Exploring the Impacts of an Early Childhood Educational Intervention on Later School Selection

Abstract

In the current article, we examine the long-run school selection patterns of children randomly assigned to the Chicago School Readiness Project, an early childhood educational (ECE) intervention that aimed to improve the quality of Head Start classrooms serving low-income communities. Analyses suggest that adolescents who participated in the program were more likely to opt out of their assigned neighborhood school and attend schools with better indicators of academic performance. Further analyses suggested that these selection patterns began in elementary school, although elementary school quality explained only a small portion of the effect on high school selection. Results suggest that intensive ECE interventions could have lasting effects on children’s patterns of selection into later educational environments.

Persistence and Fade-Out of Educational-Intervention Effects: Mechanisms and Potential Solutions

“…Children in the Chicago School Readiness Project, a program that attempted to improve the quality of Head Start classrooms in low-income neighborhoods, raised the likelihood that students would attend higher performing elementary schools (Watts et al, 2020).…”

Reducing Inequality through Dynamic Complementarity: Evidence from Head Start and Public School Spending

“…Our setting is particularly well suited for studying dynamic complementarities. 2 To isolate the effects of these two major policies, we exploit temporal and geographic variation in exposure to these policy-induced investment "shocks" and analyze the life trajectories of individuals born between 1950 and 1976, and followed through 2015 using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). These data allow us to study potential complementarities on an array of adult outcomes including educational attainment, earnings, poverty, and incarceration.…”

“…While 1 See Card and Payne (2002); Murray, Evans, and Schwab (1998); Hoxby (2001); and Jackson, Johnson, and Persico (2014) for a more complete disucssion of the effects of SFRs on public school spending. 2 Investments are "broadly defined as actions specifically taken to promote learning" in Heckman and Mosso (2014). As such, interactions between education-related interventions are likely what the theory is about.…”

Promoting equality of educational opportunity by investing early: Recommendations for longitudinal research.

“…Specifically, we uncovered clear evidence that children who participated in the Pre-K intervention found their way into higher-performing schools upon leaving Head Start. They enrolled in slightly better elementary schools in kindergarten and, by high school, they enrolled in schools with higher graduation rates and lower race-based achievement gaps (Watts et al, 2019). These analyses further suggest that, if CSRP affected long-run academic achievement and cognitive ability, the program impact may have materialized by affecting changes in other subsequent environmental exposures.…”

“…The notable exception being the evaluation of the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten Program, which found evidence of fadeout and some negative long-run effects following random assignment to the Tennessee Pre-K program (seeLipsey et al, 2018;Watts et al, 2019).Copyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution.…”