No abstract

President Obama's "Preschool for All" initiative calls for dramatic increases in the number of 4 year olds enrolled in public preschool programs and in the quality of these programs nationwide. The proposed program shares many characteristics with the universal preschools that have been offered in Georgia and Oklahoma since the 1990s. This study draws together data from multiple sources to estimate the impacts of these "model" state programs on preschool enrollment and a broad set of family and child outcomes. We find that the state programs have increased the preschool enrollment rates of children from lower-and higher-income families alike. For lower-income families, our findings also suggest that the programs have increased the amount of time mothers and children spend together on activities such as reading, the chances that mothers work, and children's test performance as late as eighth grade. For higher-income families, however, we find that the programs have shifted children from private to public preschools, resulting in less of an impact on overall enrollment but a reduction in childcare expenses, and have had no positive effect on children's later test scores.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many states introduced grants for school districts offering kindergarten programs. This paper exploits the staggered timing of these initiatives to estimate the long-term effects of a large public investment in universal early education. I find that white children aged five after the typical state reform were less likely to be high school dropouts and had lower institutionalization rates as adults. I rule out similar positive effects for blacks, despite comparable increases in their enrollment in public kindergartens in response to the initiatives. The explanation for this finding that receives most empirical support is that state funding for kindergarten crowded out participation in federally-funded early education among the poorest five year olds.This paper examines the consequences of a series of state interventions to introduce kindergartens into public schools. In the 1960s and 1970s, many states, particularly in the Southern and Western parts of the country, for the first time began offering grants to school districts operating kindergarten programs. Heavy reliance of school revenues on state support in these states and strong latent demand combined to generate quick take-up of these new funds. This is suggested by Figure I, which plots trends in the fraction of school districts with kindergarten programs and the ratio of kindergarten to first grade enrollment in these "treated" states and elsewhere in the country. My formal empirical analysis implies that within only two years of state funding, school districts in the typical state were 21 percentage points more likely to offer kindergarten and public school kindergarten enrollment rates 33 percentage points higher.These interventions present an unusual opportunity to estimate the long-term effects of a large state investment in universal preschool education.My identification strategy takes advantage of the staggered timing of the funding initiatives across treated states, along with the fact that children attend kindergarten at age five.