ERIC Number: ED584348
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2018-Jun-6
Pages: 66
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-
EISSN: N/A
Cost Benefit Analysis of First 5 Kern-Funded Programs
Wang, Jianjun; Sun, Jinping
Online Submission
Early childhood education programs play an important role in child family-to-school transition. In 1998, California voters passed Proposition 10, the California Children and Families Act, which levied a 50-cent tax on each pack of cigarettes and other tobacco products to finance programs for children ages 0-5. In less than two decades, First 5 Kern has administered more than $180 million from Proposition 10 to support early childhood services. Following the state statute to "use outcome-based accountability to determine future expenditures", this Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) includes three components: (1) configuration of the trend in program costs and benefits during 2010-2017; (2) review of comparable programs to support the transfer of long-term benefits from well-documented projects to First 5 Kern-funded programs; and (3) bootstrapping and value-added assessments of CBA outcomes across the adjacent funding cycles. Five research questions have been examined extensively in this trend data analyses across 39 programs: (1) How many programs have reached a status to pay for themselves with First 5 Kern funding? (2) What is the contribution of First 5 Kern, through partnership building, in improving the programs' financial conditions? (3) What programs would have been otherwise unavailable without First 5 Kern funding? (4) What programs became more sustainable, due to First 5 Kern's support for external fund leveraging, between the adjacent funding cycles? (5) What is the long-term return of First 5 Kern-funded programs and services? Value-added assessments have been conducted to discount the service benefit and cost in the 2018 dollar value. Bootstrapping methods were adopted to construct 95% confidence intervals for the benefit-cost ratio estimation. The result showed service benefits at least double Proposition 10 investments in Kern County during the seven-year period.
Descriptors: Cost Effectiveness, Program Effectiveness, Early Childhood Education, School Taxes, Program Costs, Educational Benefits, Best Practices, Statistical Inference, Sampling, Outcomes of Education, Value Added Models, Sustainability, Partnerships in Education, State Programs, Statewide Planning, State Aid, Funding Formulas, Statistical Analysis
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: First 5 Kern
Identifiers - Location: California
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A