News
In our last two posts on preschool education, we looked at the some of the lessons and results of recent expansions of preschool in France and Great Britain. Today, we turn our attention to research conducted on early education programs in America. In 2007, Brian A. Jacob and Changing Poverty, Changing Policies. Here is an excerpt from their review on early education:
Disparities in academic achievement by race and class are apparent as early as ages three and four, well before children enter kindergarten. Recent research in neuroscience, developmental psychology, economics, and other fields suggests that the earliest years of life may be a particularly promising time to intervene in the lives of low-income children (Shonkoff and Phillips 2000; Carniero and Heckman 2003; Knudsen et al. 2006). Studies show that early childhood educational programs can generate learning gains in the short run and, in some cases, improve the long-run life chances of poor children. Moreover, the benefits generated by these programs are large enough to justify their costs.The Perry Preschool and Abecedarian programs are commonly cited as examples of high-quality preschool services that can change the lives of low-income children. A small group of children who participated in these programs in the 1960s and 1970s have been followed for many years and on average have better outcomes in a range of domains compared to a randomly assigned group of control children (Schweinhart et al. 2005; Ramey and Campbell 1979; Campbell et al. 2002; Barnett and Masse 2007). Despite the high cost of these programs, these studies suggest that their total economic benefit exceeded their costs (Belfield et al. 2006; Barnett and Masse 2007). Although these results are encouraging, it is important to keep in mind that these are model programs that were unusually intensive and involved small numbers of children in just two sites.
Nevertheless, the evidence on publicly funded early education programs, illustrating what can be achieved for large numbers of children in programs of variable quality, is also very encouraging. A recent random assignment evaluation of Head Start found positive short-term effects of program participation on a variety of cognitive skills on the order of 0.2 to 0.4 standard deviations, with typically positive effects on noncognitive outcomes as well (though they are usually not statistically significant). A rigorous evaluation of Early Head Start, a program serving children under age three in a mix of home- and center-based programs, found positive effects on some aspects of parent practices and children’s development, but the effects were generally smaller than for Head Start (Love et al. 2002).
Vivian Wong and her colleagues (2008) find that several recent state-initiated universal pre-K programs have even larger impacts on short-term cognitive test scores than does Head Start (see also Gormley et al. 2005; Gormley and Gayer 2005). Why might the new state pre-K programs generate larger gains than does Head Start? One explanation is that pre-K programs hire more qualified teachers, pay them more, and offer a more academically oriented curriculum than do Head Start programs. Another explanation is that the Head Start comparison group received more center-based care than did children in the pre-K comparison group. A third possible explanation is that the recent Head Start study relies on a rigorous randomized experimental design, while the research design of the new state pre-K studies is more susceptible to bias from selection problems (see Ludwig and Phillips 2007).
Although these short-run achievement gains from both Head Start and newer state pre-K programs are impressive, the crucial question is whether these effects persist over time. To explore longer-run impacts, we must rely on non-experimental studies of children who participated in Head Start decades ago and control for potential confounding factors (Currie and Thomas 1995; Garces, Thomas, and Currie 2002; Ludwig and Miller 2007; and Deming 2007). These studies suggest lasting effects on schooling attainment and perhaps criminal activity, although test score effects appear to fade out over time for many children. Nonetheless, the positive long-term effects seem large enough to generate benefits that outweigh program costs.
It is possible that the long-term effects of Head Start on more recent cohorts of children are different from those for previous cohorts of program participants because program quality changes over time, or because the developmental quality of the environments that children would experience as an alternative to Head Start changes. But the short-term test score impacts that have been estimated for recent cohorts of Head Start participants appear to be similar to what we see for earlier cohorts of children for whom we also now have evidence of long-term benefits. So there is room for cautious optimism that Head Start might improve the long-term outcomes for recent waves of program participants as well, even though this hypothesis cannot be directly tested for many years (Ludwig and Phillips 2007).
Preschool interventions represent a promising way to improve the life chances of poor children, but their success is not well reflected in federal government budget priorities, which allocate nearly seven times as much money per capita for K–12 schooling as for prekindergarten (pre-K), other forms of early education, and child care subsidies for three- to five-year olds (Ludwig and Sawhill 2007). Most social policies attempt to make up for the disadvantages that poor children experience early in life. But given the substantial disparities that already exist between very young poor children and very young nonpoor children, it is perhaps not surprising that many disadvantaged children never catch up. For this reason, we believe that efforts to improve young children’s school readiness with proven, high-quality programs should play a much more prominent role in our nation’s antipoverty strategy than they do today.