Choosing a preschool is a difficult and important decision. Parents are weighing cost, proximity and convenience with how each program meets the needs of the child and matches the goals and values of their family and cultural community.

This choice makes a difference. Research in early education clearly shows that children who attend high-quality preschool programs – those with smaller class sizes, a developmentally appropriate curriculum, warm teacher-child interactions and established, efficient routines – are better prepared for kindergarten.

We are researcherswho studyearly childhood education, and we conducted an 18-year study tracking the academic progress of 27,814 students who attended different types of prekindergarten in Miami and then went on to attend the Miami-Dade County Public Schools system from kindergarten through high school. We found that the type of pre-K program the children attended made a difference for their overall educational outcomes.

How we did our study

From 2002 to 2007, we partnered with Miami-Dade County Public Schools, early childcare providers across the county and the Early Learning Coalition of Miami-Dade, a nonprofit that works with childcare providers and communities to promote school readiness, with the goal of assessing five cohorts of about 10,000 students per year.

School readiness takes into consideration the children’s cognitive, language, motor and social skills, as well as behavior problems. During the study, we shared the data we collected with parents, teachers and center directors to inform interventions for struggling kids and improvements to their pre-K programs.

Some of the students in these five cohorts attended taxpayer-funded, public school pre-K programs, while some received federal subsidies administered through the state of Florida to attend center-based or family childcare at age 4.

Center-based programs, like a Kiddie Academy, for example, can be nonprofit or for-profit centers in the community. They operate either in a freestanding location or as part of a corporate or faith-based building. Family or home-based childcare programs are generally smaller and operate out of private residences.

After the children had moved through pre-K, we continued to receive their anonymized academic records each year, as long as they stayed in the public school system. The last cohort of students completed 12th grade in spring 2020.

Outcomes in later grades

We found that children who attended public school pre-K programs at age 4 achieved the strongest third-grade outcomes on standardized reading and math test scores and GPA. These children outperformed those who attended center-based care, who in turn generally performed better than children who were enrolled in family childcare. Kids who attended public school pre-K were 35% less likely to be held back in third grade compared with the other groups.

Further, we found that kids who attended higher-quality elementary schools – as measured by the Florida Department of Education – did better on average.

However, the quality of the elementary school that students went on to attend didn’t change the differences we observed across the early childhood education types, except when it came to reading skills. Students who attended center-based care and went on to attend higher-quality schools were better able to catch up to the public school pre-K kids by third grade in reading.

Our findings are consistent with most previous studies of public pre-K. Students who attended public pre-K programs in Boston; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and North Carolina have shown better results on standardized test scores, lower absenteeism and better grade retention when compared with children who attended other programs, even as late as eighth grade.

However, there are outliers. Children who attended the publicly funded voluntary pre-K program in Tennessee did not perform any better than other children on third or sixth grade outcomes – and in some cases, they performed worse.

Previous findings are also mixed on whether these effects persist past the third grade.

In our study, it appears that the long-term benefits of public school pre-K extend through eighth grade, but this conclusion is still in peer review and has not been published yet. We are currently examining whether benefits persist throughout high school.

Collective resources

Why did kids in public school pre-K programs do better compared to center-based and family childcare? We believe that the answer likely lies in the quality and organizational differences between the three different types of early care and education.

The public school pre-K programs in our study benefited from the collective resources of the fourth-largest public school system in the country. This matters for everything from the quality of teachers they are able to hire to the facilities and curriculum.

Miami-Dade public schools require teachers to have at minimum a bachelor’s degree and a teaching credential, whereas the others required less education at the time of our study. Public pre-K teachers’ certification allows them to teach from pre-K to third grade, so they typically bring their experience of teaching in kindergarten and the early elementary grades to the pre-K classroom.

These programs also used a developmentally appropriate curriculum, while the others used a variety of materials and approaches. When we began this study, the center-based programs were mostly independent, unaffiliated sites, although some for-profits had more than one center in the study, and some nonprofit organizations such as Catholic Charities or the YMCA oversaw multiple centers.

Many of the children in the study moved from one school to another within the same district. Because Miami-Dade’s public schools are part of a countywide system, the children’s academic records moved with them easily, so their new teacher could see their progress. And since the curriculum was the same across the district, the students were able to pick up at their new school where they’d left off.

This continuity could also explain why children who entered the public school system in pre-K performed better than those outside it. The majority of the children in the study went on to attend public elementary school. The kids in public school preschool and their parents were therefore already familiar with the schools that they would be attending the following year. It’s not hard to see how this would be an advantage for a child transitioning from preschool to kindergarten.

Better than ever

Our findings do not indicate to us, however, that every child must attend public school pre-K in order to succeed in school later on. The reality in Miami-Dade County – and in most communities – is that we need all forms of early care and education, and each setting serves important needs for families.

Indeed, students in all three types of programs made excellent school readiness gains from the beginning to the end of the age-4 academic year. It was just that the children in the public school preschools made stronger gains.

Center- and home-based care in Miami-Dade County is much higher quality across the board today than when we began our study back in 2002. Many more centers are accredited, and teacher education levels have improved. In fact, in our assessment, the quality of early education in Miami-Dade County has never been better.

Still, the cohesive system offered by public schools remains the gold standard for preschool when serving most children and families. In terms of teacher preparation and qualifications, standardized curriculum, oversight and alignment with the kindergarten curriculum, public school pre-k for low-income families in Miami still offers the best hope of long-term academic success.

Read more of our stories about Florida.

Charles Bleiker, Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education, Florida International University; Adam Winsler, Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology, George Mason University, and Kaitlyn Mumma, Researcher, Applied Developmental Psychology, George Mason University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.