The Returns of an Additional Year of School: The Case of State-Mandated Kindergarten
New study examines the impacts of kindergarten on children’s long-run education and employment outcomes.
by Jade Jenkins and Maria Rosales-Rueda | August 29, 2019
The math and literacy skills of low-income children are a full year behind those of high-income children at the start of kindergarten. Skills of Black and Hispanic students are one-third to one-half years behind those of white students. And these gaps do not diminish by the time the children reach eighth grade.
A promising way to address these gaps in achievement is with public investments in early childhood education through programs such as pre-kindergarten. A mountain of research backs this approach — children begin learning at birth, learning and development occur rapidly during the early years, and early environments and educational opportunities play a central role in this development.
What is the result of this explosion in research over the past 20 years? Federal spending on early childhood education to the tune of $20.5 billion, with states like California adding another $4.7 billion in 2019. These investments have primarily gone toward expanding state pre-k programs. And that’s a good thing — the evidence across the board shows that pre-k programs consistently improve children’s school readiness in language, reading, and math skills upon kindergarten entry. The improvements are even stronger for Black and Hispanic children and for those from low-income families.
But what about the long-run impacts of state pre-k programs? Here the results are mixed, leaving policymakers and researchers with limited evidence as to how scaled-up state-level interventions like pre-k can influence children’s achievement and well-being in the long run.
Our study provides new evidence in this direction by examining the impacts of mandatory kindergarten laws on children’s long-run education and employment outcomes.
While in most states kindergarten began as a voluntary program, some states evolved to mandate kindergarten in the 1970s. This caused kindergarten attendance to go up by 12 percentage points. By comparing the long-term outcomes of children born in states with mandatory attendance to those with voluntary attendance, we found that children exposed to kindergarten mandates are more likely to go to college, earn more, and are less likely to be poor as adults.
These impacts are substantially larger for Hispanic and Black children. We find that Black and Hispanic children subjected to compulsory kindergarten saw a 5 percentage point increase in college completion relative to white children. They also experience a nearly 7 percent increase in wages and income relative to white children in the study. We also similar differential impacts on education and income for women (2 percentage points, 5.8%). This is extremely important given the presence of large education and earnings gaps between Hispanic, Black, and white adults, and between men and women.
These findings suggest that state investments in early childhood education enhance opportunities for education, earnings, and equity in the long-run.
The ideal outcome from a policymaker’s perspective is when programs that are universal — open to all — they benefit everyone, but benefit those who need it most even more. In both regards, the evidence here is clear. States truly are our democracy’s “petri dishes”, providing fertile ground for experimentation and innovation in policy, and are vital for creating opportunity for all children — especially in equalizing opportunities for children who have been historically underserved and underrepresented in higher education and in the top parts of the income distribution. When it comes to early childhood education, states that invest, and do so early on, will create more educated and financially independent citizens and reduce inequality in the long term.
The more important question is how early should states invest? Learning begins at birth. It accelerates up through and into kindergarten. If the policies we examined created universal educational opportunities for even younger children, we would expect our results to be much larger. In this respect, states should engage in a “race to the youngest” in the next generation of innovation in early childhood policy.
Jade Jenkins is an Assistant Professor at the UC Irvine School of Education. Maria Rosales-Rueda is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. Their new work was published this month in the ESSPRI Working Paper Series.
