Inclusive and Accessible Education: Three Essays on Child Care, Kindergarten and K-12 Education

This dissertation examines how a variety of demographic factors and policy instruments interact and affect the extent to which education remains inclusive and accessible to the needs of diverse students and families. The dissertation does so in a three-essay format, with each essay respectively aimed at three different stages of education (i.e., Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), Kindergarten, and K-12 schools) within the U.S. context. The first essay examines regulations in the context of child care market. Regulations are often justified as a mechanism to enhance quality of child care, but unintended labor market consequences could instead reduce the quantity and quality of services provided. Using a continuous and binary treatment difference-in-differences strategy that exploits unprecedented variation in child care regulations during the period surrounding Covid-19, this study finds that regulations reduced the demand for child care labor and motivated providers to substitute away from high-skilled labor. The second essay examines Arizona’s full-day kindergarten expansion between 2004-2010. This expansion implicitly acted as a subsidy for child care, by reducing the required number of after-school care hours. Using a difference-in-differences framework, this study finds that the availability of full-day kindergarten increased employment among some subgroups of mothers with age-eligible children. Finally, the third essay is set in the context of immigration and K-12 demographics. The theory of native flight suggests that U.S. born subpopulations move away from neighborhoods which receive higher numbers of immigrants. Merging school level data with the U.S. census data over the years 2005-2019, I use an instrumental variable approach to find that U.S. born students show heterogeneous patterns of flight in response to immigration. The dissertation showcases the relevance of certain policy variations and demographic characteristics in the context of affordability, diversity, and access in education.