Impact of the Tennessee Voluntary Prekindergarten Program on Children’s Literacy, Language, and Mathematics Skills: Results From a Regression-Discontinuity Design

Abstract

The Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K Program (TN-VPK) is statewide full-day program that gives priority to children from low-income families. A regression-discontinuity design with a statewide probability sample of 155 TN-VPK classrooms and 5,189 children participating across two pre-K cohorts found positive effects at kindergarten entry with the largest effects for literacy skills and the smallest for language skills. The results contribute to the growing body of regression-discontinuity studies of state and local pre-K programs and affirm the statewide generalizability of analogous prior findings from a more specialized subsample in the parent Tennessee Pre-K Study. Furthermore, the respective effect sizes compared favorably with those found in other regression-discontinuity studies of public pre-K on the same outcome measures, providing one index of the quality of the TN-VPK program.