Work

Estimating, Bounding, and Decomposing the Effects of a Parent-Directed School Readiness Program

Year: 2025

Type: report

Abstract: The Texas Policy Lab collaborated with the Alief Independent School District (AISD) to evaluate its JumpStart Program, a large-scale parenting intervention aimed at preparing 3-year-olds for entry into kindergarten at AISD. Children who received the JumpStart intervention showed modest gains in acquiring the skills targeted by the program curriculum, with scores increasing by seven percentage points more than for children in the control group. These gains were particularly concentrated among a subset of measures, namely name recognition and book handling. We also found evidence of a small JumpStart spillover effect on content areas not directly covered by the curriculum, as measured by the Bracken School Readiness Assessment scale. The results from the randomized controlled trial also show the program increased some parental investments, such as the frequency parents read to their children, which grew by roughly half a day more per week in the treatment group than in the control group. However, the RCT found no effects on some other parental investments, such as whether the parent engages in activities to help the child learn the alphabet or colors. Using a structural model, the researchers evaluated whether the observed impact on children’s knowledge is due to an increase in the effectiveness of parental time spent reading to their child. The estimates of the model confirmed this hypothesis. The model estimates also imply that parents react to this added effectiveness by increasing the frequency with which they choose to read to their child.

Source: National Bureau of Economic Research

DOI: 10.3386/w33537

Authors: Flávio Cunha, Qinyou Hu, Andrea Salvati, Kenneth Wolpin, Rui Zeng