Can a parent-education initiative help a school district to boost the readiness of three-year-olds who will soon enter pre-K? One Texas district has been implementing such a program for almost a decade, and a new working paper documents outcomes that are both promising and problematic.
Alief Independent School District, which serves around 39,000 students outside Houston, created the Jumpstart Program (JSP) as a means of teaching local parents how to support the pre-K readiness of their children. Approximately 83 percent of district families are economically disadvantaged and 43 percent of students are English Language Learners. Topics covered in the twenty-two-week JSP curriculum include learning colors, acquiring fine motor skills, counting, name recognition, and book handling, all of which are considered foundational for success in Alief’s pre-K program. The hour-long communal programs are held in district buildings during the school day three times each month throughout the school year. They are facilitated by a family liaison and, although they focus on parent education, children attend every third meeting to allow liaisons to gauge how the curriculum is being implemented by parents.
Compared to other early education interventions reviewed by the research team elsewhere, JSP is low-cost, as it uses existing district resources rather than purchasing outside curriculum or contracting with third-party providers. It is also directly applicable to local needs and readily scalable. In fact, creating the randomized control trial required a huge boost in participation above the sixty families that typically participate each year. Those added costs (approximately $200 per additional family) were covered by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation for purposes of this study.
Using these new resources, JSP was advertised to families of age-appropriate children in the catchment zones of all twenty-four Alief elementary schools, up from the previous eight, starting in 2016–17 and continuing for the next two school years. The intent was to get twenty families in each school zone to apply to the lottery so that researchers could implement a randomized control trial. In practice, there was varying interest from school to school, despite recruitment incentives. Some schools had more than twenty applicants, some had less, and the effort never resulted in a full complement of 480 families applying. Further, 25 percent of families awarded spots in JSP attended five or fewer sessions, and 10 percent never attended a single session, although attrition rates did decline from year to year. Cumulatively over the three years, 1,216 families entered the lottery, with half from each school randomly assigned to JSP (treatment) and half assigned to control.
All students whose parents agreed to be in the study (treatment and control) were evaluated using Alief’s own “Jumpstart Assessment Tool”—geared to determine children’s fine and gross motor skills, knowledge of colors, and a few other foundational skills identified by the district—as well as Pearson’s Bracken School Readiness Assessment, which adds number and shape knowledge, among other skills. Each test was re-administered at the end of the twenty-two-week program. Researchers then compared scores on the overall tests, as well as for individual components.
On the Jumpstart Assessment, both groups showed test score gains over the twenty-two-week period—meaning that while control group student didn’t receive the district’s programming, some substantive learning was going on—but the treatment group showed a 7.2 percentage point advantage over their control group peers. Scores on the name recognition and book handling components were most striking. For example, less than half of control group children could recognize their name in writing during the post-test, while nearly 70 percent of the treatment group could do so. Impacts of JSP participation were markedly higher for children whose parents reported not having a high school diploma.
Similar patterns were seen on the Bracken Assessment, although the gains shown by both control and treatment groups were more muted. JSP participation increased overall Bracken test scores by 2 percentage points over the control group, with no one component standing out. However, robustness tests indicate that the Bracken findings are not statistically significant after student attrition is factored in.
Interestingly, indicators of parental involvement in children’s education (measured by surveys administered before and after the 22-week timeframe) rose for both groups, although two of those indicators—amount of time parents read to their children each week and owning ten or more children’s books—were significantly higher for JSP families than for control families. A detailed analysis of potential mechanisms indicates that 75 percent of the program’s impact is attributed to direct effects—parents actually implementing the strategies that JSP teaches—while 25 percent is mediated through changes in habit formation in children. That is, when parents establish and reinforce consistent, high-quality preparatory routines, children assign value to the interactions and activities.
While the impacts of the Jumpstart Program’s pre-K preparation are generally positive, two realities undermine them somewhat—neither of which is discussed in the working paper. First, intensive recruitment efforts were required just to get families in the queue—only to see dozens of them vanish upon the start of actual programming. (Recall that only sixty families were participating annually in the entire 39,000-student district before the research program began.) Perhaps it indicates a lack of value placed on JSP by parents or maybe just difficulty committing to the required dates and times. Whatever is holding parents back from participation in JSP must be addressed before this or similar programs is likely to have substantial impact. Second, we don’t know how any of the students actually fared in pre-K or beyond. Evidence from other early education program studies leans heavily toward a fading out of even the strongest academic impacts by third grade or sooner. So the modest initial improvements associated with JSP need to be studied over time before any real conclusion can be made.
SOURCE: Flavio Cunha et al., “An Evaluation of the Alief Independent School District Jumpstart Program: Using a Model to Recover Mechanisms from an RCT,” NBER Working Papers (March 2025).
