Preschool predicts positive outcomes for Boston children

Right place, right time

It’s hard to find families willing to sign up their children to participate in a research study where they might be randomly assigned to get free preschool…or not. Most families are understandably unwilling to take the risk of being placed in the group that doesn’t get to go to school. That’s just one of the reasons that very few studies of preschool impact can boast a true experimental design. And that’s a problem for researchers looking for evidence that participation in preschool can make a real difference in a child’s life. Looking at children who are already enrolled in preschool and comparing them to children who aren’t enrolled isn’t a fair comparison. All kinds of factors may already be creating differences between the two groups, including access, economics, demographics, family circumstances, and more. 

Researchers designing this longitudinal study were able to create an experimental design differently - by finding a place where it was already happening, naturally.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, a limited number of seats were available to 4-year-olds in Boston Public Schools’ preschool program. To try to get a seat, families entered their children’s names into a lottery. The way the lottery worked, children with similar backgrounds and from similar neighborhoods were assigned “tie-breaker” lottery numbers. Lottery winners won a seat in the program. Children whose numbers didn’t get picked did not. 

The result of this assignment method: the group of children who were ultimately offered seats looked awfully similar to the group of children who weren’t—creating the perfect (randomized) opportunity for researchers to compare outcomes between the group of children who got seats in the program and those who didn’t.

The benefits of a less-than-perfect model

Today, the preschool program offered by the city of Boston has earned itself a national reputation as a high-quality, research-based program. However, when the seven cohorts of children in this study were attending preschool, the experiences they had in school varied…a lot. Curriculum decisions at the time were made at the school level and few programmatic pieces were standard across the district. The program that researchers from MIT’s Blueprint Labs drew their data from between 1997 and 2003 was not representative of any one methodology or level of quality. 

Notably, this variability actually makes the study’s results more generalizable to a range of programs being offered across the country because results can’t be tied to the specifics of the program itself. It also means that the positive outcomes researchers identified may be underrepresented compared with what they might see if they started the study in Boston today after changes to the preschool program increased overall quality. So, the results below might be just the tip of the iceberg!

Preschool has long-lasting effects

With 20 years of data following 4,000 children from preschool to college, researchers had a chance to investigate lots of different student outcomes. They collected information on student attendance, test scores, behavior-related incidents, likelihood of taking the SATs, high school graduation rates, college enrollment, and more. They identified several significant differences in academic and behavioral measures between children who were offered preschool and children who weren’t.

“Attendance at a public preschool in Boston [increases] on-time college enrollment by 18%.”
- The long-term effects of universal preschool in Boston, The Quarterly Journal of Economics

Children who were given preschool seats (boys, especially) were much more likely to take the SATs once they got to high school, more likely to graduate from high school, and more likely to enroll in college after graduation. Lottery winners also had fewer absences and fewer suspensions in high school. 

Tools Takeaways

At Tools, we know how much social and cognitive learning happens when children have opportunities to learn alongside their peers before they go to kindergarten. The results of this research show that benefits extend far beyond kindergarten readiness and short-term academics, as has been shown previously. 

• States and districts considering whether to offer more or even universal, preschool are looking for evidence to show that it will have positive impacts on their communities, making the cost of implementation worth it. This study provides that kind of evidence. 
• This research points to lasting effects that can boost long-range life outcomes for children, increasing their chances of enrolling in college, which can in turn impact career choices, economic circumstances, where they choose to live and work, and more.
• It’s possible that the long-lasting positive effects seen here come from early social skill development or increased self-regulation, the biggest predictor of success in school and life. The preschool experiences captured during the years the Boston study took place were undefined and of variable quality. The lasting impacts of a research-based, high-quality preschool curriculum like Tools, that builds self-regulation into every single activity, are likely to be much greater!