UC Irvine

Young children, especially those from low-income families and those with disabilities, who receive high quality early childhood education (ECE) display improved academic, socio-emotional, and behavioral outcomes later in life ((Phillips et al., 2017; Heckman, 2006). However, much of this promising long-run evidence comes from small-scale exemplary ECE programs, and raises questions about how to scaled-up ECE programs to the population-level. For example, examining whether ECE curricular interventions are effective in authentic educational environments across in multiple sites and contexts, and with different groups of children (Morris et al., 2014). Some states have adopted universal or means-tested preschool programs for 4-year-olds, and many others are in the process of transforming their small-scale preschool programs to large-scale community-wide programs. For children with disabilities, the Response to Intervention (RTI) approach was introduced by the federal government in 2004 and has been adopted by most states today. Yet there are many critical inquiries unanswered with respect to how effective these programs are, whether the programs benefit children facing economic or developmental disadvantages, whether program effects can be sustained after preschool, and whether and how such interventions are differentially beneficial for key subpopulations of young children.This dissertation, comprised of three studies, comprehensively examines the different ways in which three large-scale public educational programs affect children’s learning and development. Using experimental data from a multi-site experiment randomizing socio-emotional curricula interventions in Head Start classrooms, I find that curricula interventions show positive impacts on emotional knowledge and problem-solving skills for children at the upper middle of their skill distributions and children at the higher end of their skill distributions. The results suggest that public resources can be allocated in curricula programs to children with different skill levels to help with child outcomes. Using a nationally representative sample of kindergarteners, I find that a higher percentage of children having attended preschool in a kindergarten classroom positively correlated with teachers’ perceptions of students’ reading skills, and that teachers subsequently spent more time on advanced reading content, among other findings. These findings imply that teachers may be responsive to higher skill levels of children in the classroom, but public resources are needed to help teachers provide more challenging content for some children. Leveraging multiple national datasets (e.g., Individuals with Disabilities Act reports), I find that state RTI adoption increased the proportion of students identified with specific learning disabilities, and decreased the proportion of students with disabilities placed in a separate school setting. Additionally, I observed an increase in the proportion of students identified with disabilities who are non-White students compared with White students. These results suggest that state adoption of the RTI approach could be a means of improving the processes involved in students being identified with disabilities and promote the inclusion of students with disabilities. Together, these three studies provide new evidence that advances the field’s understanding in scaled-up public programs regarding heterogeneity of treatment effects from skill-specific curricula interventions in Head Start, peer effects of preschool attendance in kindergarten on teachers’ awareness of children’s skills in their classrooms and their instruction, and population-level impacts of state RTI on children’s disability outcomes. These results provide timely and policy-relevant information for effectively designing and improving early programs for different groups of children’s development, including children at different skill distributions, those from low-income families, and those with disabilities.