This study examines the community‐wide effects of two statewide early childhood policy initiatives in North Carolina. One initiative provides funding to improve the quality of child care services at the county level for all children between the ages of 0 to 5, and the other provides funding for preschool slots for disadvantaged four‐year‐olds. Differences across counties in the timing of the rollout and in the magnitude of the state financial investments per child provide the variation in programs needed to estimate their effects on schooling outcomes in third grade. We find robust positive effects of each program on third‐grade test scores in both reading and math. These effects can best be explained by a combination of direct benefits for participants and spillover benefits for others. Our preferred models suggest that the combined average effects on test scores of investments in both programs at 2009 funding levels are equivalent to two to four months of instruction in grade 3.

North Carolina's Smart Start and More at Four early childhood programs were evaluated through the end of elementary school (age 11) by estimating the impact of state funding allocations to programs in each of 100 counties across 13 consecutive years on outcomes for all children in each county-year group (n=1,004,571; 49% female; 61% non-Latinx white, 30% African American, 4% Latinx, 5% other). Student-level regression models with county and year fixed effects indicated significant positive impacts of each program on reading and math test scores and reductions in special education and grade retention in each grade. Effect sizes grew or held steady across years. Positive effects held for both high-and low-poverty families, suggesting spillover of effects to non-participating peers. North Carolina's Early Childhood Programs 3Surging policy interest in early education and care programs for children from birth to age five has heightened demand for rigorous evaluation of programs and policies to determine which strategies produce the largest impacts on promoting child development. Because of inconsistent findings across studies (to be described below), policy and scientific interest has focused on whether positive effects of early childhood programs endure or fade. "Fadeout" refers to diminishing differences between an intervention and control group over time following an initial positive impact of a program, due to either decrement in performance by the intervention group or deferred improvement by the control group. The current study examines whether initial positive impacts of North Carolina's early childhood programs are sustained or fade out by the end of elementary school.The field has moved from exclusive reliance on the findings of a handful of small experiments begun in the 1960s to examination of the impact of policies and programs as they are implemented at scale. This progression follows from the Institute of Medicine's prescription for bringing basic science to policy by moving from scientifically-based small randomized trials of efficacy in the laboratory to larger, more naturalistic trials in the community and, finally, to evaluation of programs when implemented at scale (Mrazek & Hagerty, 1994). Coincident with the shift to evaluation of programs at scale is growing interest in whether state-level policies and programs can "move the needle" to improve population-level outcomes by exerting impact not only on program participants but also on their peers through a spillover effect, and whether these impacts are sustained or fade out by the end of elementary school.The current study evaluates fadeout and spillover of impact of North Carolina's two flagship early childhood programs on education outcomes for 13 cohorts of about one million children as they develop from birth through the end of elementary school. This study is the third North Carolina's Early Childhood Programs 4 in a series using similar methods and data. Ladd, Muschkin, and Dodge (2014) found initial positive impact of each program...

Using administrative data on public school students in North Carolina, we

This study examines the community-wide effects of investments in two early childhood initiatives in North Carolina (Smart Start and More at Four) on the likelihood of a student being placed into special education. We take advantage of variation across North Carolina counties and years in the timing of the introduction and funding levels of the two programs to identify their effects on thirdgrade outcomes. We find that both programs significantly reduce the likelihood of special education placement in the third grade, resulting in considerable cost savings to the state. The effects of the two programs differ across categories of disability, but do not vary significantly across subgroups of children identified by race, ethnicity, and maternal education levels.

To what extent do persistent race gaps in educational outcomes stem from differences in the level of advantage that students bring to school or from differences in opportunities to succeed? In order to disentangle the component elements of race gaps in middle school achievement and disciplinary infractions, the authors use demographic methods that quantify the proportion of the race gap that is linked to the student, peer, and school composition of race groups. Using administrative school records from North Carolina, the authors find that (1) students'family and demographic characteristics are the most important explanatory factors; (2) the distribution of students across schools with differing racial composition, school sizes, teacher qualifications, and poverty levels also contributes to explaining the gaps; but (3) a substantial portion of each race gap remains unexplained by these compositional differences.

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"At the aggregate level, return migrants in Puerto Rico in 1970 and 1980 faced greater employment-related difficulties, as compared with nonmigrants. This article explores the individual-level relationship of return migrant status to employment outcomes. The conceptual framework takes into consideration local and regional contextual factors, particularly the employment conditions prevailing in Puerto Rico during this period. Within this framework, specific hypotheses suggest a negative influence of return migrant status.... The findings substantiate the hypotheses for both census years and indicate the importance of the duration of residence in the United States and the timing of the return move as mediating factors."

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