Pre-K benefits faded in Tennessee — but not for the reasons you think, says new study

August 02, 2019
Chalkbeat

When a landmark study found that children in Tennessee’s pre-K program eventually fared worse than peers who didn’t participate, the surprising results unleashed a new wave of research to understand why.

Now the latest examination of the same program suggests that the pre-K program may not be the culprit. Rather, it’s what those students experience in kindergarten, first, second, and third grade that helps determine whether early academic gains will continue or flicker out.

The early findings, released last month by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, says pre-K students maintained their advances in math and reading through at least the third grade if exposed in the early grades to highly effective teachers and a high-quality school.

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Mentioned Publications

Francis A. Pearman

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Matthew Springer

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Mark Lipsey

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Mark Lachowicz

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Dale Farran

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Walker Swain

The sustaining environments thesis hypothesizes that PreK effects are more likely to persist into later grades if children experience high-quality learning environments in the years subsequent to PreK. This study tests this hypothesis using data from a statewide PreK randomized experiment in Tennessee that found positive effects at the end of PreK that did not persist past kindergarten. These data were combined with teacher observation and school-level value-added scores from Tennessee’s formal evaluation system to determine whether positive effects of PreK persisted for the subgroup of students exposed to higher-quality learning environments between kindergarten and 3rd-grade. Neither exposure to highly effective teachers nor attending a high-quality school was sufficient by itself to explain differences in achievement between PreK participants and non-participants in 3rd-grade. However, this study found evidence that having both was associated with a sustained advantage for PreK participants in both math and ELA that lasted through at least 3rd-grade. Notably, however, very few children were exposed to high-quality learning environments after PreK, suggesting that maximizing PreK investments may require attending to the quality of learning environments during PreK and beyond.

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