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Schools worldwide distribute information to parents about their children’s academic performance. Do frictions prevent parents, particularly low-income parents, from accessing this information to make decisions? A field experiment in Malawi shows that, at baseline, parents’ beliefs about their children’s academic performance are often inaccurate. Providing parents with clear, digestible performance information causes them to update their beliefs and adjust their investments: they increase the school enrollment of their higher-performing children, decrease the enrollment of lower-performing children, and choose educational inputs that are more closely matched to their children’s academic level. Heterogeneity analysis suggests information frictions are worse among the poor. (JEL C93, D83, I21, I24, J13, O15)
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Did State Pre-Kindergarten Programs Affect the Head Start Enrollment of Children with Disabilities? A Quasi-Experimental Analysis
Little is known about how the expansion of state pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs affects low-income children with disabilities in Head Start. Using almost 30 years of administrative data of all Head Start programs and a differences-in-differences design, this study tests the possibility that, as state pre-k differentially draws relatively more advantaged children from the pool of eligible 4-year-olds, Head Start taps into their relative programmatic strengths and serves more children with disabilities. We found that, overall, the introduction of state pre-k was associated with a 1 percentage point (7%) decrease in Head Start enrollment of children with disabilities. However, Head Start programs located in school systems did experience an increase in their enrollment of children with disabilities identified before Head Start enrollment. We also found that the decrease was primarily driven by children with speech impairment, suggesting that state pre-k might affect the Head Start enrollment of children with disabilities through “cream-skimming” because services for these children are relatively more common and less expensive. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1749275
- PAR ID:
- 10625439
- Publisher / Repository:
- Sage
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Exceptional Children
- Volume:
- 89
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0014-4029
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 142 to 160
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/00144029221110241
