Objectives
Education research and policy debates have shifted away from the simple question of whether early childhood programs have an impact on children’s educational development and toward questions of how long does impact last. The recent national evaluation of Head Start has ignited fears that effects might “fade out” over time as children enter under-resourced classrooms populated by peers who had not benefitted from high-quality early childhood programs.
This study examines how investments in two early childhood initiatives in North Carolina – one that provides child, family and health services for 0-5 year olds and the other that funds pre-school slots for 4 year olds – affect the probability that children are placed into special education by the end of the elementary grades. This focus is of great policy significance both because of the secular rise in special education placements over time and because of the high costs of these programs. We test the hypothesis undergirding these programs that by making available high-quality preschool and other early childhood programs, special education placements will be reduced through grade five (Phillips & Meloy, 2012).
North Carolina has been a national leader in developing state-wide public initiatives designed to address childhood disadvantages. The Smart Start Initiative (SS) began in the early 1990s with the goal of improving the delivery and quality of childcare and preschool services for children between the ages of 0 and 5. Complementary to SS, the More at Four (MAF) preschool program was introduced in 2001 to provide access to high-quality preschool for disadvantaged four-year-olds.
Framework and Prior Research
From the perspective of public education, the financial benefits of reducing special education placements are substantial. The federal government provides a supplemental allocation for each student placed in special education, equal to 90 percent of the standard per pupil funding in a given year (Hibel, Farkas, & Morgan, 2010). Researchers estimate that the average per-pupil cost of special education is approximately double that of regular education (Harr, Parrish, & Chambers, 2008).
Developmental science indicates that some chronic disabilities are a function of an interaction between a child’s endowment and early environmental experiences (Caspi & Moffitt, 2006), suggesting that systematic intervention to alter early experiences could prevent later disability. We thus proceed with a heuristic model that optimal education policy attends to three different groups of young children who are at risk for disability. One group of children is born with chronic disabilities that require lifelong attention, such as physical handicaps and genetic abnormalities. Although long-term special education placement for these children is costly, these placements are both humane and cost-effective. A second group includes young children who are at risk for a later chronic disability that could be alleviated by early identification and educational treatment during preschool or grades K-2, followed by a transition out of special education before grade 3. Studies find that children who are placed early and then successfully transition out of special education continue to increase their gains in academic and intellectual functioning across later development (Daley & Carson, 2009; Innocenti, 2005). A third group of young children is also at risk for a special education diagnosis, but with high-quality early environmental, childcare, and educational experiences, the need for special education placement could be prevented altogether. The outcome measure in our study is special education placement at the end of third, fourth, and fifth grades, thus capturing program effects on the second and third groups without distinguishing between them.
