Teachers, Schools, and Pre-K Effect Persistence: An Examination of the Sustaining Environment HypothesisFrancis PearmanauthorMatthew SpringerauthorMark LipseyauthorMark LachowiczauthorDale FarranauthorWalker SwainauthorPreKacademic achievementsustaining environmentsteacher qualityschool qualityEarly childhoodProgram and policy effects2019Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown UniversityThe sustaining environments thesis hypothesizes that PreK effects are more likely to persist into later grades if children experience high-quality learning environments in the years subsequent to PreK. This study tests this hypothesis using data from a statewide PreK randomized experiment in Tennessee that found positive effects at the end of PreK that did not persist past kindergarten. These data were combined with teacher observation and school-level value-added scores from Tennessee’s formal evaluation system to determine whether positive effects of PreK persisted for the subgroup of students exposed to higher-quality learning environments between kindergarten and 3rd-grade. Neither exposure to highly effective teachers nor attending a high-quality school was sufficient by itself to explain differences in achievement between PreK participants and non-participants in 3rd-grade. However, this study found evidence that having both was associated with a sustained advantage for PreK participants in both math and ELA that lasted through at least 3rd-grade. Notably, however, very few children were exposed to high-quality learning environments after PreK, suggesting that maximizing PreK investments may require attending to the quality of learning environments during PreK and beyond. engtextgrey literatureedworkingpapers.com10.26300/p0a7-rg97In Copyright