. We find that on average attending center care is associated with positive gains in pre-reading and math skills, but negative social behavior. Across economic levels, children who start center care between ages two and three see greater gains than those who start centers earlier or later. Further, starting earlier than age 2 is related to more pronounced negative social effects. Results for center intensity vary by income levels and race. For instance, poor and middle-income children see academic gains from

Estimates of developmental models of processes involving contextual influences (e.g., child care arrangements, divorce, parenting, neighborhood location, peers) are subject to bias if, as is often the case, the contexts are influenced by the actions of ei-ther the individuals being studied or their parents or teachers. We assessed the nature of the endogeneity biases that may result, discuss the importance of such biases in practice, and suggest possible ways of avoiding them. Our primary recommendation is that developmentalists consider reorienting their data collection strategies to take advantage of real or “natural ” experiments that produce exogenous variation in fam-ily and contextual variables of interest. Individuals’livesareshapedbyarichsetof interactivegenetic, social, structural, and historical forces and processes. Consequently, developmental science places high demands on the evidence needed to separate correlation from causation. Although social science theory can commonly be invoked to limit the scope of problems and isolate key variables, a developmental perspective often does just the opposite. Be-cause a broad theoretical perspective holds great promise for advancing researchers’ understanding of human development, developmental scientists should not be sim-plifying their theories for the sake of empirical tractability. Instead, they should de-vote themselves to ensuring that their empirical work does justice to the theory.

This paper estimates the effect of the childhood environment on a large array of social and economic outcomes lasting almost 60 years, for both the affected cohorts and for their children. To do this, we exploit a natural experiment provided by the 1949 Magic Carpet operation, where over 50,000 Yemenite immigrants were airlifted to Israel. The Yemenites, who lacked any formal schooling or knowledge of a western-style culture or bureaucracy, believed that they were being "redeemed, " and put their trust in the Israeli authorities to make decisions about where they should go and what they should do. As a result, they were scattered across the country in essentially a random fashion, and as we show, the environmental conditions faced by immigrant children were not correlated with other factors that affected the long-term outcomes of individuals. We construct three summary measures of the childhood environment: 1) whether the home had running water, sanitation and electricity; 2) whether the locality of residence was in an urban environment with a good economic infrastructure; and 3) whether the locality of residence was a Yemenite enclave. We find that children who were placed in a good environment (a home with good sanitary conditions, in a city, and outside of an ethnic enclave) were more likely to achieve positive long-term outcomes. They were more likely to obtain higher education, marry at an older age, have fewer children,

We thank Latika Chaudary for excellent research assistance, Craig Turner for giving access to

In recent years, child care subsidies have become an integral part of federal and state efforts to move economically disadvantaged parents from welfare to work. Although previous empirical studies consistently show that these employment-related subsidies raise work levels among this group, little is known about the impact of subsidy receipt on child well-being. In this paper, we identify the causal effect of child care subsidies on child development by exploiting geographic variation in the distance that families must travel from home in order to reach the nearest social service agency that administers the subsidy application process. Using data from the Kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, our instrumental variables estimates suggest that children receiving subsidized care in the year before kindergarten score lower on tests of cognitive ability and reveal more behavior problems throughout kindergarten. However, these negative effects largely disappear by the time children reach the end of third grade. Our results point to an unintended consequence of a child care subsidy regime that conditions eligibility on parental employment and deemphasizes child care quality. 1

Abstract This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We use the random assignment in the Project STAR experiment to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, college choice, and degree completion. We improve on existing work in this area with unusually detailed data on college enrollment spells and the previously unexplored outcome of college degree completion. We find that assignment to a small class increases the probability of attending college by 2.7 percentage points, with effects more than twice as large among blacks. Among students enrolled in the poorest third of schools, the effect is 7.3 percentage points. Smaller classes increase the likelihood of earning a college degree by 1.6 percentage points and shift students towards high-earning fields such as STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), business and economics. We find that test score effects at the time of the experiment are an excellent predictor of long-term improvements in postsecondary outcomes. Education is intended to pay off over a lifetime. Economists conceive of education as a form of "human capital," requiring costly investments in the present but promising a stream of returns in the future. Looking backward at a number of education interventions (e.g., Head Start, compulsory schooling), researchers have identified causal links between these policies and long-term outcomes such as adult educational attainment, employment, earnings, health and civic engagement They therefore rely upon short-term outcomes -primarily standardized test scores -as their yardstick of success. A critical question is the extent to which short-term improvements in test scores translate into long-term improvements in well-being. Puzzling results from several evaluations make this a salient question. Three small-scale, intensive preschool experiments produced large effects on contemporaneous test scores that quickly faded We examine the effect of smaller classes on educational attainment in adulthood, including college attendance, degree completion and field of study. We exploit random variation in class size in the early grades of elementary school created by the Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Experiment. Participants in the STAR experiment are now in their thirties, an age at which it is plausible to measure 1 completed education. Our postsecondary outcome data is obtained from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a national database that covers approximately 90 percent of students enrolled in colleges in the U.S. We find that being assigned to a small class increases the rate of postsecondary attendance by 2.7 percentage points. The effects are considerably higher among populations with traditionally low rates of postsecondary attainment. For Black students and students eligible for free lunch the effects are 5.8 and 4.4 percentage points, respectively. At elementary schools with the greatest concentration of poverty, measured using the fraction of students receiving a subsidized lunch, smaller classes increase the rate of postsecondary attendance by 7.3 percentage points. We further find that being assigned to a small class increases the probability of earning a college degree by 1.6 percentage points. Smaller classes shift students toward earning degrees in high-earning fields such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), business and economics. Our results shed light on the relationship between the short-and long-term effects of educational interventions. The short-term effect of small classes on test scores, it turns out, is an excellent predictor of its long-term effect on adult outcomes. We show this by adding K-3 test scores to our identifying equation; the coefficient on the class size dummy drops to zero. The coefficient on the interaction of class size and test scores is also zero, indicating that the scores of children in small classes are no less (or more) predictive of adult educational attainment than those of children in the regular classes. Our analysis identifies the effect of manipulating a single policy-relevant educational input on adult educational attainment. By contrast, the early-childhood interventions for which researchers have identified lifetime effects (e.g., Head Start, Abecederian) are multi-pronged, including home visits, parental coaching and vaccinations in addition to time in a preschool classroom. We cannot distinguish which dimensions of these treatments generate short-term effects on test scores, and whether they differ from the dimensions that generate long-term effects on adult well-being. The effective dimensions of the treatment are also ambiguous in the recent literature on 2 classroom and teacher effects. For example, THE TENNESSEE STAR EXPERIMENT The Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Experiment randomly assigned class sizes to children in kindergarten through third grade. The experiment was initiated in the 1985-86 school year, when participants were in kindergarten. A total of 79 schools in 42 school districts participated, with over-sampling of urban schools. An eventual 11,571 students were involved in the experiment. The sample is 60 percent white and the balance African American. About 60 percent of students were eligible for subsidized lunch during the experiment. The experiment is described in greater detail elsewhere (Word, et al

Abstract: Iron-deficiency anemia is among the world's most widespread health problems, especially for children, but it is rarely studied by economists. This paper evaluates the impact of a health intervention delivering iron supplementation and deworming drugs to 2-6 year old children through an existing pre-school network in the slums of Delhi, India. At baseline 69 percent of sample children were anemic and 30 percent had intestinal worm infections. Sample pre-schools were randomly divided into groups and gradually phased into treatment. Weight increased significantly among assisted children, and pre-school participation rates rose sharply by 5.8 percentage points -a reduction of one-fifth in school absenteeism -in the first five months of the program. Gains are largest in low socio-economic status areas. Year two estimates are similar, but two methodological problems -sample attrition, and the non-random sorting of new child cohorts into treatment groups -complicate interpretation of the later results.