Family engagement practices and children’s attendance and early learning skills in a public pre-kindergarten program

Family engagement is a key component of preschool program quality with the potential to benefit children’s early learning skills. Yet, there is limited research on what practices teachers and programs use to engage families and whether these practices are associated with improved child outcomes. This study links administrative data on children’s records and survey data collected from public pre-k teachers and administrators in a mid-sized, urban school district to estimate the associations between family engagement practices and children’s attendance in pre-k and their early literacy and socioemotional skills at the end of pre-k. Overall, we found limited evidence that family engagement practices are, on average, associated with children’s outcomes. Only teachers’ practices for communicating with families were associated with lower chronic absenteeism. However, these associations varied by child, family, and program characteristics. Our findings identify promising family engagement practices for preschool programs and highlight the need for future research to consider the heterogenous effects of family engagement across different types of practices and across child, family, and program characteristics.