What do these findings mean? The authors of the study hold out hope that the positive finding on kindergarten retentions means that the TN-VPK had a positive effect on children’s social/emotional development, which will lead to long term positive outcomes like those that were found in the famous Perry Preschool Project (in which, for example, participants were less likely than nonparticipants to have had encounters with the criminal justice system as adults). This seems to me to be grasping at straws, given the lack of any differences among participants and non-participants in teacher rated social/emotional outcomes, and given other research showing no association between kindergarten retentions and later school performance. The authors of the study also refer frequently to the prevalence of fade-out of cognitive gains in other research on the impact of preschool programs. But there is a big difference between the fade-out of group differences on academic and cognitive outcomes somewhere in late elementary school or middle school, which is the pattern in some previous research, versus gains that don’t last even until the end of kindergarten, which is the finding in the present research and the National Head Start Impact Study.
Not much new here, but it is nice they did a controlled study. Now we don't have to hear about small quasi-randomized studies form the 60's and 70's anymore.
