Is skill heterogeneity in kindergarten classrooms associated with the persistence of pre-K gains? Evidence from the IES early learning network.

• Students' early learning gains from Pre-K often converge with similar students who did not attend Pre-K in early elementary school. • We find that skill heterogeneity does indeed moderate student learning gains over the kindergarten year, particularly for students who attended Pre-K. • We provide evidence that Pre-K attendees scoring higher at the beginning of kindergarten, relative to the average score in their classroom, made smaller achievement gains throughout their kindergarten year. • These findings have important implications for Pre-K effectiveness research and the educational environments that subsequently sustain or constrain Pre-K's longitudinal effects Students' gains from Pre-K converge with similar students who did not attend Pre-K in elementary school. One theory for convergence is that students who attend Pre-K enter kindergarten classrooms that are skill heterogeneous, and these students are positioned near the top of the classroom skill distribution. Kindergarten teachers, however, focus their instruction on students toward the bottom of the skill distribution, which generates observed convergence. We explore this theory by analyzing data from six rural school districts in North Carolina (N = 655, aged 4–6, 51 % female, 77 % non-White). We find mixed evidence in support of this hypothesis. Our measures of kindergarten classroom heterogeneity were inconsistently related to skill convergence based on both the outcome measure and the specific construction of the heterogeneity measure, but all significant associations were in the predicted direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]