Putting 'Pre' in 'School': The Institutionalization of Preschool in Elementary Schools

This study examines whether the physical location of Pre-K programs--whether in elementary school buildings or stand-alone centers--leads to differences in student outcomes in elementary school. Over the past several decades, public investment in Pre-K programming has burgeoned. According to the National Institute for Early Education Research, 32 percent of all four-year-olds in the United States attend state-funded Pre-K programs (Barnett et al., 2016). As Pre-K programs are taken to scale across the United States, a key concern is ensuring that programs are high-quality and provide significant and persistent effects on children's school readiness and early schooling outcomes. Researchers are working to identify the components that predict high-quality and effective Pre-K programs, including components such as teacher credentials and measures of classroom quality, so that policies can better promote high-quality programs. Unfortunately, research to date has revealed few consistent and reliable proxies for high-quality Pre-K programs. My dissertation seeks to further investigate potential components of high-quality Pre-K programs by studying the "physical location of Pre-K settings"--namely, whether or not Pre-K programs are located in elementary school buildings or stand-alone centers. In order to provide evidence on the role of the physical location of Pre-K programs on differences in student outcomes in elementary school, I use a concurrent, explanatory mixed-methods design that combines nationally-representative, quantitative data with in-depth, qualitative interview data from school administrators and teachers in North Carolina. The combination of quantitative and qualitative data enable me to provide a holistic analysis of the phenomena of the physical location of Pre-K programs by providing estimates of the effects of setting type on a range of student outcomes and also providing evidence on the potential reasons for the observed relationships. In the quantitative portion of this dissertation, I used nationally-representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort of 2011 to estimate the impacts of school-based versus non-school-based Pre-K on a range of academic and social-emotional outcomes from kindergarten entry through the third grade. Enabled by the robust set of covariates available in the dataset, I use new propensity score weighting methods that ensure balance on observables between treatment and control groups. In the qualitative portion of this dissertation, I collected data from a convenience sample of elementary school administrators and teachers in central North Carolina to provide in-depth information about the physical location of Pre-K programs. Finally, I concluded my analysis by considering the merged quantitative and qualitative data to explore areas of convergence and divergence. From the quantitative analysis, I find little evidence that school-based Pre-K is predictive of differences in student outcomes in kindergarten through third grade. However, I do find suggestive evidence that co-location--wherein students who attend Pre-K in an elementary school building and remain in that building--have superior outcomes when compared to students who move to attend another elementary school after Pre-K. These findings largely cluster in the academic achievement domains. From the qualitative analysis, I find that there is significant variability between elementary schools in the extent to which schools engage with Pre-K programs in their buildings and support collaborative, vertically aligned environments. Together, these results indicate that the physical location of Pre-K programs, alone, is insufficient for differentiating program quality. I conclude this dissertation with a discussion of my findings in relation to the existing literature, highlight the limitations of my study, and discuss directions for future research in the area of Pre-K location and program quality. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]