Abbott Preschool Program

DOES PRE-K WORK?

Abbott Preschool Program

New Jersey’s Abbott Preschool Program is a statefunded, public preschool program free to all three- and four-year-olds in 35 of the state’s lowest-income school districts (now known as the “Former Abbott and Expansion Districts”). The program’s goal is to prepare children to enter school with the knowledge and skills necessary to meet New Jersey achievement standards.

Abbott is a mixed delivery system managed by the state’s public schools: as of 2015, about 44 percent of children were served in public school classrooms, and the other 56 percent attended programs in private centers and Head Start agencies that contract with local boards of education. The program served approximately 43,000 children in 35 districts during the 2014–15 school year, constituting almost one-quarter of all the state’s three- and four-year-olds and almost 85 percent of the three- and four-year-olds in the Abbott districts.

Children can attend Abbott for either one year beginning when they are four years old or two years beginning when they are three. The program runs on the public school schedule of six hours per day for a 180-day school year—a total of 1,080 program hours for one year and 2,160 hours for two years. The New Jersey Department of Education also coordinates with the state’s Department of Human Services to provide before- and after-school child care and summer programs for up to 10 hours per day and 245 days per year, which are free to low-income families.

Each classroom is staffed by a state-certified lead teacher and an assistant teacher, and the maximum class size is 15 children. Staff are provided with ongoing supervision and coaching and receive the same salary and benefits as public school teachers.

Study Description. In the fall of 2005, researchers implemented a two-part research project—the Abbott Preschool Program Longitudinal Effects Study—to study the Abbott pre-K program’s impact on children’s academic performance, both when they enter kindergarten and over the long term.

For the first part of the study, the researchers used an RDD to compare two groups of children. That group was composed of 766 children who had already attended Abbott pre-K and were entering kindergarten in fall of 2005. The first group included 451 children who had attended one year of preschool and 303 who had attended two years. This part of the study examined the impact of one and two years of the program on children’s academic skills when they were starting kindergarten. The second group was composed of 305 children who were just entering the pre-K program that fall because they had missed the age cutoff for the previous year.

For the second part of the study, the researchers used a propensity score matching design with children drawn from the original RDD. In a follow-up through second grade, they compared 754 children who had attended Abbott (451 attended for one year and 303 for two years) with a group of 284 children with similar demographic characteristics from the same kindergarten classrooms who had not attended Abbott. Subsequently, they conducted a follow-up through fifth grade, comparing 553 children who had attended Abbott with 201 children who did not attend.

The Bottom Line. Both the RDD and matching design parts of the study showed that children whose parents enrolled them in the Abbott program scored higher than their peers in language arts, literacy, and math at kindergarten entry. The RDD showed stronger impacts than the matching study, but whether gains are overstated by the RDD or understated by the matching study is unknown. The matching study also found somewhat larger gains at kindergarten entry for children who attended the program for two years rather than one.

Researchers were able to follow a little more than two-thirds of the original pre-K group into fifth grade: 553 of the 766 children who attended Abbott (72 percent) and 201 of the 305 children who did not attend (66 percent). Of those children, researchers found small to moderate gains on tests of basic academic skills. Children were also a few percentage points less likely to be retained in grade or placed in special education. By the end of fifth grade, children who had attended two years of pre-K had slightly larger gains in academic skills. However, they were slightly more likely to have been retained in grade or placed in special education than children who attended just one year of pre-K.