By Richard P. Boyle, Ph.D.
UNM Institute for Social Research
Since 1999-2000, the Institute for Social Research at the University of New Mexico has been following children who had attended a public preschool as they entered kindergarten and then moved on through Albuquerque Public Schools.
At the same time, APS (along with other New Mexico school districts) changed from half-day to full-day kindergarten, introducing the full-day program gradually over a five-year period.
The first group of schools, which were most at-risk and served the lowest-income neighborhoods, began full-day kindergarten in 2000-2001, with the second (next most at-risk) group starting in 2001-2002. All these schools continued the program in subsequent years, so we can look at successive groups of children experiencing full-day kindergarten.
This database makes it possible to compare the relative impacts of preschool and full-day kindergarten as the children move through the elementary grades.
In 2002-2003 APS began assessing language and reading development at the beginning as well as the end of kindergarten. Using these test scores, any benefits attributable to preschool should be evident at the start of kindergarten, while improvements between the beginning and end of kindergarten can be credited to full-day kindergarten. The children who entered kindergarten in 2002-2003 are therefore the best group to study.
Most of these children reached third grade in 2005-2006, so we can follow their reading scores from kindergarten to third grade. At the start of kindergarten, children who had attended public preschool scored nine percentiles above other low-income children who had not attended preschool.
So the evidence is that the preschools (Head Start, the city of Albuquerque's Child Development Centers, and the APS Even Start program) delivered children to kindergarten with improved language and reading development.
Then, between the beginning and end of kindergarten, children in the 2002-2003 group who attended full-day kindergarten improved their reading skills considerably, moving up an average of 15 percentiles by the end of the year. So the evidence is that full-day kindergarten programs were doing their job, sending children on into first grade with reading skills that had caught up with the average for all APS kindergarteners.
The problem, however, is that as these children proceed through the elementary grades their reading scores decline steadily. By third grade almost all the initial benefits of full-day kindergarten disappear. Preschool children maintain a slight advantage over their non-preschool peers, although by less than half the margin they had at the start of kindergarten.
So while both preschool and full-day kindergarten programs were successful during the time they operated, most advances in achievement appear to have washed away by grade four.
This is not unique to Albuquerque. Throughout the nation, studies often find that the contributions of early childhood programs to reading or math achievement do not last. The big benefit, and economic payoff, of preschool lies in "non-cognitive" outcomes like graduating from high school rather than dropping out, or avoiding involvement with the criminal justice system.
But why do achievement scores decline? For one thing, our research shows that the declines are steeper in schools located in the lowest-income neighborhoods. These schools have an enormous amount of momentum to overcome in their efforts to keep their children on track.
New Mexico has invested generously in early childhood programs, and these programs work. But it is a shame not to benefit from the cognitive as well as the non-cognitive fruits of this investment.
To do this, we need to figure out how to create elementary schools that sustain what early childhood programs have begun. Only if the benefits last will New Mexico rise from the bottom in national comparisons of academic achievement at grades four and eight.
Beating on "failed schools" is not likely to help, but it is time to seriously consider how to improve elementary education, in general and especially in low-income schools where problems are concentrated.
Full report available at http://isr.unm.edu/cer/
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