Dosage Effects in the Child-Parent Center PreK-to-3rd Grade Program: A Re-analysis in the Chicago Longitudinal Study

Highlights

• P-3 dosage is associated with better school outcomes than P-K, P-1, or P-2 dosage.

• Performance of the P-K group is not different from no intervention, K-3 or P-1 groups.

• Boys are driving the P-3 effects in social-emotional functioning.

• K-3 dosage is associated with 2 outcomes positively than P-K dosage for girls.

• Girls not participating in CPC are associated with higher rates of school mobility.

Abstract

Although substantial investments in early childhood intervention have continued, whether gains are sustained past kindergarten for routinely implemented programs is a critical research need. Using data from the Chicago Longitudinal Study (CLS; N = 1539; 50.3% female; 92.9% African American and 7.1% Hispanic), an on-going investigation of the Child-Parent Center (CPC) program for an inner-city cohort, this study investigates the effects of program duration from preschool to 3rd grade on school outcomes and whether the effects differ by gender. Regression analyses are conducted to compare the differences in outcomes among intervention groups. Inverse probability weighting (IPW) is used to adjust for potential attrition and selection biases. Findings indicate that relative to the preschool plus kindergarten (P-K) group, participation from preschool through third grade (P-3) is significantly associated with better academic functioning at both 3rd and 8th grades, better classroom adjustment at 3rd grade, lower rates of retention and school mobility, and few years of special education. Relative to the preschool through second grade (P-2) group, the P-3 group has significantly higher academic functioning in third grade. Results suggest that the P-3 dosage is associated with larger effects on academic functioning for girls and larger effects on social-emotional functioning for boys compare to the P-K dosage. Findings suggest that receiving up to third grade (P-3) of an early childhood education program have associated with persistent effects on developmental outcomes compared to the dosages of P-K. Multi-year programs have the potential to sustain early childhood gains and promote healthy development via improving academic functioning and school experiences.

Introduction

Early Childhood Education (ECE) intervention is recognized as an effective approach to narrow the achievement gaps by income and race/ethnicity (Burger, 2010). ECE can also serve as a policy lever to improve public health by improving social-emotional functioning in early childhood (Moore et al., 2015) and by reducing the growing health disparities resulting from variability in adulthood educational attainment (Muennig, 2015). Thus, ECE intervention is essential to improve health, human capital, and well-being across the life course (Black et al., 2017; Conti, Heckman, & Pinto, 2015). How gains from ECE are initiated and sustained have received increased attention because recent findings on the short-term effects of public ECE programs dissipate when children enter elementary school.

Early childhood landscape has changed considerably since 1965, and there are several points worth noting. First, the percentage of 3–5 year old children enrolled in ECE programs have increased significantly (See Appendix A). The increase was rapid between 1965 and 1983 for all children ages 3, 4, and 5; the increase continued but slowed down between 1983 and 1997. The percentages of children enrolled in ECE programs have been stable since 1997. Children from economically disadvantaged families receive priority for enrollment in many public pre-kindergarten programs, but the disparities in access to preschool by family income, race and ethnicity remain (Chaudry & Datta, 2017). Second, resources on ECE have increased significantly and there is more variation in funding sources. Federal and state investments in preschool have increased in the last decade. For example, the Preschool Development Grants awarded $463 million and state matching funds of $985 million in 2014 and 2015 (U.S. Department of Education, 2015) to provide children access to preschool. States spending on preschool rose from just $2.4 billion in 2002 to over $7.6 billion in 2017 (National Institute of Early Education Research (NIEER), 2018). Many preschools combine private with public dollars, and different sources of public dollars, such as Head Start, Child-care subsidies, and public pre-kindergarten funds, are combined as well (Chaudry & Datta, 2017). Finally, although the early childhood landscape has changed since 1965, the positive effects of preschool in academic outcomes have remained consistent over the past decades (Camilli, Vargas, Ryan, & Barnett, 2010; Cannon et al., 2017a; Karoly, Kilburn, & Cannon, 2005). For example, a recent study reported that preschool is positively associated with academic outcomes using two nationally representative U.S. cohorts 12 years apart from each other (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, ECLS-K 1998 and ECLS-K 2010) (Bassok, Gibbs, & Latham, 2018). While the landscape of the ECE has changed, findings from programs implemented decades ago can still provide insights on how gains from ECE are initiated and sustained.

Effects of ECE programs were examined in numerous studies. Short-term effects of preschool programs on school readiness are reported consistently in reviews and meta-analyses (Blok, Fukkink, Gebhardt, & Leseman, 2005; Burger, 2010; Camilli et al., 2010; Farran, 2000; Yoshikawa et al., 2013). However, there is limited evidence on the long-term effects of public programs (Karoly et al., 2005; Phillips et al., 2017). A meta-analysis of state prekindergarten programs by Gilliam and Zigler (2000) found that the most significant impacts were limited to kindergarten and first grade. More recent evidence, however, shows that gains can be sustained into middle school and beyond (Cannon et al., 2017b; McCoy et al., 2017; Meloy, Gardner, & Darling-Hammond, 2019). Findings of mixed (Cascio & Schanzenbach, 2013; Hill, Gormley, & Adelstein, 2015; Jung, Barnett, Hustedt, & Francis, 2013) and unsustained effects (Lipsey, Farran, & Hofer, 2015; Puma et al., 2012) raise concerns about the effectiveness of scale up efforts. Only a few studies of contemporary state prekindergarten programs have reported enduring effects into middle school (Barnett, Jung, Youn, & Frede, 2013; Dodge, Bai, Ladd, & Muschkin, 2017; Gormley, Phillips, & Anderson, 2018) and beyond (Schweinhart, Xiang, Daniel-Echols, Browning, & Wakabayashi, 2012). How gains from ECE programs are initiated, increased, and sustained continues to be a critical issue in the field.

Bailey, Duncan, Odgers, and Yu (2017) discussed three processes, skill-building, foot-in-the-door, and sustaining environments, that might explain whether the impacts of ECE programs persist or fade out. ECE quality itself was not addressed as an additional explanation. Skill-building and foot-in-the-door emphasize the right kinds of skills and capacities equip children to take advantage of an environmental opportunity or skill development while sustaining environments emphasizes the necessity of subsequent investments in sufficiently high-quality schools and other environmental contexts for persistent effects (Bailey et al., 2017). Sustaining environments is especially relevant because the fade out of positive effects has been attributed to the low quality of elementary school children attended subsequently (Benner, Thornton, & Crosnoe, 2016; Currie & Thomas, 2000; Phillips et al., 2017). Qualities of elementary school that are related to the persistence of preschool effects include the higher quality classroom environments during the elementary school years (Ansari and Pianta, 2018a, Ansari and Pianta, 2018b), attendance of high performing school (Zhai, Raver, & Jones, 2012), consistency of instructional practices (Mashburn & Yelverton, 2019), better teaching quality in early grades (Swain, Springer, & Hofer, 2015), and small class size and high levels of reading instruction in kindergarten (Magnuson, Ruhm, & Waldfogel, 2007).

For example, the benefits of Head Start spending were found to be larger when followed by access to better-funded public K-12 schools, and the increases in K-12 spending were more efficacious for poor children who were exposed to higher levels of Head Start spending during their preschool years (Johnson & Jackson, 2017). Elementary school quality indicators that are not related to persistence of preschool effects includes academic content coverage in kindergarten (Claessens, Engel, & Curran, 2014). Targeted teacher professional supports were found to mitigate fadeout between kindergarten and first grade but it was not mediated through classroom quality (Jenkins et al., 2018). It should be noted, however, that the contributions of all of the above processes and resource supports are likely to vary as a function of the quality of the preschool experience and the size of the initial effect (Reynolds, Ou, Mondi, & Hayakawa, 2017; Reynolds & Temple, 2019).

Given the overall evidence of both sustained and unsustained gains of large-scale ECE programs, it is crucial to learn from large-scale ECE programs that report positive outcomes in adulthood. Evidence on long-term effects of large-scale programs is sparse. Knowledge on the persistent impacts of ECE programs is timely given the focus of national and state efforts to increase access to ECE and pressing needs to understand how to sustain gains from preschool to lead to long-term effects. The present study re-examines the effects of such a large-scale public program, Child-Parent Center (CPC) Program, from a new perspective in the hope to provide insights into the persistent and fadeout effects of large-scale ECE programs. As one of the few public ECE programs that have reported long-term effects, findings from the present study will have implications on sustained ECE effects after third grade and beyond.

Although heterogeneous effects of ECE by race/ethnicity, dual language status, and low-income status have been evaluated (Duncan & Sojourner, 2013; Ladd, 2017; Yoshikawa et al., 2013), the heterogeneous effects of ECE by gender are under-investigated. Gender differences in education and behavior are well known. Studies have found that girls have more advanced reading skills, have advantages in social skills and classroom behavior, and obtain higher grades in school than boys (Buchmann, DiPrete, & McDaniel, 2008; Fortin, Oreopoulos, & Phipps, 2015; Loveless, 2015).

Schore (2017) uses a model of the psychoneurobiological mechanisms to underline the vulnerability of the developing male. Developing males are more vulnerable over a longer period of time to stressors in the social environment and toxins in the physical environment that negatively impact right-brain development because male brain matures more slowly than female brain in the prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal critical periods. Boys are more vulnerable early in life than girls, so they are more likely to be impacted by adverse life conditions than girls (Autor, Figlio, Karbownik, Roth, & Wasserman, 2015; Golding & Fitzgerald, 2017). This body of literature suggests that we might find substantial differences in the impacts of ECE by gender. In addition, the long-term effects of ECE might be promoted differently by gender. Examining boys and girls together ignores potentially large differences in treatment effects (García, Heckman, & Ziff, 2018). There is no consensus on whether ECE program impacts differ by gender in certain ways (García et al., 2018; Hill et al., 2015; Magnuson et al., 2016; Ou & Reynolds, 2006; Schweinhart et al., 2005). Nevertheless, given that ECE programs were found to benefit economically disadvantaged children more than their more advantaged peers (Ladd, 2017; Magnuson, Meyers, Ruhm, & Waldfogel, 2004), it is likely that boys might benefit more than girls because boys are more vulnerable early in life than girls. Gender differential effects of ECE are important from a developmental science perspective, as they will shed light on the mechanisms of ECE effects by gender and help to develop strategies to reduce gender gaps in education and health (Muschkin, Ladd, Dodge, & Bai, 2018).

The present study investigates whether the effects of the Child-Parent Center (CPC) program on academic functioning, social-emotional functioning in school, and school experiences between ages 9 and 16 differ by duration of participation and whether the effects differ by gender. Findings from the present study help identify a threshold of ECE dosage associated with positive effects in early adolescence and potentially leading to long-term effects.

The CPC program had a unique history in that it not only provided comprehensive services similar to Head Start but was the first early education program funded under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Opened in 1967 in four disenfranchised neighborhoods in need of revitalization, the program showed strong effects early on and was expanded over the next decade. The CPC programs have been implemented in Chicago although it might not have received as much attention as other state prekindergarten programs. The program history and elements are described in other reports (Reynolds, 2000; Reynolds, Hayakawa, Candee, & Englund, 2016). A summary of the main features is provided here.

CPC is a federally-funded, enriched early childhood education intervention that serves children from preschool through third grade (ages 3–9). CPC targets Title I children and offers comprehensive services. The CPC preschool program is followed by a full-day or part-day CPC kindergarten. The CPC school-age program is open to any child in the school in either first through second grades in 14 sites or first through third grades in 6 sites. All participants attended either CPC kindergarten or an alternative kindergarten program. The CPC intervention underscores the acquisition of basic skills in language arts and math through both teacher-directed and child-initiated activities. All teachers have bachelor's degrees and are certified in early childhood education. Major components of the intervention (preschool, kindergarten, and school-age) include center-based education; instructional supports; small class sizes; a parent program that includes parenting education, parent room activities, classroom volunteering, and home visitation; and health and nutrition services, including screening and diagnostic services, meal services and referral by program nurses. Parents are expected to participate in the program up to half of a day per week through various supported activities. The program's focus on the continuity of learning environments indicates that optimal development can be promoted through enriched experiences and settings created together by children, families, and schools.

Previous studies have revealed significant benefits of the CPC preschool participation on multidimensional well-being (Reynolds et al., 2007; Reynolds, Temple, Ou, Arteaga, & White, 2011; Reynolds, Temple, Robertson, & Mann, 2001), the high economic returns of the CPC program (Reynolds, Temple, White, Ou, & Robertson, 2011), and the mechanisms and processes of change from cognitive and motivational advantages to enhancements in social-emotional development (Reynolds & Ou, 2011; Reynolds, Ou, & Topitzes, 2004). The CPC program is a Preschool through third-grade (P-3) program that provides children both preschool and school-age services up to third grade. To receive the full dosage of services, children participate in the P-3 program from preschool to third grade. This enhances continuity in learning, defined as the consistency and predictability in environmental settings (Reynolds et al., 2017). However, the effects of the CPC program have not been examined via the P-3 framework. Effects of the CPC program have been examined separately by preschool and school-age program, and dosage of the CPC program has been examined by extended participation (4–6 years) and less extended participation (0–3 years) (Reynolds et al., 2001; Reynolds et al., 2007; Reynolds, Temple, Ou, et al., 2011). Dosage of CPC preschool have been examined by years of preschool participation (Arteaga, Humpage, Reynolds, & Temple, 2014; Reynolds, 1995). Researchers suggest that providing children with continuity of service from preschool through third grade (P-3) will sustain the gains in preschool and lead to better developmental outcomes (Benner et al., 2016; Reynolds, Magnuson, & Ou, 2010). Yet empirical evidence on the value-added of preschool to 3rd grade (P-3) continuity is scant. The present study examines the dosage of the CPC program on the P-3 framework for the first time.

The conceptual frameworks behind the CPC P-3 program are ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1989) and psychosocial risk and protective factors (Rutter & Rutter, 1993). They specify that developmental outcomes are enhanced as a function of supportive and protective contexts and behaviors at multiple levels of influence. The concept of developmental continuity or environmental maintenance of development is a prominent feature, as the effects of early childhood experiences are magnified as they increase in duration and intensity (Ramey & Ramey, 2019). An additional component of the theories is a cumulative advantage and the similar concept of developmental cascades (Masten & Cicchetti, 2010), which hypothesizes that early influences multiply competencies in one domain “spill over” or are transmitted to other domains across time, culminating in positive long-term outcomes.

Three levels of system are involved in the CPC P-3 program: child, family, and school. Characteristics at each level can be influenced by the CPC program. Then those characteristics interacting with other characteristics at different levels can function as risk or protective factors of developmental outcomes. For example, the CPC program might have different effects on child's cognitive and social competence (child level), parental involvement (family level), and school mobility (school level) depending on the dosage, and the CPC effects might multiply when the effects at different domains/levels interact. Understanding the dosage effects of the CPC program on school outcomes can lead to more effective prevention programs by catalyzing cumulative advantages or “cascades” that promote positive development.

This study is unique in several respects. First, the CPC program is the only large-scale public program that reported long-term effects into adulthood (Reynolds, Ou, & Temple, 2018; Reynolds, Temple, Ou, et al., 2011), and the CPC program is still implemented nowadays. Re-examining the CPC effects in a P-3 dosage perspective provides a new look at the effectiveness of the CPC program, and it also provides insights on how gains from early childhood experiences are likely to be sustained. Second, social-emotional functioning in school is examined. Understanding the social and emotional behavior of children is the key to understand behaviors into adulthood (Jones, Greenberg, & Crowley, 2015). Third, differential effects by gender are examined. Previous studies found significant interaction effects between gender and CPC preschool participation in educational attainment favoring boys (Ou & Reynolds, 2006). However, whether dosage effects vary by gender have not been examined. Additional studies on gender differential effects will shed light on the potential pathways of the long-term effects of the CPC program. Fourth, the present study uses data from a cohort of over 1400 participants with substantial variability in duration of participation from ages 3 to 9. Most previous studies have small sample sizes and were not sufficiently powered to assess dosage effects. Finally, the study sample is a cohort of low-income minority children from high-poverty contexts. Findings provide insights into narrowing achievement gaps by family income and race/ethnicity and promoting healthy development.