Jade Marcus Jenkins

With limited federal requirements for block grants, states have developed very different welfare policies, often with onerous recertification or reporting requirements, creating barriers to continuous program enrollment. Examined through the framework of Administrative Burden, our study examines how changes to burdensome policies in states’ Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) programs affect the length of children’s continuous enrollment in child care through the CCDF program, known as subsidy “spells.” We exploit state-level changes in three key policies during a 10-year period (2004–13) that capture administrative burden: (1) length of eligibility redetermination; (2) reporting requirements for income changes; and (3) grace period for care before termination. Using state fixed effects analyses in a sample of 38 states using data from the Administration for Children and Families and multiple other sources, we find that administrative burdens meaningfully and robustly affect continuous enrollment in CCDF; switching to a 12-month redetermination period, as required 2014 Child Care and Development Block Grant reauthorization, increases children’s continuous enrollment in CCDF care (i.e., state median spell length) by 30%. In contrast, requiring all changes in family income to be reported while enrolled in CCDF decreases spell length by 7%. Results underscore the importance of reducing administrative burdens related to compliance costs to better support low-income citizens, especially those with young children, and improve child development (with T. Nguyen).

As a result of a patchwork policy approach, many early childhood education programs combine funding from multiple streams coined as a “blended funding” model. However, little is known about how blended funding models relate to adherence to high-quality early childhood standards. Using organizational theory, this research explores how blended funding influences early childhood programs. Our study uses national survey data to first identify the prevalence of blended funding models and Quality Counts California data to describe the relation between blended funding models and program quality. Results suggest an overall positive association between a program’s number of funding streams and program quality measured by CLASS, ECERS, and QRIS scores. Findings highlight that early education programs often blend funding from Head Start, state pre-k, and additional streams, and offer support for resource dependency theory by identifying the positive relation between blended funding models and adherence to high-quality standards. (with J. Duer).

Policymakers at the federal and state levels aim to expand public early childhood education (ECE) programs, such as prekindergarten programs, with many states providing universal preschool to all age-eligible residents. Yet there exists limited evidence on how a universal ECE intervention like prekindergarten programs may influence the wellbeing of children in the long-run. In this paper, we examine the effects of state mandatory kindergarten requirements on long-run educational attainment and labor market outcomes. While in most states kindergarten began as a voluntary program, starting in the 1970s some states evolved to mandating kindergarten attendance. Several changes in state mandatory school entrance laws across states over time provide an opportunity to causally identify the influence of an additional year of ECE on important individual education and labor market outcomes, comparing states with mandatory attendance to those with voluntary attendance. We exploit this natural experimental design using data from the ACS 2008-2017. Findings indicate no overall impacts of mandatory kindergarten policies on educational attainment in adulthood, but substantial heterogeneous impacts, with women and Hispanic and Black individuals benefiting most in terms of educational attainment, poverty reduction, and income. Our findings indicate that states’ investments in universal early education pay off in the long run, and are equity enhancing. (with M. Rosales-Rueda).

A new concern in parents’ child rearing decisions is whether to enroll their child in kindergarten “on time”, when they are first age-eligible, or to delay their kindergarten entry, known as “redshirting”. The literature on delayed entry and relative age at kindergarten entry show mixed results, at least in part because of the selection bias related to school entry decisions. Our paper addresses this gap by providing the first causal estimates of the effects of redshirting on achievement outcomes by exploiting an exogenous policy change in the birthdate enrollment cutoff for public schools in North Carolina (NC). NC moved the birthdate cutoff from Oct 15^th to September 1^st for children entering school in the 2009-2010 school year. This change required children born in these six weeks of the year to delay kindergarten entry, which essentially forced parents to redshirt their children. We compare the outcomes of these “forced” redshirted children with the outcomes of their peers (from leading and trailing cohorts) using census-level administrative data with exact birthdates to identify the impact of redshirting on achievement outcomes and on students’ curricular determinations of giftedness or having a disability in third through fifth grades. We find that delayed kindergarten entry provides small benefits to students’ math and reading achievement, and makes children slightly less likely to be identified with a disability. We also find heterogeneous benefits for students who are low-income and non-white. (with C. K. Fortner).

This study examines the relation between school-level Response to Intervention (RTI) introduction and children’s disability status, cognitive development, and socioemotional development from kindergarten through fourth grade using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort 2011. Using child fixed effects analyses, our findings indicate that children who attended an elementary school that had introduced RTI are three percentage points less likely to be identified with a disability by the end of fourth grade compared with children attending schools that did not introduce RTI. We find heterogeneity in this association with respect to children’s disability status; RTI improves the interpersonal skills of children with disabilities but does not affect the outcomes of typically developing children. (with Z. Shea).