PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Gormley, William T.
AU  - Gayer, Ted
TI  - Promoting School Readiness in Oklahoma
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.XL.3.533
DP  - 2005 Jul 01
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 533--558
VI  - XL
IP  - 3
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/XL/3/533.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/XL/3/533.full
SO  - J Hum Resour2005 Jul 01; XL
AB  - Since the mid-1990s, three states, including Oklahoma, have established a universal pre-kindergarten (pre-K) program. We analyze the effects of Oklahoma's 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.