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Investing in preschool programs

Description:
At the beginning of kindergarten, the math and reading achievement gaps between children in the bottom and top income quintiles amount to more than a full standard deviation. Early childhood education programs provide child care services and may facilitate the labor market careers of parents, but their greatest potential value is as a human capital investment in young children, particularly children from economically disadvantaged families (Heckman 2006). After all, both human and animal studies highlight the critical importance of experiences in the earliest years of life for establishing the brain architecture that will shape future cognitive, social, and emotional development, as well as physical and mental health (Sapolsky 2004; Knudsen, Heckman, Cameron, and Shonkoff 2006). Moreover, research on the malleability (plasticity) of cognitive abilities finds these skills to be highly responsive to environmental enrichment during the early childhood period (Nelson and Sheridan 2011). Perhaps early childhood education programs can be designed to provide the kinds of enrichment that low-income children most need to do well in school and succeed in the labor market. We summarize the available evidence on the extent to which expenditures on early childhood education programs constitute worthy social investments in the human capital of children. We begin with a short overview of existing early childhood education programs, and then summarize results from a substantial body of methodologically sound evaluations of the impacts of early childhood education. We find that the evidence supports few unqualified conclusions. Many early childhood Investing in Preschool Programs education programs appear to boost cognitive ability and early school achievement in the short run. However, most of them show smaller impacts than those generated by the best-known programs, and their cognitive impacts largely disappear within a few years. Despite this fade-out, long-run follow-ups from a handful of well-known programs show lasting positive effects on such outcomes as greater educational attainment, higher earnings, and lower rates of crime. Since findings regarding short and longer-run impacts on "noncognitive" outcomes are mixed, it is uncertain what skills, behaviors, or developmental processes are particularly important in producing these longer-run impacts. Our review also describes different models of human development used by social scientists, examines heterogeneous results across groups, and tries to identify the ingredients of early childhood education programs that are most likely to improve the performance of these programs. We use the terms "early childhood education" and "preschool' interchangeably to denote the subset of programs that provide group-based care in a center setting and offer some kind of developmental and educational focus. This definition is intentionally broad, as historical distinctions between early education and other kinds of center-based child care programs have blurred. Many early education programs now claim the dual goals of supporting working families and providing enriched learning environments to children, while many child care centers also foster early learning and development (Adams and Rohacek 2002). (author abstract)
Resource Type:
Reports & Papers
Country:
United States

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