The primary objective of this multi-year project is to assess whether children who attended a state-funded Pre-Kindergarten program perform better academically in the short and long term than a comparable group of peers who did not attend Tennessee’s Pre-Kindergarten program. The evaluation will also investigate whether various characteristics of Tennessee’s Pre-Kindergarten programs impact short- and long-term achievement among students who attended these programs.

To analyze the effectiveness of Tennessee’s Pre-Kindergarten program, SRG will integrate and analyze Pre-Kindergarten enrollment files provided by the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) Office of Early Learning, data from the Tennessee Education Information System (EIS), and student test scores from the TDOE Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Division to address two research questions. At the conclusion of the project, the evaluation will span eleven cohorts of students who attended Tennessee’s Pre-Kindergarten program and ten cohorts of students who did not.

Deliverables for this project include seven comprehensive reports of findings and two presentations to the education committees of Tennessee’s General Assembly.