Impact of North Carolina’s Early Childhood Initiatives on

ParticiPation in early child care and education (ECE) programs in the United States increased substantially during the 1990s and early 2000s as a result of improvements in the quality and avail-ability of child care programs and the expansion of state-supported programs for high-quality cen-ter or school-based preschools (Barnett, 2011; Magnuson, Ruhm, & Waldfogel, 2007). This increase abated during the end of the last decade, however, perhaps due to the economic crisis and growing questions about the relative economic cost-effectiveness of state-supported programs (Barnett, 2011). In his 2014 State of the Union Address, President Obama renewed his call for providing early education opportunities to all children, noting that one of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is high-quality early education (Bidwell, 2014). Numerous studies have found that children who participate in small, high-quality, ECE programs experience gains that persist throughout their schooling and into early adulthood (Barnett, 2011; Camilli, Vargas, Ryan, & Barnett, 2010; Mervis, 2011); however, evaluations of larger scale federal and state pro-grams indicate a more mixed pattern regarding the persistence and cost-effectiveness of effect