The effect of California’s Universal Pre-K on child development: Evidence from an Academic-Industry partnership

In 2022, California began a multi-year effort to create a universal pre-k (UPK) program offered to all four-year-olds in the state by 2025-2026. This team will partner with AMIRA learning, an edtech tool that provides students with patient, personalized reading tutoring, that simultaneously collects reading data to look at the impact of Universal PK programs.

By utilizing innovative statistical methods, this team of researchers and industry partners will answer a critically important policy question for the state of CA, with population-level implications for the well-being of young children and elementary school educators.

This academic-industry partnership model for educational policy evaluation may also serve as a model for future studies with myriad edtech data sources developed in the industry.