Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Publicly-funded preschool programs, such as Head Start and state prekindergarten, have been shown to improve children’s long-term educational success and well-being (Karoly, Kilburn, & Cannon, 2005; Schweinhart, 2005). As preschool attendance becomes more commonplace among families with young children, states have begun considering the expansion of services from a half-day to a full-day schedule. In addition to increasing the amount of time children spend in classrooms, access to full-day preschool might also have important impacts on the home lives of families with young children. Full-day public preschool could indirectly impact students by increasing opportunities for parents to earn income, reducing childcare costs, reducing parental stress, and perhaps even stabilizing important home routines and activities like napping, sleeping, and time available to parents to interact with their children in developmentally appropriate ways. Several recent studies have documented the benefits of children’s preschool participation on various parental outcomes, including engagement in educational activities and increased educational attainment (Gelber & Isen, 2013; Sabol & Chase-Lansdale, 2014). However, little evidence supports whether full-day preschool affords parents with benefits above and beyond what a district might otherwise provide. We leverage a three-cohort longitudinal randomized control trial of offers of full- versus half-day preschool to estimate the effects of full-day preschool programming on a wide range of family outcomes.

In 2016-17, Westminster Public Schools (WPS), a district that largely serves non-White, low-income, and non-native English-speaking families, launched the Full-Day Pre-K Program (FDPK) based on a lottery system. WPS randomly assigned offers of full- and half-day preschool for three cohorts of students entering preschool in August 2016, 2017, and 2018. Students in the full-day preschool program were in classrooms for six hours a day, five days a week. Those in the half-day program were in classrooms for three hours a day, four days a week.

Previous work on FDPK found that at the end of preschool, students in the full-day program outperformed their half-day peers on receptive vocabulary and teacher-reported measures of cognition, literacy, math, and physical development. These results indicate that there are clear, direct benefits of this program for children, but it is unknown whether and how families were affected by the program. We estimate the causal effects of full-day preschool on parental employment, childcare costs, time spent in alternative forms of childcare, parental stress, and activities that parents engage their children in at home. We hypothesize that there are secondary benefits of access to full-day preschool for families because half-day preschool may not be a feasible childcare option for working and single-parent families.

Preliminary results from the first and second cohorts indicate that the offer of full-day preschool reduced the costs of childcare for families and affected the ways in which families covered childcare needs during the work week. Future analyses for the presentation will incorporate the results from the third cohort and examine whether the strength of the findings varies for subgroups, defined by household structure (e.g., single-parent and two-parent families). Our findings have important implications for districts considering implementation of full-day preschool.