What Happens Next? How Post-PreK Pipelines Support or Suppress Early Benefits

In recent years, political consensus has grown around expanding school services downward in the form of investing in preschool. However, amidst this early-childhood policy renaissance, scholars and policy analysts have paid increasing attention to the well documented, "fade out" of measured benefits of these types of one-shot early interventions. While it makes intuitive sense for evaluations of early childhood investments to focus on the goal of lasting measurable benefits, a focus on "fade-out" or convergence of performance, neglecting policy-sensitive subsequent experiences, merits scrutiny. This talk will examine evidence of important interactions between early-childhood programs and the school and neighborhood experiences that follow.

Walker Swain, assistant professor of Educational Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, is an interdisciplinary policy researcher focused on issues of educational equity, poverty, and inequality. His recent work has examined intersections of education and health, teacher policy, early childhood education, neighborhood change and school choice. Swain holds a B.A. in political science and biology from UNC-Chapel Hill, an M.A. in teaching from the University of Louisville, a Master's Degree in public policy from Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, and a Ph.D. in Leadership & Policy Studies from Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education and Human Development.