An analysis of the costs to provide high-quality and individualized emergent literacy support in pre-K classrooms
Introduction
Decades of research indicates that establishing literacy competencies early in life is foundational for learning in all subjects (Chall, Jacobs, & Baldwin, 1990). Early reading difficulties can persist during school years (Baydar, Brooks-Gunn, & Furstenberg, 1993; Felton, 1998) and into adulthood (Bruck, 1998). However, numerous children today arrive to kindergarten lacking these emergent literacy competencies (Chatterji, 2006; Zill & West, 2001). Recent studies indicate that gaps in reading skills are already present when children enter school, and these gaps persist and even widen as children progress through school (Reardon, 2011; Zill & West, 2001). By fourth grade, two in three students fall below the proficient level of reading competency, while this statistic is four in five for low-income students (NAEP, 2020).
To address this challenge, emergent literacy tutoring interventions at the pre-K level are being developed and undergoing expansion (e.g., Bailet, Repper, Murphy, Piasta, & Zettler-Greeley, 2013; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1995; Piasta et al., 2020; Gonzalez et al., 2011; Kelley, Goldstein, Spencer, & Sherman, 2015; Neuman & Kaefer, 2013; Phillips et al., 2016). The purchase price and necessary personnel required to implement these programs are barriers to constrained education budgets, especially in under-resourced schools serving at-risk populations where the level of need for early literacy support is high (Kagan, 2009).
An alternative, less costly approach is to mobilize resources from the community. Tutoring interventions for elementary grades enlisting community tutors or teacher's aides (TAs) have shown improved reading outcomes (Ritter, Barnett, Denny, & Albin, 2009; Wasik, 1998) and reduced cost burden (Jacob, Armstrong, Bowden, & Pan, 2016). However, programs that rely on community service are often difficult to bring to scale due to challenges both in maintaining a supply of high-quality tutors for the long-term (Grossman & Furano, 1999; Hager & Brudney, 2004) and in training, recruiting, placing, and monitoring community members (Kraft & Falken, 2021).
Early literacy tutoring programs, such as the Minnesota Reading Corps (MRC), now exist to address the costs of establishing and managing a tutoring program and to provide evidence-based literacy support in early education. Essentially, these programs are addressing the quantity-quality trade-off by supplying quality personnel and educational support at a low cost to the school. In this study, we examine the economic costs of MRC and illustrate how the costs to the school of providing literacy support are offset by relying on community tutors and providing coaching and supervisory support from certified instructors as a model that can potentially achieve quality at scale.
Importantly, MRC improves pre-K students’ emergent literacy competencies at scale (Markovitz, Hernandez, Hedberg, & Silberglitt, 2015). The program relies on community tutors who are trained to provide early literacy support and coached regularly in the classroom. In this paper, we examine the costs that correspond to the effects of the MRC program in order to better understand the cost-effectiveness of this approach and to provide evidence on the resource side of the quality-quantity dilemma in supporting early literacy.
The following section reviews the importance of supporting literacy in preschool. Then, we describe the MRC approach and provide methods and findings from our analyses.
Section snippets
Supporting emergent literacy
Promoting emergent literacy development and addressing early setbacks in mastering competencies is critical (Cabell, DeCoster, LoCasale-Crouch, Hamre, & Pianta, 2013; Dickinson & Brady, 2006; Early et al., 2010; Hamre & Pianta, 2007), but doing so at the pre-K program level usually implies a substantial cost burden to hire trained staff to provide high-quality teaching and personalized support. Programs that promote early literacy attainment focus on the five emergent literacy competencies:
Description of the program: the Minnesota Reading Corps Pre-K program
The Minnesota Reading Corps (MRC) Pre-K program was designed by literacy experts at Reading & Math, Inc., the host organization responsible for recruiting, training, coaching, and placing AmeriCorps members into already established pre-K classrooms in public preschools, community-based programs, and Head Start centers across Minnesota. MRC AmeriCorps members provide high-quality supplemental and individualized support to the pre-K classrooms in which they are placed by providing one-on-one or
An effective approach: reviewing prior research
The Minnesota Reading Corps (MRC) Pre-K program has been found to be effective in improving pre-K students’ emergent literacy skills (Markovitz et al., 2015). The 2013-2014 evaluation used the Individual Growth and Development Indicators (IGDI) as outcome measures (McConnell, McEvoy, & Priest, 2002) to assess the following domains: picture naming (a measure of oral language development), sound identification (a measure of letter-sound correspondence), rhyming (a measure of phonological
Rationale
Given the evidence of effectiveness of the MRC pre-K literacy program, and its unique hybrid model using both AmeriCorps members at the classroom level and certified instructors at a coaching and mentoring level, it is important to examine the economic costs required to deliver the program.
Based on previous literature on the efficacy of tutoring interventions (e.g., May et al., 2013) and their ability to reduce cost burden (e.g., Jacob et al., 2016), there is reason to believe that such a
Methods
We employ the ingredients method (Levin, McEwan, Belfield, Bowden, & Shand, 2018) to estimate costs that correspond to the positive effects of the MRC Pre-K program found by Markovitz et al. (2015). As such, our cost estimation is retrospective and focuses on the cost as it was implemented in the 2013-2014 school year (Belfield & Bowden, 2019).
The ingredients method draws upon the economic concept of opportunity cost, which means that we value all resources used to obtain the desired program
Findings
In this section, we present estimates of the incremental cost of the Minnesota Reading Corps Pre-K Program relative to “business-as-usual,” as well as the weighted average per student cost by type of ingredient. We also examine the costs borne by the MRC program (i.e., Reading & Math, Inc.), schools, AmeriCorps and their members, and families. To provide insight into the more resource-intensive components of MRC, we examine the costs of coaching and training by internal and master coaches and
Uncertainty and sensitivity analyses
In cost analyses, it is important to examine sources of uncertainty in estimates and test the robustness of results to assumptions via sensitivity analysis. Following Boardman, Greenberg, Vining, & Weimer (2018), we perform a series of parameter variation tests on the key assumptions that are most likely to significantly impact our results and test a range of plausible values. We then combine these sensitivity tests into “best case” (lowest cost) and “worst case” (highest cost) scenarios to
Discussion & conclusion
This study examined the resources used in providing the MRC Pre-K program during the 2013-2014 school year that was evaluated for impacts on emergent literacy outcomes for three-, four-, and five-year-olds for a sample of 25 pre-K sites. It contributes to the literature on early childhood education as one of the few rigorous cost analyses on a supplemental pre-K literacy program conducted alongside effectiveness research. The effectiveness evaluation found positive impacts that did not vary
Author credits
Credits: Atsuko Muroga, Maya Escueta, and Viviana Rodriguez (Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal Analysis, Writing - Original Draft, Visualization); Brooks Bowden (Supervision, Conceptualization, Methodology, Funding Acquisition, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing).
Declaration of interest statement
This research was funded by ServeMinnesota, Minnesota's administrator for federal AmeriCorps funds. The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not reflect the funder.
Acknowledgments
The authors appreciate the information and support provided by the Minnesota Reading Corps program team. We are also grateful to the pre-K centers and schools in Minnesota, their staff, Internal Coaches, and the AmeriCorps members serving in the schools for welcoming our team and sharing their time during the site visits, without which we would not have been able to complete this study. This study was greatly enhanced by comments from the reviewers, discussants, and participants of the 2018
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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