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Preschool and school performance of children from immigrant families

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Abstract

We study whether free preschool affects the subsequent school performance of children from immigrant families. Our difference-in-differences approach takes advantage of a policy intervention implemented in two districts in Oslo, leaving other similar districts unaffected. The grade point average of girls increases more in the intervention districts than in the comparison districts, resulting in effect estimates of about a tenth of the standard deviation. We find no consistent effects for boys.

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Notes

  1. Excellent contributions include Chetty et al. (2011), Dahl and Lockner (2012), Duncan et al. (2011), Heckman et al. (2010a, (2010b), Deming (2009), Heckman (2006), Garces et al. (2002) and Duncan and Brooks-Gunn (1997). Almond and Currie (2011) provide an overview of the literature on children below age five.

  2. See Almond and Currie (2011), Ruhm and Waldfogel (2012) or Heckman and Kautz (2014) for excellent reviews of this rapidly expanding literature.

  3. There are a few studies exploring the related question of how the achievement gap between persons with and without immigrant background is affected by preschool/kindergarten, see next section.

  4. See Havnes and Mogstad (2011b) for a recent and notable exception. Using Norwegian data, they find that expansions of publicly certified child care only marginally increased maternal labor supply. They argue, however, that the expansion crowded out low-quality and informal day care. Another recent Norwegian study (Drange and Telle 2015) considers short-term effects of offering free child care and finds no or negligible effects on maternal employment despite significant effects on child care uptake for their children.

  5. Cohorts born 1990 and before started school at age 7, and graduated at the same age (16). They thus have completed 9 years of schooling upon graduation from compulsory school, while our later cohorts complete 10 years.

  6. All languages except Norwegian, Sami, English, Danish and Swedish.

  7. The decision to providing free child care in Gamle Oslo was announced in October 1997 when the National Budget for 1998 was published (Prop 1, 1997/1998). In Grünerløkka, the final decision came later, with a decision in the city district council early autumn 1998 (see Appendix 2 for details).

  8. The figures in Fig. 1 might understate the effect of the intervention on the increase in preschool attendance; for example, as child care slots are measured 15 December in these data, children who started later (like in January or February) will not be included. Note that the figures do not present shares in short-term care for children of immigrants only. These statistics are unfortunately not available.

  9. In addition, most children from native families get marks in a version of written Norwegian called nynorsk. Children with immigrant background will typically be exempted from this subject, and hence we do not include it.

  10. Some records contain missing observations for one or more marks. As there was no legal opportunity to fail students in this age group, the missing observations are most likely due to problems with registration. If there are more than five missing observations on an individual, we exclude the record. This similarly applies to the other measures defined below, though below we only require that they have at least one mark to be included. To make sure that excluding missing observations are not endogenous, we have performed a robustness test where we run our main regression (see Sect. 5) with a missing observation of GPA as the outcome. We find no significant differences between treatment and control groups before and after the reform.

  11. The measure of behavior is only available for children born 1992–1995, i.e., we only have one pre-cohort.

  12. A considerable share with missing on educational achievement is not surprising for these parents, since they are born outside Norway (typically in developing countries like Pakistan and Turkey; cf. Sect. 4.1). Moreover, survey data indicate that education of immigrants is not well captured and typically underreported in register data (Blom and Henriksen 2008).

  13. Decade of immigration could also be a proxy for language proficiency. Whether the child is an immigrant should also to some extent be expected to pick up language proficiency among parents (everything else equal, parents with a 5-year-old child born in Norway would presumably have a better proficiency in the new language than parents with a 5-year-old child born outside Norway as they have resided in the country for longer).

  14. To explore this further, we have run regressions (like Eq. (1)) using the dummy for mother finished high school as the dependent variable, see Appendix 3. The results show that without control variables the “effect” estimate is positive and significant. However, the estimate becomes much lower when including the controls for country of origin and decade of immigration, and it becomes statistically insignificant at the 10 % level when we also include the other control variables (except maternal education).We also see from Table 3 that controlling for parental education reduces the effect estimates somewhat.

  15. While misclassification is likely to result in a downward bias, the direction of the self-selection bias is not obvious. The bias could be upwards if higher-skilled families are more able (and willing) to relocate into the treatment area to get the free preschool. The bias could be downwards if the relative value of the free preschool is higher for lower-skilled families, for example since the value of the free preschool constitutes a larger share of their family income and this makes them move more.

  16. For the first post-intervention cohort born 1993, this alleviates concerns of self-selection bias (since the reform was not known 2 years in advance), and the scope for attenuation bias is limited (since few change residency from age four to five). For the later cohorts, especially those born 1996, self-selection remains an issue (since the intervention was known to them before they turned five). However, to eliminate the possibility of self-selection for the 1996-cohort, we would have had to use residency at age one (since this is the most recent time when the intervention was not known to them), which could introduce serious attenuation bias as changing of residency from age one to five is more frequent. While in our main results we have chosen to use residency at age four for all cohorts, we will also show robustness results when using age one for all cohorts. In addition, we have estimated our main results by instrumenting residency in the treatment area at age four (as well as at age five) with the district of residency at age two (and instrumenting the interaction in Eq. (1) with the residency at age two interacted with the post variable). This yielded qualitatively similar estimates as those presented, but precision was lower.

  17. In the 1992 cohort, among all children with immigrant background residing in the whole of Norway at age four (like in our main sample) only 39 children graduated 1 year too late. Twenty-two of these were born in the last quarter of the year.

  18. Also, the intervention occurred around the same time as a program called Plan of Action Oslo Centre/East (PAOCE). Maybe of relevance to our children, PAOCE included subsidies to after-school clubs and an expansion of outdoor activities. But PAOCE started in 1997, so children born in for example 1992 and 1993 should be similarly affected by the program.

  19. Note, however, that we do not include school fixed effects in our main regressions since what school a student attends may be endogenous to the intervention: If the intervention improves school performance of the child or the integration of the parents, it is possible that the family might be better at identifying and getting the child into a higher-quality school. Public schools in Norway are generally of high quality, and there are very few private schools. The public schools have geographically defined catchment areas and getting into a school outside the catchment area is rarely possible. Segregation by socioeconomic status results in the abilities of the students to vary substantially across schools, but this is largely compensated by more public funding directed toward schools with low-performing students (Hægeland et al. 2005).

  20. Throughout the paper, we report results from one regression model with interactions for gender treatment. Our main result becomes almost identical if we run regressions on the sample of boys and girls separately.

  21. When adding all cohorts (last row), there seems to be a rather large positive reform effect for native girls. When looking closer into this, it turns out that this is due to a very good result for native girls in treatment city districts born 1996, i.e., the last cohort to be included in our analysis. We find it unlikely that this is related to the intervention, as the estimates during the first years post-reform are nonsignificant and modest.

  22. In 2003, only 8 % of teachers and assistants working in Norwegian preschools were men (St. meld. 2008–2009).

  23. Some studies indicate that females from immigrant families are kept under stricter control by their parents than males from immigrant families and non-immigrants (Yuval-Davis 1997; Prieur 2004). However, this excess control of females is found to be connected to controlling female sexuality (Prieur 2004), which makes it hard to assess the relevance of these studies for the 5-year-old girls in our sample.

  24. Drange and Telle (2015) do not estimate causal effects on child development (only on uptake), since these recent data are only available for cohorts that were all affected by this recent intervention.

  25. Lov av 5. mai 1995 nr. 19 om barnehager (Act of May 5, 1995, no. 19 about child care institutions).

  26. Rammeplan for barnehagen, 1995 (Curriculum for childcare institutions, 1995).

  27. Informasjon om prosjektet gratis kortidsbarnehage i bydel Gamle Oslo (Plan for the project free part-time preschool in Gamle Oslo city district.) Gamle Oslo city district.

  28. Unless anything else is specified, the content of this subsection is based on information from the qualitative evaluation report “Gratis barnehage for alle femåringer i bydel Gamle Oslo” by Trude Brita Nergård (NOVA report 3/02).

  29. From “Rapport februar 1999”: Prosjekt gratis korttidsplass for alle femåringer i bydel Gamle Oslo.

  30. City district council case 136/98 and 137/98.

  31. Handlingsprogram for Oslo indre øst, årsrapport 1999 (Plan of Action Oslo Centre/East, annual report 1999)

  32. Satsinger på oppvekst i bydel Grünerløkka under Handlingsprogram Oslo indre øst 1997-2005. En intern evalueringsrapport. Internal evaluation report.

  33. City district council meeting November 26, 1998.

  34. Suggestion from the children and youth committee to the city district meeting December 16, 1999.

  35. This subsection is based on an interview with the former unit director for child care centers in Stovner city district, Mary Kristensen.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Peter Fredriksson, Erling Holmøy, Magne Mogstad, Mari Rege and Lars Østby for comments and suggestions to earlier versions of the paper. We would also like to thank a number of seminar participants for comments and discussions. A special thank to Lise Sande Amundsen in Grünerløkka, Mary Kristensen in Stovner, Olga Mørk in Gamle Oslo and Yanina Shestakova in Sagene for providing information and access to district documents. Thanks also to Kari Søndenå for help with the literature on language development. Financial support from the Norwegian Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Statistics Norway, Research Department, Postboks 8131 Dep., 0033, Oslo, Norway

    Nina Drange & Kjetil Telle

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  1. Nina Drange
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Correspondence to Nina Drange.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Additional robustness checks

As discussed in Sect. 4.1, it is inherently somewhat arbitrary how to define the comparison group. In our main definition of comparison area, we relied on information about the share of 5-year-old children with immigrant background in the district (age four). In Table 8, we also rank the 25 districts in Oslo based on other characteristics of the districts: the earnings of fathers, the children’s GPA and combined information from a number of covariates. The latter is the mean of predicted individual probabilities of being treated, where predictions are retrieved from a logit regression of living in the treatment area (in 1996) on all covariates included in our main regressions (cf. Sect. 4.2), where the sample includes both children with and without immigrant background (Table 9).

Table 8 City districts ranked by given characteristic of each district
Full size table
Table 9 Summary statistics, immigrant population in Oslo and the rest of Norway
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In Figs. 4 and 5, we report the effect estimates (with 95 % confidence intervals) for girls and boys when we vary which districts are included in the comparison group. In each of the four panels, 0 on the x-axis indicates that the comparison group comprises the top 10 non-treated districts in the corresponding column of Table 8. The number on the x-axis indicates how many more or fewer districts are included in the redefined comparison group. For example, the comparison group of our main sample includes the top 10 non-treated districts given in column 1 of Table 8. The effect estimate provided at 0 in the upper left panel of Fig. 4 is thus our main regression result (as given in Table 3, last row). Further, -3 indicates that we have removed the three districts in our comparison group with lowest share of children with immigrant background; and 3 indicates that we have added the three districts outside our comparison group with highest share of children with immigrant background.

The other three panels of Figs. 4 and 5 present similar robustness checks based on other definitions of the comparison group, cf. columns 2–4 in Table 8. We see from Fig. 4 that the standard errors tend to increase somewhat as the number of districts included in the comparison area declines, but, overall, the point estimate seems fairly robust to alternative definitions. For the boys (Fig. 5), the effect estimate is negative but typically small and never close to statistically significant.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Girls. Robustness of main result to variations in what districts are included in comparison group. Note: Comparison group redefined to be the top 10 non-treated districts in the indicated columns of Table 8 (at 0) and adding/dropping one to five of the districts closest in rank in the same column. The upper left panel (cf. column 1 of Table 8) thus replicates our main regression result (last row of Table 3) at x-axis value 0; and \(-5\) indicates that we have dropped the five districts (among the 10) with lowest immigrant background share from our comparison group; and 4 indicates that we have added the four districts (not among the 10) with highest immigrant background share to our comparison group

Full size image
Fig. 5
figure 5

Boys. Robustness of main result to variations in what districts are included in comparison group. Note: Comparison group redefined to be the top 10 non-treated districts in the indicated columns of Table 8 (at 0) and adding/dropping one to five of the districts closest in rank in the same column. The upper left panel (cf. column 1 of Table 8) thus replicates our main regression result (last row of Table 3) at x-axis value 0; and \(-5\) indicates that we have dropped the five districts (among the 10) with lowest immigrant background share from our comparison group; and 4 indicates that we have added the four districts (not among the 10) with highest immigrant background share to our comparison group

Full size image

Appendix 2: Details on the preschool intervention and further robustness checks

1.1 Pedagogical content

Norwegian preschools follow a national curriculum.Footnote 25 The curriculum describes what kind of subjects that should be covered and how the pedagogical content should be implemented. Among the requirements, the curriculum from 1995 stated that the child should develop its verbal communication to be able to communicate effectively.Footnote 26 In addition to the regular curriculum, the city district of Gamle Oslo developed a more comprehensive pedagogical plan aimed at reaching the immigrant children with their particular language and cultural background.Footnote 27

1.2 The intervention in Gamle Oslo (GO)Footnote 28

Initially, GO had a low coverage of preschool slots, and the city district was chosen to become a pilot project finances by The Norwegian Ministry for Children and the Family. The Ministry contributed with 10 million NOK yearly (autumn 1998 approximately 5 million), and the funding should cover the infrastructure required to increase the supply of new preschool slots as well as provide all children with preschool free of charge. The city district itself states in a report from 1999 that the objective was to provide all children with experience from preschool before they started school.Footnote 29 One of the new preschool centers was aimed at the new starters and offered part-time slots only.

1.3 The intervention in Grünerløkka (GL)

While GO already had their preschool expansion fully financed by the Ministry, two other city districts (GL and Sagene–Torshov) received funding for their preschool offer through another source (Municipality and another Ministry). GL started their project October 1, 1998.Footnote 30 All 5-year-old children in the district who were not already in preschool received the offer.Footnote 31 During the first year, the new children were integrated into regular preschool centers. This was funded on the idea that “language stimulation and the acquiring of social skills are best implemented across country origin/ethnicities and by teachers qualified to work with these particular challenges”.Footnote 32 According to the annual report on the intervention in the city district, families of several of the children who started preschool when receiving the offer, decided to increase the time the child attended to full time because they observed improvements in the child’s language development. Families with 5-year-old children that had not applied for a preschool slot were systematically approached by representatives from the city district in order to enhance participation. GL did, in line with GO, employ multilingual teachers to meet the new children.

1.4 Sagene–Torshov (ST)

ST did not start offering preschool free of charge until spring 1999.Footnote 33 Moreover, very few children seem to have started on the program, and families of children who did not apply for preschool seem not to have been approached by representatives from the city district (like they were in GO and GL). Indeed, documents from the budgetary process for year 2000 underlines that the program has not been successful in recruiting children: “The city district council note that the demand for the 5-year-old preschool offer has not been as expected. The city district council therefore suggests that an evaluation is implemented during the first quarter of 2000.”Footnote 34

Thus, the intervention in ST does not seem to be comparable to the ones undertaken in GO and GL, and it seems to have been largely unsuccessful in recruiting immigrant children to attend preschool. This indicates that there was no real intervention going on in ST, and we have therefore excluded ST from the analysis. In Appendix Table 10, we still report our main results (Table 4) with (i) ST excluded from the sample (as in Table 4), (ii) ST included in the treatment group and (iii) ST included in the comparison group. As we might expect, we see that the point estimate declines modestly when ST is included in the treatment group. Including ST in the comparison group, however, has a negligible impact on our main result from Table 4.

Table 10 Sagene/Torshov
Full size table

1.5 Stovner (SR)Footnote 35

Some time during the mid-1990s, the city district SR started offering a small-scale child care program for the children that were not attending the regular child care centers. The target group was children from immigrant families, but children from native families were also allowed to attend. Children from age 3 could participate, and they could continue until they started school. The idea was to facilitate the language learning process of children from immigrant families as well as to introduce their parents to the institutions in the city district before the children started school. The offer was not free, but parents paid a very low fee.

The small-scale offer amounted to 16 hours of child care every week. The groups would consist of approximately 18 children, and there would be two teachers in each group. The activities were slightly less intensive than in regular child care centers, with fewer excursions and fewer teachers per child. Approximately 60 children attended the small-scale program each year. As the city district of SR changed its borders in 2004, we have not been able to retain detailed written information on this small-scale child care program.

We have decided to include the city district in the comparison group because the program most likely was in place when the treatment districts (GO and GL) introduced their program in 1998. Our difference-in-differences analysis should hence handle the fact that SR had already implemented a possibly somewhat similar program.

In Appendix Table 11, we still report our main results (Table 4) with i) SR included in the comparison group (as in Table 4), ii) SR excluded from the sample and iii) SR included in the treatment group. We see that the point estimate changes modestly if we exclude SR from the sample or include SR in the treatment group.

Table 11 Stovner
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Appendix 3: Robustness on differences in maternal education

See Table 12 and Fig. 6.

Table 12 Dummy for mother finished high school as outcome variable
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Fig. 6
figure 6

Annual “Effect” estimates on maternal education using 1992 or 1988–1992 as cohorts of reference. Note: Difference from a regression model (including all control variables except parental education) in probability of mothers having completed high school between children in treated and comparison districts in given year. Solid lines show estimates from a model with 1992 as the cohort of reference, and dashed lines show estimates from a model with 1988–1992 as the cohorts of reference

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Drange, N., Telle, K. Preschool and school performance of children from immigrant families. Empir Econ 52, 825–867 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-016-1091-7

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