The jury remains out regarding the true impact of pre-K enrollment on early elementary outcomes. Some research finds a positive impact, some a negative, and much of it shows the fading out of impacts by third grade or soon thereafter. A new report by researcher Hyunwoo Yang adds to the evidence by looking at Wisconsin 4K, a long-standing pre-K program funded and administered by state and local education agencies and offered in public elementary schools and standalone childcare centers.
Under this program, all four-year-olds in the state are eligible to participate and can attend pre-K free of charge. However, districts may opt out of providing programming in any form, leaving thousands of eligible families without a convenient location. Those families can open-enroll in another district, but spaces are not guaranteed to non-residents and there are costs associated. A number of different scheduling options (including full-day, full-week, part-day, and part-week) provide families with flexible choices to meet various needs and to help providers run their programs in the most cost-effective manner.
According to research-recommended standards for ECE policies in the United States, Wisconsin 4K is considered “moderately high quality.” The state has established standards for teacher qualifications (bachelor’s degree and an elementary or regular education license) and learning benchmarks and set out some guidelines on content, including coverage of ten subjects in required curricula (including science, health, social studies, and art—at an appropriate level for youngsters of course), and the requirement that 30 percent of the curriculum should comprise reading and English language arts. Beyond that, program structure is variable from site to site and is described as mostly “play-based.” 4K sites can be district-run or contracted out to private providers—and can take place in district buildings or standalone sites—although districts are ultimately responsible for all programming regardless of form. As of 2018, 98 percent of districts offered 4K in some form, and approximately 75 percent of four-year-olds were enrolled. The vast majority of students attended part time and fewer than five days per week (not surprising, since only 2 percent of districts even offered a full-day, all-week program). The report cites data from the 2013–2014 school year (the last one under study for new 4K enrollment) showing the average per-child expenditure was $5,618. Newer numbers not included in the study cite a steady decrease in that average since 2017.
Yang looks at statewide administrative and student achievement data from nearly 300 districts that launched and ran 4K programs between the 2001–2002 and 2013–2014 school years. Unfortunately, precise enrollment data are not available, but Yang approximates based on the following year’s kindergarten enrollment, with appropriate cautions issued. Ditto for socioeconomic-status data, which are not mandatory for part-time 4K families to provide and thus is extrapolated based on the following year’s kindergarten demographics. The analysis likely underestimates the actual number of low-income students participating in 4K in each cohort.
Student test score data come from annual administrations of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) to third grade students each fall. WKCE testing covers more subjects, but Yang’s analysis sticks with math and reading only. Students are grouped into the four WKCE achievement categories—advanced, proficient, basic, and below basic. Overall, the data encompass 292 districts with 3,495 year-by-district observations over twelve years. Since districts implemented Wisconsin 4K programing at different times, approximately 59 percent of the observations fell into a post-treatment period (after students had participated in 4K), while 41 percent were captured prior to 4K implementation. Yang reports his impact findings at the district level due to the near universality of 4K programming, allowing him to capture any spillover effects on non-treated students, which are difficult to capture at the student level.
His analysis finds that implementation of 4K boosted district reading scores by 0.091 of a standard deviation (SD) in the model without controls (approximately a 15 percent increase in the number of students who achieved proficient and advanced levels of reading compared to pre-treatment outcomes) and 0.104 SD in the model with controls (controlling for, among other things, year fixed effects). That translates to a 20 percent increase in the number of students who achieved proficient and advanced levels of reading. Positive impacts were strongest among low-income students, at 0.165 and 0.177 SD with and without controls, respectively, equivalent to a 40 percent increase of such students achieving proficiency and advanced levels. There was, however, no statistically significant impact on reading achievement among higher-income students. The positive effect of 4K was also much greater for the reading scores of Hispanic students (0.323 and 0.333 SD with and without controls, respectively, equivalent to a 50 percent increase) than any other racial or ethnic category. There were, however, no statistically-significant effects on math achievement for 4K students, no matter how the data were sliced.
Caveats cited by Yang include the lack of data on what preschool experiences non-4K students are participating in and what other enrichment part-time 4K students take part in when not involved in the program. Additionally, the non-standardization of curriculum and programming (along with other unobserved differences from site to site) makes it impossible to suggest what specific mechanisms are driving the impacts. This research also does not address the possibility of positive impacts fading out beyond third grade. However, the positive points of Wisconsin 4K likely include the near-universal availability, some strong curricular features, and the cost-effectiveness of delivering programming in this manner. More evidence is still required for the jury to come to a verdict on the longer-term impacts of pre-K education.
SOURCE: Hyunwoo Yang, “The Effects of Wisconsin’s Universal Prekindergarten Program on Third-Grade Academic Achievement,” American Educational Research Journal (September 2024).
