Abstract
In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. We then document four sets of experimental impacts. First, students in small classes are significantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes. Class size does not have a significant effect on earnings at age 27, but this effect is imprecisely estimated. Second, students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings. Third, an analysis of variance reveals significant classroom effects on earnings. Students who were randomly assigned to higher quality classrooms in grades K–3—as measured by classmates' end-of-class test scores—have higher earnings, college attendance rates, and other outcomes. Finally, the effects of class quality fade out on test scores in later grades, but gains in noncognitive measures persist.
Highlights
What are the long-term impacts of early childhood education? Evidence on this important policy question remains scarce because of a lack of data linking childhood education and outcomes in adulthood
We report estimates of equation (1) for various outcomes in Table V using the full sample of Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) students; we show in Online Appendix Table VIII that similar results are obtained for the subsample of students who entered in kindergarten
Yicn = n + bLM scni + "icn: We show in Online Appendix B that the coe¢ cient on class quality converges to a positive value as the number of schools N grows large if and only if class quality has an impact on adult outcomes: plim N !1 ^bLM > 0 i¤ > 0.27 bLM is biased toward zero relative to because scni is a noisy measure of class quality
Summary
What are the long-term impacts of early childhood education? Evidence on this important policy question remains scarce because of a lack of data linking childhood education and outcomes in adulthood. In addition to the extensive literature on the impacts of STAR on test scores, our study builds on and contributes to a recent literature investigating selected long-term impacts of class size in the STAR experiment These studies have shown that students assigned to small classes are more likely to complete high school (Finn, Gerber, and Boyd-Zaharias 2005) and take the SAT or ACT college entrance exams (Krueger and Whitmore 2001) and are less likely to be arrested for crime (Krueger and Whitmore 2001). Most recently, Muennig et al (2010) report that students in small classes have higher mortality rates, a ...nding that we do not obtain in our data as we discuss below We contribute to this literature by providing a uni...ed evaluation of several outcomes, including the ...rst analysis of earnings, and by examining the impacts of teachers, peers, and other attributes of the classroom in addition to class size.
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