Poster #79 - Long-term Effects of Transitional Kindergarten on ELA and Math Skills in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

California’s landscape of early childhood education is undergoing a massive shift with the expansion of their universal preschool, transitional kindergarten. One concern as this universal program rolls out is whether the universal public TK program is going to draw children away from existing programs that would actually serve them better. A recent study of a state preschool program in Tennessee showed long-term negative effects of the program when compared to children who accessed other ECE programs (Lipsey et al., 2018; Durkin et al., 2022). It is critical to test whether TK programs in California are a strong investment, or whether they are likely to result in negative long-term effects. By examining how effects of the program are sustained over late elementary school years in one preschool-rich school district, we can test whether TK is providing preparation similar to existing options.

The current study examines long-term effects of the San Francisco Unified School District TK program on math and language arts in 3rd through 5th grade. Transitional kindergarten (TK) programs were first tested in California using age-eligibility for children who would turn 5 years old between November 2 and December 2, during their last eligible preschool year. The program’s structures and standards are closely aligned with kindergarten, including the same teacher qualifications, class-size, curriculum, and assessments. Over the next 5 years, this age-eligibility will be expanded to include all children at age 4.

We used Mahalanobis Distance Matching to match students who have reached grades 3–5 who attended TK (n = 294) to their peers who did not (n = 7508) based on race, language status, gender, program type, special education status, and school-level free and reduced priced meals. Ultimately, 284 children who attended TK were matched with 284 peers who did not attend TK (see Table 1 for matched-sample demographics). With this matched sample, we ran linear regressions clustered at the school level controlling for race, language status, gender, program type, special education status, and school-level free and reduced priced meals to test the effects of the TK program on the state standardized assessment of ELA and math in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade. Missing data was accounted for using Full Information Maximum Likelihood. In future analyses, we will test the robustness of our results using another quasi-experimental method, regression discontinuity.

Table 2 shows that TK status was not associated with students’ scores in ELA or Math in grades 3, 4, or 5 as shown in Table 2. These results suggest that students who attended the SFUSD TK program performed as well on standardized test scores as their peers who did not attend the program. These findings were not moderated by race or language status. Given the rich early childhood environment in the San Francisco area, we interpret these results as demonstrating that this state-funded, universal program supports similar long-term outcomes for students as the private, local, and/or federally-funded early childhood experiences offered across the city. Future research should examine the effects of the TK program on socioemotional and behavioral skills.

Authors

• Meghan Elizabeth McDoniel, Child Trends -Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Carrie Townley-Flores, Stanford University

• Michael J. Sulik, Stanford University

• Jelena Obradovic, Stanford University