This study examines the Denver Preschool Program (DPP), a voter-approved sales tax initiative that provides a tuition credit for four-year old children to attend preschool. Using propensity weighting and doubly robust modeling on ten cohorts of kindergartners from 2009–2010 through 2018–2019, we found DPP participants were more likely to read at grade level and less likely to be retained or to be chronically absent than their similarly-situated non-DPP peers. The absolute magnitude of the effect sizes for reading achievement and chronic absenteeism ranged from 0.21 to 0.28, and were considered substantively important. The relationships were stronger for DPP participants who had enrolled in a school-based, pre-kindergarten program than DPP participants who had enrolled in a community-based preschool, and the effect sizes were almost twice as large for pre-kindergarten participants than for community-based participants on reading achievement. Policy implications are discussed.

这项研究考察了丹佛学前教育计划（DPP），这是一项经选民批准的销售税计划，可为四岁的孩子上学提供学费减免。使用倾向加权和双重健壮模型对2009-2010年至2018-2019年的10个幼儿园的队列进行研究，我们发现DPP参与者比同等情况的非阅读者更有可能在年级阅读，并且被保留或长期缺席的可能性更低。 -DPP同行。阅读成绩和长期旷工的影响大小的绝对大小范围为0.21至0.28，并且被认为具有重要意义。对于参加基于学校的幼儿园前教育计划的DPP参与者，其关系要强于对于基于社区的学前教育的DPP参与者，幼儿园前的参与者在阅读成就方面的影响大小几乎是社区参与者的两倍。讨论了政策含义。