The Causal Effects of Boston’s Prekindergarten Program on Students’ Medium-Term Academic Achievement

Abstract

In my first paper I use data from four cohorts of students who applied to the Boston Public Schools prekindergarten program between 2007 and 2011 to conduct a lottery-based analysis of the impacts of Boston prekindergarten on children’s enrollment and persistence in district schools, grade retention, special education placement and kindergarten through third-grade test scores. I complement this lottery-based analysis with a regression-based analysis of Boston prekindergarten impacts for all prekindergarten applicants (not just those that competed in a lottery) and an analysis of children’s K-3 experiences. In my second paper I rigorously examine whether there is variation in the medium-term effects of the Boston prekindergarten program through the lens of the Sustaining Environments hypothesis. This hypothesis posits that the environment students enter after prekindergarten plays a critical role in sustaining benefits from their prekindergarten experience. Specifically, I first examine whether there is variation in the medium-term effects of the Boston prekindergarten program on children’s outcomes. Afterwards I explore whether a parsimonious set of school features predict variation in the treatment effects across schools.