 Promoting School Readiness in Oklahoma: An Evaluation of Tulsa's Pre-K ProgramWilliam T. Gormley, Jr. and Ted Gayer Journal of Human Resources, 2005, vol. 40, issue 3 Abstract: Since the mid-1990s, three states, including Oklahoma, have established a universal pre-kindergarten (pre-K) program. We analyze the effects of Oklahoma’s universal pre-kindergarten (pre-K) program for four-year-olds on children in Tulsa Public Schools (TPS). The main difficulty with testing the causal impact of a voluntary pre-K program is that certain parents are more likely to select pre-K, and these parents might have other unobservable characteristics that influence the test outcomes of their children. Because TPS administered an identical test in September 2001 to children just beginning pre-K and children just beginning kindergarten, we can compare test outcomes of “old” pre-kindergarten students to test outcomes of “young” kindergarten students who attended pre-K the previous year. We find that the Tulsa pre-K program increases cognitive/knowledge scores by approximately 0.39 standard deviation, motor skills scores by approximately 0.24 standard deviation, and language scores by approximately 0.38 standard deviation. Impacts tend to be largest for Hispanics, followed by blacks, with little impact for whites. Children who qualify for a free lunch have larger impacts than other children. Date: 2005 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uwp:jhriss:v:40:y:2005:i:2:p533-558 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Journal of Human Resources from University of Wisconsin Press |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.