Promoting School Readiness in Oklahoma
评估俄克拉荷马州普及学前班对儿童认知、运动及语言能力的影响，发现效果显著，尤其对少数族裔和低收入家庭儿童帮助更大。
Since the mid-1990s, three states, including Oklahoma, have established a universal pre-kindergarten (pre-K) program. We analyze the effects of Oklahoma9s universal pre-kindergarten (pre-K) program for four-year-olds on children in Tulsa Public Schools (TPS). The main difficulty with testing the causal impact of a voluntary pre-K program is that certain parents are more likely to select pre-K, and these parents might have other unobservable characteristics that influence the test outcomes of their children. Because TPS administered an identical test in September 2001 to children just beginning pre-K and children just beginning kindergarten, we can compare test outcomes of “old” pre-kindergarten students to test outcomes of “young” kindergarten students who attended pre-K the previous year. We find that the Tulsa pre-K program increases cognitive/knowledge scores by approximately 0.39 standard deviation, motor skills scores by approximately 0.24 standard deviation, and language scores by approximately 0.38 standard deviation. Impacts tend to be largest for Hispanics, followed by blacks, with little impact for whites. Children who qualify for a free lunch have larger impacts than other children.