Denver didn’t know how much a taxpayer-funded tuition program helped preschoolers.  

Many cities across the United States have established local funding streams to improve families’ access to high-quality preschool programs. The Denver Preschool Program (DPP), a voter-approved sales tax initiative, provides a tuition credit for all four-year-old children within the city’s limits to attend a preschool of their families’ choosing. DPP bases tuition credits on family income, family size, and the quality of the preschool that families select. Despite the promise of the DPP program, little is known about whether receipt of the tuition credit is associated with higher kindergarten readiness levels. 

NORC worked with the Denver Preschool Program to evaluate the program’s effectiveness.  

DPP partnered with NORC at the University of Chicago and the University of Colorado, Denver, to conduct a longitudinal evaluation of the DPP program. Using data collected from nine cohorts of DPP participants and non-participants between the 2009-10 and 2017-18 academic years, we addressed three research questions:  

• How is DPP participation related to kindergarten reading achievement?
  
• Is there a relationship between DPP participation, grade retention, and chronic absenteeism at kindergarten?
  
• Do associations between DPP participation and children’s academic and chronic absenteeism vary by the preschool setting that participants had attended?
  

Using propensity weighting and doubly robust modeling, we examined the relationship between DPP participation and children’s academic and behavioral readiness for kindergarten.