Though there is an expanding field of research on public prekindergarten, there is a relatively little comprehensive investigation into what public prekindergarten costs. We address some of the absences in the literature by analyzing public-sector expenditures for the city of Boston's public prekindergarten program, a particularly high-quality…

Though there is an expanding field of research on public prekindergarten, there is a relatively little comprehensive investigation into what public prekindergarten costs. We address some of the absences in the literature by analyzing public-sector expenditures for the city of Boston's public prekindergarten program, a particularly high-quality…

While there is a consensus that attending preschool better prepares children for kindergarten, evidence on the factors that sustain the preschool boost into the early elementary years is still emerging. To add to this literature, we use lottery data from applicants to oversubscribed schools in Boston Public Schools (BPS) prekindergarten program to…

High-quality pre-K sets children on a path for success in kindergarten and beyond. Yet most children in the United States do not attend high-quality programs, with particularly pronounced gaps in quality for children from families with low incomes, dual language learners, Black children, and Latino children. Ensuring equitable access to…

In recent years, policymakers' and practitioners' interest in school climate as a contributor to K-12 student learning and classroom processes has increased, both in the US and internationally. However, researchers have not yet examined the influence of school climate on the youngest learners in these contexts -- prekindergartners. Using data from…

Experts have heralded domain-specific play-based curricula coupled with regular coaching and training as our "strongest hope" for improving instructional quality in large-scale public preschool programs. Yet, details from different evaluations of the strongest hope model are not systematically compiled, making it difficult to identify…

This article synthesizes findings from a reanalysis of data from the Head Start Impact Study with a focus on impact variation. This study addressed whether the size of Head Start's impacts on children's access to center-based and high-quality care and their school readiness skills varied by child characteristics, geographic location, and the…

Early care and education in the United States is in crisis. The period between birth and kindergarten is a crucial time for a child's development. Yet vast racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities that begin early in children's lives contribute to starkly different long-term outcomes for adults. Compared to other advanced economies, child…

General measures of process quality are widely used in the early childhood education (ECE) field. However, the evidence regarding associations between the most widely used process quality measure, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; Pianta et al., 2008), and children's school readiness gains during the preschool year is mixed. Using…

In this paper we use data from students who participated in the oversubscribed Boston Public Schools (BPS) prekindergarten program as a window into variation in the program's medium-term effects. We first examine whether, for the sample of students who applied to oversubscribed BPS prekindergarten programs, there is variation in the effects of the…

Early childhood interventions can be highly cost effective when positive impacts are sustained into adulthood. Yet while many recent preschool interventions have been found to have short-term effects on young children's language, literacy, mathematics, executive function, and social-emotional development, studies show that impacts on cognitive and…

We have many reasons to invest in preschool programs, including persistent gaps in school readiness between children from poorer and wealthier families, large increases in maternal employment over the past several decades, and the rapid brain development that preschool-age children experience. But what do we know about preschool education's…

We assessed impacts on classroom quality and on 5 child language and behavioral outcomes of a 2-year teacher professional-development program for publicly funded prekindergarten and kindergarten in Chile. This cluster-randomized trial included 64 schools (child N = 1,876). The program incorporated workshops and in-classroom coaching. We found…

In recent years, governments across the world have increased their investments in early childhood education programs (Britto, Yoshikawa, & Boller, 2011; Engle et al., 2011; Myers, 2006; UNESCO, 2006). This investment in preprimary education reflects the proven value of providing early learning opportunities in promoting later educational…

"Un Buen Comienzo" [A Good Start] was a professional development program implemented with prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers in Chilean public schools serving low-income families. In a randomized trial, the program showed moderate to large impacts on classroom quality but no impacts on targeted child outcomes. To unpack these…