![]() Previous research suggests that the quality of the teachers and elementary school that children attend after pre-K may boost or undermine long-term effects of pre-K. The graduates of the state program also performed worse on state academic tests. Students who attended state pre-K were more likely to have discipline issues than students who did not attend the program. Some of the children who did not receive a spot in the program attended Head Start, center-based child care or had home-based care.īy the end of sixth grade, the children in the study who had been randomly selected to attend the pre-K program were more likely to be referred to special education services than their peers who had not secured a spot. They compared two cohorts of low-income children, including one group that had been selected to receive a spot, at random, from applicants for the state program and one group of children whose parents applied for a spot but did not receive one. In the most recent study, the researchers found that children who did not attend the program fared better down the road academically and behaviorally. The results, said Farran, were “alarming”: The positive effects of the state-funded pre-K program faded out by the end of kindergarten and turned “slightly negative” by the end of third grade. The first part of the study of Tennessee’s program was released by the Vanderbilt University researchers in 2015. The team’s past findings surprised early childhood experts and advocates who herald high-quality pre-K as a necessity to help prepare children, especially those from low-income families, for kindergarten. The latest study is part of a series of reports by Farran and fellow researchers at Vanderbilt University about Tennessee’s voluntary pre-K program. “The kinds of pre-K that our poor children are going into are not good for them long term.” “At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing,” said Dale Farran, a professor in Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, director of its Peabody Research Institute and one of the authors of the study. ![]() The results, which were released earlier this month, could bring more scrutiny to public pre-Kindergarten programs and raise the question of whether they adequately set low-income children up for success. These are the latest findings of a multi-year study that followed 2,990 children in Tennessee schools to look at the long-term impact of the state’s public pre-K program. The trend emerged by the end of third grade and was even more pronounced three years later. Children who attended Tennessee’s state-funded voluntary pre-K program during the 2009-11 school years were doing worse than their peers by the end of sixth grade in academic achievement, discipline issues and special education referrals.
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