Executive Summary: "The Effects of Expanded Public Funding for Early Education and Child Care on Preschool Enrollment in the 1990s" by Katherine Magnuson, Marcia Meyers, and Jane Waldfogel

Although the share of all 3- and 4-year old children enrolled in preschool has grown steadily in recent decades, gaps in enrollment have persisted between children from low- and high-income families. The cost of private arrangements contributes to these disparities. There is substantial evidence that high child care costs depress maternal employment and the use of child care, particularly among low-income, low-skilled, and single mothers. Steady growth in public funding for compensatory preschool education and means-tested child care assistance during this period had the potential to close these gaps by increasing the availability of free or low-cost arrangements.

In this paper, we make use of repeated cross-sectional measures of preschool enrollment between 1992 and 2000, from the October Current Population Survey, to estimate the contribution of public funding for child care subsidies and Head Start to enrollment levels among low-income children and to income-related enrollment disparities. We find that public funding did play an equalizing role over this period, accounting for between 8 and 11 percentage points of the actual 16 percentage point increase in enrollment for low-income children, but having no effect on enrollment among higher income children. Although enrollment disparities persist, income-related gaps in early education would likely have been larger in the absence of these funding increases.

We also find that the effects of funding were larger for 3 year olds than 4 year olds. This result suggests that more 3 year olds than 4 year olds were moved into preschool by the funding increases, which makes sense given that programs were more widely available to 4 year olds prior to the funding increases.

Our finding that expanded public funding for early education and child care has played an equalizing role is robust to whether we include different measures of state characteristics that may be correlated with child care and early education funding and enrollment. Our results suggest that further expansions could be effective in increasing the enrollment of low-income children into preschool and similar arrangements and in closing persistent gaps in early education experiences between less- and more-advantaged children.

Ultimately, in order to assess the importance of the enrollment changes we have documented, we would want to know something about the quality of the programs children are attending, relative to what they otherwise would have attended. We would also like to know more about the implications of these enrollment changes for children’s school readiness, and for families’ economic well-being. All of these are important directions for future research.