High-quality early childhood environments are important for children's school success and their socio-emotional development. Center-based early childhood programs improve child outcomes through high-quality care while children are in the care environment, but also have effects that reach beyond the classroom. Large-scale evaluations of early childhood programs, such as Head Start and Early Head Start, show a positive effect on parenting and the home environment. These programs offer many services that can support the home environment such as volunteer opportunities for parents and referrals to services and supports in the community. However, little is known about the mechanisms through which center-based early childhood programs influence the home environment. Similarly, little is known about the characteristics of people who use services and what specific services they use.

This dissertation aims to improve our understanding of how parents interact with center-based early childhood programs, and the role these programs play in shaping the home environment. The first study investigates parent uptake of services associated with center-based care, and the characteristics of parents who are using such services and supports. Findings from this study indicate parents are using services, and that the most disadvantaged families are utilizing services related to their well-being, such as education and employment services. Study two examines characteristics of parents that participate in volunteer or (other types) of parent engagement activities, and whether parental involvement is associated with improved parenting practices and child development outcomes. In general, parents are participating in children's center-based early childhood programs. In contrast to the findings from the first study, parents who are most disadvantaged are less likely to participate; however, low-income parents who participate in their child's schooling gained the most from parental involvement activities. The third study examines the benefits of various services, such as parenting-related and family well-being supports, and finds that take-up of services and supports has a positive effect on the quality of the home learning environment.

Taken together, the findings from the three studies included in this dissertation demonstrate that parents are utilizing services and are becoming involved in their child's center-based early childhood program, and that doing so benefits the home environment and parenting practices. Early childhood programs and policies should work to further incorporate parents into programming and provide parents with services and supports.

During the 2011-2012 academic year, approximately 3.5 million students received suspensions across the United States. Scholars and professionals have raised concerns regarding the frequent use of exclusionary discipline. In fact, research shows that receiving suspensions is associated with a wide range of negative youth outcomes. However, because isolating the causal effects of suspension is difficult, to what extent the associations are causal is still an open question. Moreover, little is known about the effects of suspension on the educational achievement of non-suspended students.

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the consequences of suspensions on students and their non-suspended peers by focusing on within-person variations, comparing change in achievement for the same students before and after the time of their suspensions and classmate suspensions. The results of Study 1 show that students from disadvantaged backgrounds have an elevated risk of exposure to an environment with classmates who receive suspensions. In Study 2, the results suggest that receiving multiple out-of-school suspensions can lead to negative educational achievement, whereas receiving one out-of-school suspension or receiving in-school suspension have little effects on the educational achievement of suspended students. Finally, in Study 3, I find that classmate suspensions positively affect the math achievement of non-suspended students.

Taken together, the findings from the three studies provide new empirical evidence about the consequences of using classroom or school removal as a school disciplinary policy. In recent years, many school districts have discouraged suspension practices and have implemented alternative ways to discipline students. As a result, suspension rates plummeted in some school districts. The findings imply that the effort to reduce suspension rates may benefit students at risk of suspension, but may also harm overall learning environments. Such findings have important implications for policies regarding how to best discipline and teach students with behavioral challenges.

Mathematics and reading skills are targeted by wide-ranging educational policies in hopes that boosting academic achievement will improve adult attainments. Relying on theories of skill building, researchers and policy-makers have pursued the idea that early gains in skills will lead to the acquisition of later skills, and this skill-building trajectory should lead to adult economic success. In this dissertation, I examined this long-run academic skill acquisition process in mathematics by investigating several approaches to promoting mathematics achievement during the preschool and elementary school years. I then turned to the hypothesis that boosting academic achievement during the schooling years should lead to greater economic success in adulthood.

In the first study, I investigated whether early math learning impacted later math achievement in a sample of children recruited for participation in a preschool mathematics intervention program. To generate causal estimates of the impact of early learning on later achievement, I leveraged random assignment to the preschool mathematics program as an instrument for gains in early math skills. I found some indication that instrumented gains in early math skills affected math achievement measured 6 to 7 years later, but estimates were smaller than had been reported in previous correlational studies. These findings suggested that theories of skill building may have over predicted the long-run returns to early investments in mathematical skill development.

In the second study, I evaluated the effects of a 2-year intervention that encouraged second- and third-grade teachers to individualize instruction in mathematics. Individualized instruction is thought to help students at all achievement levels gain skills through tailoring instruction to the individual needs of each student. Results suggested that the intervention had little impact on math achievement at both grades assessed, and I found no impact of spending two consecutive years in individualized math instruction. However, teacher implementation was poor, suggesting that teachers may be resistant to programs that encourage them to differentiate instruction in mathematics.

The final study examined the link between adolescent achievement test scores and adult earnings. Although many studies have reported links between test scores and earnings (e.g.., Currie & Thomas, 2001; Murnane et al., 2000), most studies have only controlled for simple demographic characteristics (e.g., race, gender), leaving concerns that reported estimates might contain substantial bias. Using nationally representative data from the United Kingdom, I found that adolescent math and reading scores predicted adult earnings through age 50, but results were highly sensitive to the inclusion of a large set of controls (e.g., IQ, personality, parenting characteristics). Although fully-controlled estimates were still positive and significant, my results suggest that using the correlation between test scores and earnings to project educational program impacts may lead to biased predictions.

In final chapter, I discuss the implications of these findings for educational theory and policy. In particular, I suggest that theories of skill building need revision and more work is needed to understand the mechanisms that connect academic skills to important life outcomes.

The support that society provides to children from low-income families plays a critical role in helping them grow and thrive. This support encompasses a wide range of policies, including increased funding for education and direct assistance to families in the form of cash or in-kind benefits. While it is well established that these forms of support significantly improve child outcomes, questions remain about the most effective strategies for targeting, distributing, and designing programs to maximize the impact of these resources. This dissertation focuses on deepening our understanding of three specific types of social supports for low-income children: education policies that target resources to schools serving low-income students, social policies that provide unconditional cash transfers to low-income families, and policies that focus on improving the environmental conditions of schools. First, many education policies depend on valid measures of school economic disadvantage. Recent research raises questions about the validity of commonly used free-or-reduced-price-lunch measures, particularly in light of the increasing availability of universal free school meals. The first study links confidential federal tax return data and program participation data housed at the U.S. Census Bureau to examine the validity of several measures of school economic disadvantage. Results suggest that direct certification measures provide the best widely available measure, both over time and across the distribution of school poverty. Second, parental spending on children is important for child development. Using data from a randomized control trial of an unconditional cash transfer to low-income mothers of young children, the second study examines the extent to which the cash transfer is spent on goods directly related to children, relative to other sources of household income. I find that the unconditional cash transfer is more likely to be spent on children than any other household income source, including mothers’ earned income alone. The results suggest that money in the household is differentiated for spending on children. Finally, no level of lead is safe in a child’s blood. Moreover, low-income children have higher blood lead levels than non-economically disadvantaged children. Most research and policy has focused on lead abatement in home environments. However, researchers estimate that 73 percent of schools have lead in the drinking water. The third study uses school water lead data linked to education administrative records to estimate a causal effect of school water lead exposure on educational outcomes. The results suggests that water lead exposure may negatively affect students, although the effect is sensitive to model specification. In addition, students’ exposure to lead in schools is curiously correlated with students’ prior achievement, making a causal effect of lead in schools unclear. My dissertation concludes with a discussion of themes and lessons from the three studies for improving social policies to support low-income families.