REACH Cost Analysis

In this report, we present a cost analysis of Raising Educational Achievement Coalition of Harlem (REACH), a partnership between Teachers College, Columbia University, and five high-needs schools in Harlem, New York City. A rigorous cost analysis can help illuminate the resources used to implement its theory of action, in addition to contextualizing the size of measured effects in a broader implementation framework and helping decision-makers select among alternative uses of scarce resources. REACH entails deep collaboration between schools and program staff in five key areas: Leadership, Teaching and Learning, Expanded Learning Opportunities, Physical and Mental Health, and Family and Community Engagement. The program supports schools in achieving their goals for student learning by utilizing university and community resources, including research from faculty, and graduate student assistants working as interns or volunteers in exchange for hands-on learning experiences. We used the ingredients method for cost analysis, documenting all resources utilized to operationalize the program’s theory of action regardless of whether each resource has a monetary cost or who pays for or provides the resource, in order to fully capture the economic or opportunity cost of the program. We obtained data on ingredients from program documentation, a detailed report on program implementation, and interviews and personal communications with program staff. In 2016-17, REACH cost $2,732,960, or$1,560 per student, with substantial variation by school site, domain of REACH, type of ingredient, and source of ingredient and associated funding. We supplement this analysis with a case study of the Teachers College Community School and sensitivity analysis. While the costs of REACH are substantial, the program itself is comprehensive and wide-reaching; further study should compare the costs of REACH to measured effects in a variety of areas, including student test scores, and behavioral, health, and socioemotional learning outcomes

Minnesota Reading Corps Pre-K Program Cost Analysis

The Minnesota Reading Corps (MRC) program is a statewide AmeriCorps early literacy initiative that aims to foster emergent literacy skills of children to ensure reading proficiency by the end of grade 3. MRC and its host organization, Reading & Math, Inc. (RMI), aim to address the resource gaps within under-resourced schools by bringing AmeriCorps members into Pre-K classrooms to provide literacy enrichment for the whole class and tutoring services for specific at-risk students. An impact evaluation of the program conducted in 2013-2014 by the University of Chicago-based research center, NORC, showed positive impacts on emergent literacy outcomes for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (Markovitz et al., 2015). Building on the existing evidence on the program effectiveness, this study estimates the costs of providing the MRC Pre-K program that are associated with the impact measured by the 2013-2014 impact evaluation. Rigorous economic evaluations of educational interventions provide important information about the resources necessary to implement a program. Such evaluations bridge the gap between knowledge on program implementation and program impact by identifying the resources utilized to generate outcomes of interest. As such, cost analyses intend to inform policymakers facing decisions to replicate or scale up a program, or trade-offs related to limited resources. Our study used the ingredients method—an approach widely applied to examine costs of educational interventions—to estimate the MRC Pre-K program’s cost (Levin, McEwan, Belfield, Bowden & Shand, 2018). We conducted interviews, surveys, and classroom observations, as well as reviews of program documents, administrative records and past research in order to collect data on all resources utilized to derive program impact based on its theory of change. Wherever important data were missing, we used a Monte Carlo simulation strategy to explore site-level variation on resource use and costs. Overall, the costs of MRC were identified as $1.5 million per year to serve 1,261 students across twenty-five schools, or$1,210 per pupil on average. Costs were found to vary substantially by site, by ingredient category and by who bears the burden of the costs across the 25 sites evaluated. Our analyses of the distribution of who bears the costs suggest that the average cost per student per site borne by schools ranges from $680 to$210, or approximately 25% of the total costs per student. Comparable cost estimates are limited by a lack of similar Pre-K programs that have conducted both impact and cost analysis evaluations. Our study is one of the few rigorous cost analyses in Pre-K programs conducted alongside effectiveness research on a supplemental Pre-K literacy program to date. Nevertheless, these results suggest the Minnesota Reading Corps program leverages a substantial amount of resources into Pre-K classrooms in a way that feasibly distributes costs

Three Essays on Economics of Early Childhood Education

This dissertation is composed of three chapters, each applying different quantitative methods to study a specific early childhood education policy or program. Chapter One explores whether expanding preschool education in low- and middle-income countries with public resources would be a viable policy option, using a benefit-cost analysis. Chapter Two examines economic costs of an emergent literacy program that places paid community tutors into pre-K classrooms in Minnesota using the ingredients method of cost analysis. Chapter Three investigates the effectiveness of a school-based attendance intervention at public preschools in high poverty communities of Chile by using student level observational data. The three chapters each highlight different policy problems: global inequalities on access to preschool education, reading gaps among American PK-12 students, and high student absenteeism at publicly funded preschool programs. Together, these studies advance our knowledge about ways to address existing early childhood education policy problems. These studies also help shed light on gaps in our current knowledge and lay out future research agenda