Preschool Development Grant had positive impacts on children’s early academic skills, with the strongest impacts on the most vulnerable children.

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In late 2014, the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) was awarded a four-year federal Preschool Development Grant to support the expansion of high-quality early childhood education to high-needs communities, with particular focus on serving children from low- and middle-income families.

The Massachusetts Preschool Expansion Grant (PEG) model is built around a collaborative public-private delivery system. PEG requires shared governance between local school districts and EEC-licensed programs, with classrooms run by the community-based programs. The 48 PEG classrooms provide free prekindergarten for low income four-year-olds (i.e., age four as of September 1 of the incoming school year) who will be eligible for kindergarten in the upcoming fall and who, with some exceptions, have not yet attended a formal child care program (licensed center-based or family child care). The PEG model is intended to achieve a high level of quality in instructional and emotional supportiveness, classroom organization, and learning resources, while also being responsive to local needs.

Each PEG community was encouraged to design a program that adhered to certain quality requirements, with a goal of ensuring consistently high quality learning environments while also allowing for local variation :

1: PEG Model Quality Elements 1 A collaborative local governance structure designed to oversee implementation and work on systems coordination for all children in the community; 2 Full-day, full-year programming (at least 8 hours/day, 12 months/year); 3 A maximum class size of 20; 4 A maximum child-teacher ratio of 10:1; 5 A curriculum/a aligned with the MA Preschool Standards and Guidelines (curriculum/a may vary by grantee); 6 The use of Teaching Strategies Gold® as a formative assessment tool; 7 One educator in each classroom with a bachelor’s degree in a relevant field; 8 Salaries for lead educators commensurate with comparable positions in public schools within the respective community; 9 Joint professional development training and coaching for teaching staff, and other supports for planning and implementation of curriculum, in collaboration with the LEA; 10 Family engagement activities, including support for kindergarten transition and resources about child development; 11 Comprehensive services including services addressing health, mental health, and behavioral needs for all families; 12 Inclusion of students receiving special education support; and 13 Efforts to build linkages with services for children from birth to age 3 as well as connections with elementary schools. Source: Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care

 By the end of the grant period (2018–19), PEG centers are also expected to attain the highest rating (Level 4) in the Massachusetts Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) or Level 3 and National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) accreditation. To study the impacts of PEG on children’s school readiness, a rigorous impact evaluation, using an age cutoff regression discontinuity design (RDD), was conducted to examine whether children who had attended a PEG program had greater skills at kindergarten entry compared with similar children who did not attend PEG. This type of study design involves comparing the skills of children who are very close to one another in age and development and differ only in their exposure to the PEG program.

The impact evaluation answers the following research questions: · What is the impact of the PEG program on children’s early academic skills (literacy and math)? · What is the impact of the PEG program on children’s language development (vocabulary)? · What is the impact of the PEG program on children’s executive function skills?

The study compared the early academic and executive function skills for students who attended PEG classrooms in the 2016-17 school year versus the skills of students who had missed PEG’s age cutoff and had not spent the year in PEG (and were just entering PEG classrooms in the 2017-18 school year). A total of 1,107 children were included in the analysis sample: 582 in the treatment group (PEG enrollees in the 2016-17 school year) and 525 in the control group (children who subsequently enrolled in PEG in the 2017-18 school year). Both groups were similar in terms of gender and home language.

Children were assessed individually by trained assessors, typically in a single assessment visit lasting no more than 45 minutes. All assessments included were administered to children in English, regardless of the students’ home language or English proficiency. The study used standardized measures to assess children’s early literacy and early math skills, and early vocabulary, and a nonstandard but widely used measure assessed children’s executive function skills.

Assessors used the following battery of measures: · Early Literacy. Children’s early literacy skills were measured with the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Cognitive Abilities: Letter-Word Identification Subtest (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001; WJ-III). · Early Math. Children’s early mathematics skills were measured using the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Cognitive Abilities: Applied Problems Subtest. · Vocabulary. Children’s receptive vocabulary knowledge was measured with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Fourth Edition (Dunn & Dunn, 2007). · Executive Functioning. Children’s executive functioning was measured with the Hearts & Flowers Task (previously called the Dots Task; Davidson et al., 2006; Diamond et al., 2007), which measures children’s ability to remember rules and to inhibit their response when applying those rules under different contexts.

To estimate the effect of PEG, the study ran regression models that predicted children’s scores from PEG participation controlling for child age relative to the birthdate cutoff, the interaction of treatment and child age relative to the cutoff (both critical in age-cutoff RDD models), child gender, home language, and prior child care exposure and that accounted for the clustering of children in PEG classrooms. The study found impacts on children’s early literacy and early math achievement (effect sizes of .92 and .45 standard deviation units, respectively) and on their vocabulary development (effect size of .21 standard deviation units).

On all three measures of early academic performance, PEG had a positive and statistically significant impact on children’s achievement. The largest impact was seen for early literacy skills, and the smallest effect was for vocabulary. On executive function, the children who attended PEG scored higher than the children who had not yet attended PEG, but the impact was not significant. Exploratory analyses indicated that the impact of PEG was stronger for children in homes where English was not the primary language and for children who had not had prior child care exposure. PEG did not appear to be more or less effective for children of either gender.