Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In the 1990s, Dolly Parton founded Imagination Library, a non-profit that gives free books to children regardless of family income. Using a dosage difference-in-difference strategy, we are able to identify the academic achievement effects of this program on students across the state of Tennessee. In doing so, we contribute to an expanding literature assessing long-term effects of early childhood events and to a stream of research focused specifically on improving childhood literacy. In the United States alone, almost a fifth of adults fall below a basic level of literacy. This is the only known study to assess the effects of an unmonitored, at-home intervention that affects young children before schooling on their school-aged performance, which could improve the involved generation’s literacy levels. Using a unique dataset that merges Imagination Library mailing lists and Tennessee Department of Education standardized test scores, we estimate fixed effects models to measure the increase in average test scores when counties are exposed to increasing Imagination Library enrollment. We find the largest changes in the proportion of students scoring among the lowest level as aggregate program participation increases, indicating the program helped weakest performers the most. Specifically, a 10 percentage point increase in Imagination Library enrollment leads to a .6 percentage point decrease in the proportion of students scoring at the lowest level. The marginal effect sizes are rather small compared to those of other early literacy interventions, which could be the result of the “light touch” nature of the intervention. However, we do find highly significant results, which asserts the program’s positive impact on outcomes up to 4 years after a student’s participation.