Elsevier

Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Volume 62, 1st Quarter 2023, Pages 206-216
Early Childhood Research Quarterly

An analysis of the costs to provide high-quality and individualized emergent literacy support in pre-K classrooms

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2022.08.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Emergent literacy skills are a critical base for later academic success. Since gaps in reading skills appear as early as kindergarten, pre-K programs are compelled to increase the quality of whole class literacy instruction and to provide additional personalized support as needed. Given that additional personnel are needed to do both, there is a policy tension: hiring certified specialists that follow an evidence-based approach or utilizing a more affordable option that uses unpaid volunteer instructors where quality may be mixed. In this study, we explore an alternative emergent literacy model called the Minnesota Reading Corps (MRC) Pre-K Program and analyze its associated costs. The MRC Pre-K model places stipend AmeriCorps members into existing pre-K classrooms and integrates coaching and supervisory support from certified instructors, making enhanced whole-class literacy instruction and at-risk support possible. Using the ingredients method (Levin et al., 2018), we estimate that the average incremental cost per student of the MRC Pre-K Program is approximately $1,300 per year. We find that the majority of costs are borne by the MRC program (38%), with a much smaller portion of the costs borne by schools (25%), primarily from a reallocation of school staff time. These results demonstrate the opportunity of MRC with trained AmeriCorps members to increase early literacy support at a low-cost to schools.

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.

References (73)

  • R.E. Slavin et al.

    Effective programs for struggling readers: A best-evidence synthesis

    Educational Research Review

    (2011)
  • O. Al-Ubaydli et al.

    Scaling for economists: Lessons from the non-adherence problem in the medical literature

    Journal of Economic Perspectives

    (2017)
  • L.L. Bailet et al.

    Emergent literacy intervention for prekindergarteners at risk for reading failure: Years 2 and 3 of a multiyear study

    Journal of Learning Disabilities

    (2013)
  • N. Baydar et al.

    Early warning signs of functional illiteracy: Predictors in childhood and adolescence

    Child Development

    (1993)
  • C. Belfield et al.

    Using resource and cost considerations to support educational evaluation: Six domains

    Educational Researcher

    (2019)
  • A.E. Boardman et al.

    Cost-benefit analysis: Concepts and practice

    (2018)
  • M. Bruck

    Outcomes of adults with childhood histories of dyslexia

  • B. Byrne et al.

    Evaluation of a program to teach phonemic awareness to young children: A 2- and 3-year follow-up and a new preschool trial

    Journal of Educational Psychology

    (1995)
  • J.J. Carta et al.

    Multi-tiered systems of support for young children: Driving change in early education

    (2019)
  • J.S. Chall et al.

    The reading crisis: Why poor children fall behind

    (1990)
  • M. Chatterji

    Reading achievement gaps, correlates, and moderators of early reading achievement: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) kindergarten to first grade sample

    Journal of Educational Psychology

    (2006)
  • Standards for the economic evaluation of educational and social programs

    (2021)
  • J.M.V. Davis et al.

    The economics of scale-up (No. 23925; NBER Working Paper)

    (2017)
  • A. Diaconis et al.

    Process assessment: Minnesota Reading Corps PreK Program

    (2015)
  • D.K. Dickinson et al.

    Toward effective support for language and literacy through professional development

    Critical issues in early childhood professional development

    (2006)
  • R.H. Felton

    The development of reading skills in poor readers: Educational implications

  • D. Fuchs et al.

    What is intensive instruction and why is it important?

    TEACHING Exceptional Children

    (2014)
  • J.E. Gonzalez et al.

    Developing low-income preschoolers’ social studies and science vocabulary knowledge through content-focused shared book reading

    Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness

    (2011)
  • W.H. Greene

    Econometric analysis

    (2011)
  • C.R. Greenwood et al.

    Is a Response to Intervention (RTI) approach to preschool language and early literacy instruction needed?

    Topics in Early Childhood Special Education

    (2013)
  • J.B. Grossman et al.

    Making the most of volunteers

    Law and Contemporary Problems

    (1999)
  • T.R. Guskey

    What Makes Professional Development Effective?

    Phi Delta Kappan

    (2003)
  • C. Hafford et al.

    Process assessment: Minnesota Reading Corps

    (2013)
  • M.A. Hager et al.

    Volunteer management practices and retention of volunteers

    (2004)
  • B.K. Hamre et al.

    Learning opportunities in preschool and early elementary classrooms

  • F.M. Hollands et al.

    CostOut—The CBCSE cost tool kit

    (2015)
  • View full text