Costs of the Boston Public Prekindergarten Program

Abstract

Though there is an expanding field of research on public prekindergarten, there is a relatively little comprehensive investigation into what public prekindergarten costs. We address some of the absences in the literature by analyzing public-sector expenditures for the city of Boston’s public prekindergarten program, a particularly high-quality program. We identify the different components of the Boston program and explore how they translate into costs. We also examine how costs change over time, how costs are distributed across different levels of the education system, and how costs can be adjusted in order to calculate nationally representative estimates. Our findings are relevant for localities interested in learning from existing prekindergarten programs.

Keywords:

• Prekindergarten
• quality
• cost

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Boston Public Schools, Jason Sachs, Brian Gold, Blaire Horner, the BPS Department of Early Childhood coaches and staff, the BPS Office of Data and Accountability, and the Center for Benefit Cost Studies in Education at Teachers College and the CBSE’s Methods Training Course. Special thanks to Sara Staszak, Anna Shapiro, Shana Rochester, Rebecca Unterman, Eleanor Martin, Henry Levin, and Jere Behrman.

Notes

1 The average prekindergarten teachers’ salary in Boston in 2009 was $70,625, but we report all dollar figures in this article as 2018 dollars, using the Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

2 As with all of the figures in the paper, we have adjusted for inflation and report these salaries in 2018 dollars.

3 Transportation is a complex issue. We adjusted transportation costs in the same way as all district-level expenses, by multiplying them by the ratio of students in our sample to all students in the district. However, two additional adjustments might be important. First, a significant percentage of the transportation budget services special education children. In 2007–2008 budget, 47% of the transportation budget went towards serving these students, who are not included in our sample. This would reduce our transportation estimate for prekindergarten students. Second, transportation services in Boston do not service high school students, who are expected to take public transportation. In the 2007–2008 year, 32% of students were in high school. This would increase our estimate for transportation costs for the prekindergarten students, as the ratio of students in our sample to all students served by the transportation department would increase. Another additional point is that we have categorized transportation costs as systems-level expenses. While we know that other systems level costs did not increase as a result of the inclusion of prekindergarten, we are not sure if the transportation budget changed to accommodate the influx of students. In the prekindergarten lottery, students in walk-zones are given priority and parents might be more likely to transport younger children, possibly making these students less likely to incur transport costs.

Additional information

Funding

This study is funded by the Institute of Education Sciences [RFA R305A140059].