How to Make the Most Out of Early Childhood Education: Lessons from Michigan's Transitional Kindergarten Program
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In partnership with the Michigan Department of Education, Dr. Christina Weiland and Dr. Brian Jacob plan to inform the policy debate over the design of early childhood education programs with the evidence on Michigan’s Transitional Kindergarten (TK) program.
The study would take advantage of a natural experiment to estimate the causal impacts of TK; children born between September 2 and December 1 each year are eligible to enroll if they reside in a school district that offers the program, offering a perfect opportunity to use regression discontinuity to estimate child-level impacts into elementary school. The team also plans to estimate impacts for important student subgroups; to examine impact variation across districts; and to identify district-level predictors of this variation. Finally, the team will conduct rigorous descriptive work, including surveys of programs and selected teachers to identify key elements of the program and variation across the state.
The team also includes Jordy Berne, Jasmina Camo, Tareena Musaddiq, and Samuel Owusu at the University of Michigan and Anna Shapiro at the University of Virginia.
Primary Investigator(s)
