A decade-long effort to improve early-childhood education in California produced dramatic improvement in students' later academic performance and helped to narrow the academic gap between high-income and low-income students, according to a new report authored at UC Berkeley.
When California created new paths to state preschools and prekindergarten, students who went through those programs showed much higher achievement levels by third and fourth grade - almost a year higher in reading and eight months higher in mathematics, compared to students who did not attend.
The bottom line is that the expanded prekindergarten programs helped to prepare young students to be better learners - and the effect lasted for years as they advanced in school. When the state also invested more money to improve teaching and learning programs in elementary schools, the gains were larger and more persistent, said authors Rucker Johnson, a professor and nationally influential researcher at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, and Austin Land, a researcher and policy analyst at the Berkeley School of Education.
"This combination of public preschool at 3 and 4 years of age dramatically helped young children build stronger reading and math skills," Johnson said. "The cumulative effect of investing in the early years matters. Children from low-income families also saw additional gains when their elementary schools received more funding."
The first-of-its-kind report, "Who Benefits From Universal Prekindergarten?" was released today (Thursday Oct. 22) in advance of a Sacramento briefing for California education policymakers. The briefing was organized by the Learning Policy Institute, Early Edge California and UC Berkeley's Equity and Excellence in Early Childhood (E3C), a campus-wide research and policy initiative.
The researchers tracked the educational performance of some 1.6 million students who were kindergarten-age between 2011 and 2014, at a time when preschool and "transitional kindergarten" options were expanding and the state was making historic new investments in education. The researchers evaluated student performance as kids advanced to third and four grades at roughly 6,100 elementary schools in 935 California school districts, ending in 2019, just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The positive impacts were striking:
- Children in pre-K programs shaped by California's 2010 Kindergarten Readiness Act were able to attend state preschools at age 3 and transitional kindergarten at age 4. By third and fourth grades, they achieved reading levels nearly 11 months more advanced and mathematics levels nearly eight months better when compared with earlier classes.
- The benefits of transitional kindergarten were greatest for children from low-income families whose parents spoke English. They were about seven months ahead in third grade math and reading, relative to similar children who did not attend the prekindergarten program.
- For children from low-income families whose parents did not speak English, those who attended state preschool and then transitional kindergarten achieved roughly a half-year of learning gains. The effects were more modest for those who did not first attend preschool, with learning-level gains in reading and math of just a couple of months. However, the authors emphasized the students went through the California early education system at a time when the state stressed English-language learning and restricted support for foreign language students.
- A $1,000-per-pupil increase in state funding for preschool programs led to a learning-level gain of almost a quarter-year in math and reading three to four years after kindergarten.
Easing challenges for younger learners
Before the reforms that began in 2010, the youngest kindergarten students faced significant disadvantages. For admission to kindergarten, students had to turn 5 by Dec. 2, which meant that students born in September, October and November were only 4 when they began kindergarten.
The elementary school classrooms can serve as charging stations for sustaining and amplifying the pre-K gains.
Rucker Johnson
Even if these young kindergarteners had had a year of preschool, "they would have gone into kindergarten and they would've been very young for their grade and developmentally much younger than their peers," Land said. "The effect would be even more pronounced for young lower-income students compared to peers from higher-income homes."
Affluent families could choose to "redshirt" their kids, sending them to kindergarten a year later, with an extra year of maturity. Low-income families often could not afford that, the authors said, because the parents were working or they couldn't afford preschool.
But starting in 2009, the state enacted a series of major reforms that were advanced by both Republican and Democratic governors and lawmakers.
First, the state streamlined and expanded its system of preschools that served students aged 3 and 4, from low- and middle-income households. Soon the share of eligible children enrolling in state preschools at age 3 rose from 8% to about 20%.
The Kindergarten Readiness Act, passed a year later, shifted kindergarten admission rules so that students had to be 5 by Sept. 1. The law also created transitional kindergarten to help prepare younger students for kindergarten. In effect, California's K-12 school system was adding a new class - pre-K - and creating one of the most ambitious, innovative early childhood learning systems in the U.S.
For students, Land said, the advantage seemed clear: Those with two years of pre-K experience would arrive at kindergarten more comfortable in the classroom, more confident and better able to absorb the lessons conveyed even in play.
At about the same time, California lawmakers approved an infusion of new funding into the state's K-12 schools. By the 2022-23 state budget, funding for California public schools was nearly triple the levels in 2011, the authors said.
Vast potential for continued progress
Public investment in prekindergarten programs has been perhaps the fastest-growing sector in U.S. education, Johnson said, and that means the California results will likely be studied by educators and policymakers nationwide.
"Just since 1980, the number of states funding pre-K has risen from seven to 44 states, plus the District of Columbia," he explained. "State programs now serve more than 1.5 million children."
Some California school districts have struggled to keep up with the dramatic changes. But enrollments are growing, and Johnson and Land say the conditions are in place to support continued improvement in student learning, and to continue closing learning gaps linked to income, language and race.
For example, the barriers to providing proper support for students who don't speak much English have largely been removed. And the ramp-up of universal transitional kindergarten, which started in 2022, could benefit every 4-year-old child in the state.
Still, Johnson said, "to create a whole new grade - you can't do that without raising up a whole new cadre of teachers who understand early child development. And so that's a part of what is going to be requisite for these patterns of positive gain to be realized as we move things to a higher level of scale."
That raises a point that Johnson and Land see as critical: To achieve continued improvement and progress, policymakers must take a comprehensive view of education. The gains achieved in robust pre-K programs could fade away unless the learning is reinforced continually, at every subsequent grade.
"The gains we identified in our research were largest and most durable in well-resourced elementary schools," Johnson said. "The elementary school classrooms can serve as charging stations for sustaining and amplifying the pre-K gains, or they can alternatively lead to an erosion or a fade-out of the effects."
The new report draws from a detailed study commissioned by Stanford University and supported by the Learning Policy Institute, W.T. Grant Foundation and the Ballmer Group of Los Angeles. The Learning Policy Institute, based in Palo Alto, conducts and communicates independent research to improve education policy and practice.
