Essays in Early Childhood Development and Public Policy

A large literature demonstrates the long-term individual and societal benefits of investing resources in children during early childhood because of the powerful influence of the environment during early life on child neurological development. Therefore, early childhood presents an unrivaled opportunity for policy intervention, and is a critical component of child and family policy. This dissertation uses three different types of policy research to examine child well-being between birth and kindergarten. Chapter 1 is a program evaluation of a school-based outreach intervention to identify and enroll uninsured low-income children in publicly funded health insurance programs in North Carolina. Chapter 2 is a state policy evaluation examining how variations in state governance of early child care and education policy affects children's well-being. Chapter 3 is an example of testing and applying theory from economics to examine how parent characteristics and behaviors contribute to child cognitive development throughout early childhood. Each paper is interdisciplinary, implementing different methods for causal inference to address the unique challenges of each approach using statewide and nationally representative child data with several indicators of well-being. In chapter one, there were no significant differences in public health insurance enrollment and preventive care use for kindergarten-aged children between counties that received the outreach intervention treatment from those who did not. However, the findings from the qualitative work in this study may be helpful in implementing other school-based outreach efforts to enroll children in public health insurance. The findings from chapter two indicate that there is a nontrivial positive effect of policy dispersion on children's reading, math, and fine motor skills in kindergarten. Future research in this area should explore the specific mechanisms through which policy governance translates into meaningful differences in children's well-being. The findings from chapter three show that when parents read books, sing songs, and engage in supportive parent-child interactions as early as 9 months of age, this has an important effect on children's reading skills in kindergarten in addition to the effect of maternal education and ability, and family income. These behaviors are important inputs in the development process because they are amenable to policy interventionDoctor of Philosoph

Head Start at Ages 3 and 4 Versus Head Start Followed by State Pre-K: Which Is More Effective?

As policy-makers contemplate expanding preschool opportunities for low-income children, one possibility is to fund two, rather than one year of Head Start for children at ages 3 and 4. Another option is to offer one year of Head Start followed by one year of pre-k. We ask which of these options is more effective. We use data from the Oklahoma pre-k study to examine these two ‘pathways’ into kindergarten using regression discontinuity to estimate the effects of each age-4 program, and propensity score weighting to address selection. We find that children attending Head Start at age 3 develop stronger pre-reading skills in a high quality pre-kindergarten at age 4 compared with attending Head Start at age 4. Pre-k and Head Start were not differentially linked to improvements in children’s pre-writing skills or pre-math skills. This suggests that some impacts of early learning programs may be related to the sequencing of learning experiences to more academic programming

Fadeout in an early mathematics intervention: Constraining content or preexisting differences?

A robust finding across research on early childhood educational interventions is that the treatment effect diminishes over time, with children not receiving the intervention eventually catching up to children who did. One popular explanation for fadeout of early mathematics interventions is that elementary school teachers may not teach the kind of advanced content that children are prepared for after receiving the intervention, so lower-achieving children in the control groups of early mathematics interventions catch up to the higher-achieving children in the treatment groups. An alternative explanation is that persistent individual differences in children’s long-term mathematical development result more from relatively stable pre-existing differences in their skills and environments than from the direct effects of previous knowledge on later knowledge. We tested these two hypotheses using data from an effective preschool mathematics intervention previously known to show a diminishing treatment effect over time. We compared the intervention group to a matched subset of the control group with a similar mean and variance of scores at the end of treatment. We then tested the relative contributions of factors that similarly constrain learning in children from treatment and control groups with the same level of post-treatment achievement and pre-existing differences between these two groups to the fadeout of the treatment effect over time. We found approximately 72% of the fadeout effect to be attributable to pre-existing differences between children in treatment and control groups with the same level of achievement at post-test. These differences were fully statistically attenuated by children’s prior academic achievement

Improving the supply and quality of center-based providers in the child care subsidy program: Evaluating the impacts of the 2014 CCDF Block Grant Reauthorization

We investigate how state CCDF policy changes in the CCDF reimbursement rates, in response to the 2014 CCDBG reauthorization, affected the supply and quality of CCDF providers using nationally representative data

Supplemental Material, ER_revision2_Appendix - Double Down or Switch It Up: Should Low-Income Children Stay in Head Start for 2 Years or Switch Programs?

<p>Supplemental Material, ER_revision2_Appendix for Double Down or Switch It Up: Should Low-Income Children Stay in Head Start for 2 Years or Switch Programs? by Jade Marcus Jenkins, Terri J. Sabol, and George Farkas in Evaluation Review</p

Head Start at ages 3 and 4 versus Head Start followed by state pre-k: Which is more effective?

As policy-makers contemplate expanding preschool opportunities for low-income children, one possibility is to fund two, rather than one year of Head Start for children at ages 3 and 4. Another option is to offer one year of Head Start followed by one year of pre-k. We ask which of these options is more effective. We use data from the Oklahoma pre-k study to examine these two 'pathways' into kindergarten using regression discontinuity to estimate the effects of each age-4 program, and propensity score weighting to address selection. We find that children attending Head Start at age 3 develop stronger pre-reading skills in a high quality pre-kindergarten at age 4 compared with attending Head Start at age 4. Pre-k and Head Start were not differentially linked to improvements in children's pre-writing skills or pre-math skills. This suggests that some impacts of early learning programs may be related to the sequencing of learning experiences to more academic programming

Head Start at ages 3 and 4 versus Head Start followed by state pre-k: Which is more effective?

As policy-makers contemplate expanding preschool opportunities for low-income children, one possibility is to fund two, rather than one year of Head Start for children at ages 3 and 4. Another option is to offer one year of Head Start followed by one year of pre-k. We ask which of these options is more effective. We use data from the Oklahoma pre-k study to examine these two 'pathways' into kindergarten using regression discontinuity to estimate the effects of each age-4 program, and propensity score weighting to address selection. We find that children attending Head Start at age 3 develop stronger pre-reading skills in a high quality pre-kindergarten at age 4 compared with attending Head Start at age 4. Pre-k and Head Start were not differentially linked to improvements in children's pre-writing skills or pre-math skills. This suggests that some impacts of early learning programs may be related to the sequencing of learning experiences to more academic programming

Do High-Quality Kindergarten and First-Grade Classrooms Mitigate Preschool Fadeout?

Prior research shows that short-term effects from preschool may disappear, but little research has considered which environmental conditions might sustain academic advantages from preschool into elementary school. Using secondary data from two preschool experiments, we investigate whether features of elementary schools, particularly advanced content and high-quality instruction in kindergarten and first grade, as well as professional supports to coordinate curricular instruction, reduce fadeout. Across both studies, our measures of instruction did not moderate fadeout. However, results indicated that targeted teacher professional supports substantially mitigated fadeout between kindergarten and first grade but that this was not mediated through classroom quality. Future research should investigate the specific mechanisms through which aligned preschool-elementary school curricular approaches can sustain the benefits of preschool programs for low-income children