Research « Preschool Matters… Today!

Early Childhood Education Featured in Principal Magazine

August 10, 2011

NIEER co-directors Ellen Frede and Steve Barnett discuss the critical role pre-K plays in closing the achievement gap in the May/June issue of NAESP’s Principal magazine. Drs. Frede and Barnett note that the availability of preschool is a strong predictor of differences in scores in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a comparison of educational achievement across 65 countries. They also point to research findings that show national achievement test scores rise with the level of public spending on and quality of preschool education. Frede and Barnett maintain that a commitment to an effective, quality preschool program could reduce the achievement gap in the United States by 20 percent. The article from NIEER co-directors also offers principals and other school leaders 10 research-based, practice-tested steps they can take to increase the availability of quality pre-K whether or not they currently offer pre-K in their school.

Also included in the May/June 2011 issue of Principal magazine: Jacqueline Jones, senior adviser for early learning at the U.S. Department of Education, writes about assessment in early childhood education. First Five Years Fund director Harriet Dichter writes about pre-K to grade 3 education in Pennsylvania. University of North Carolina assistant professors Rebecca Shore and Pamela Shue and former principal Marion Bish report on a professional development program in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, designed to prepare elementary principals for preschool.

6 Comments | Achievement gap, Early Childhood, Early Education, Outcomes, Preschool, Quality Early Childhood Programs, Research | Permalink
Posted by NIEER

Human Capital Development: Why Pre-K Needs to be a Capitol Concern

August 5, 2011

It would be difficult to find a more timely report than Attracting, Developing, and Maintaining Human Capital: A New Model for Economic Development, from the Partnership for America’s Economic Success (a project of the Pew Center on the States). At the same time American families fret over the continued economic doldrums and begin to worry about back-to-school shopping for their kids, the report connects high-quality early education to long-term economic success, pulling from the new book by economist Timothy Bartik.

Bartik’s research makes a strong case for both the short- and long-term benefits of quality early education programs for students, parents, employers, and taxpayers. Short-term, investing public dollars in early education can:

Help attract skilled workers with young children, who prefer areas with high-quality education programs to those with low-quality or inaccessible programs;
Provide peace of mind to local employees, allowing them to be more productive and fully present on the job; and
Increase the demand for highly qualified teachers, who are likely to move to the area as well as spend their earnings locally.

These are essentially the same reasons parents are drawn to areas with good elementary and secondary schools. Businesses want to be in areas rich with highly qualified, happy employees, reflected in years of research showing that public services, including education systems, play more of a role in locating a company than does the business tax rate. Offering peace of mind to parents regarding the arrangements for their young learners has become more important throughout this economic downturn. A 2010 report from the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies (NACCRRA) found that 51 percent of families with child under age 5 had their child care affected in some way by the recession, even as 57 percent of these families reported child care as an economic necessity. Investing in high-quality early education could not only go beyond the needs of “just” child care but also alleviate the stress families feel regarding both the quality and cost of this care.

Some may ask, “What about the taxpayer?,” echoing the rallying cry of this age of austerity. As noted above, quality early education can improve the environments for both families and businesses, improving local tax revenues and quality of life. Bartik notes that the short- and long-term effects of pre-K include higher test scores. Looking further down the line, quality early learning experiences can reduce special education placements by up to 50 percent through second grade and reduce grade retention by up to 33 percent through eighth grade, both of which significantly reduce the cost of public education. All told, school systems can save up to $3,700 per child over the K-12 years, to say nothing of the crime-related savings of between $2 and $11 per each dollar invested in early education.

Bartik also calls up an interesting statistic in this age of globalization: 60 percent of American workers, including 45 percent of those with a college degree, continue to live and work in the state in which they were raised. Thus, the investments states make during early childhood to prepare children for school and, eventually, work pay off in benefits to taxpayers of those same states later in life. As any real estate agent can attest, parents are attracted to areas with good schools. Bartik’s research find the testing score improvements attributed to pre-K can improve property values by $13 for every dollar invested. Creating attracting education systems can also working parents to stay local, benefitting businesses and local tax bases.

Early childhood education does not need to be limited to state efforts. Bartik’s data indicates that as an economic development strategy, half-day pre-K for all 4-year-olds more than holds its own against business tax incentives. At the state level, pre-K benefits $2.78 for each dollar spent, not far behind the $3.14 benefitted by business incentives. At the national level, however, the $3.79 per dollar benefitted by pre-K far outstrips the $0.65 benefit-cost ratio of business tax incentives. Tax incentives encourage businesses to play musical chairs throughout the country, seeking to cut overhead without necessarily producing more. High-quality early education, though, starts children on an improved educational and social path that benefits workforce quality into the future. It is not difficult to understand, then, the federal government’s current Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge that seeks to develop these early learning programs.

As government at all levels continues its belt-tightening, there are those who claim pre-K is an unaffordable luxury, when in reality it is an astonishingly good investment for both the short- and long-term benefit of the nation. While pre-K has not traditionally been considered in the elementary education system supported by taxpayers, using public funds to provide such programs can actually spur current economic growth while preparing America for a prosperous future. A recent NIEER brief examines current public financing of early learning as well as how the system can be improved. Advocates of publicly-funded pre-K support early learning not only because it is the right thing for children, but also because it can mitigate some of the long-term deficit ills so recently brought to the national light.

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

4 Comments | Economics, Preschool, Research | Permalink
Posted by NIEER

Latest Yearbook Findings: A Wake-Up Call?

April 26, 2011

When NIEER’s research team analyzed the 2009–2010 data for this year’s State Preschool Yearbook, it was not without some trepidation. News coming from the states has been anything but encouraging and we knew the previous year’s data had not captured the full impact of the recession. In many respects, the 2009-2010 data does present a fuller appreciation of the economic stresses affecting the states. For the first time since we began tracking state pre-K, total spending for the country fell in real (inflation adjusted) dollars. So did per-child spending, which now sits $700 below what states, on average, spent in the 2001–2002 school year.

Beyond the national averages, however, there’s a very mixed picture — some of it good, some bad and some downright ugly. First, the good: Enrollment increased nationally with nearly 1.3 million children attending state-funded preschool education. While the enrollment increase was not large, it does stand as testimony to the value many state leaders grappling with tough economies place on preschool education. Alaska and Rhode Island started programs for the first time – the first new states to provide pre-K in many years.

But there was plenty of bad news. After adjusting for inflation, state funding per child declined in 19 of 40 states with programs. Many of these were relatively large states. Nine state (Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Carolina) cut per-child spending by more than 10 percent. While four states (Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia) improved on NIEER’s Quality Standards Checklist, two states (Ohio and Nebraska) lost ground. And, despite increased enrollment at age 4, enrollment of 3-year-olds decreased across the country with nine states (Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, and Washington) cutting enrollment at age 3 by 10 percent or more.

In talking with members of the early education community as we prepared to release the report, it sounded like more bad news is in the offing in states like North Carolina, New York, and Illinois. These are states that have made good progress in state pre-K in recent years – progress which is now being threatened by the proposed cuts and changes in governance. Barbara Bowman, a NIEER scientific advisory board member who runs Chicago’s pre-K program, describes the funding situation in Illinois as “dire” and points out that if the federal stimulus money she used this year to support public pre-K in Chicago isn’t replaced she will have to cut the number of kids they serve next year.

This state of affairs is not lost on U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who joined me in Washington to present the yearbook findings. Duncan remarked that educational inequality is the civil rights issue of our time and increased access to quality pre-K and other early learning opportunities is the way to begin addressing disparities.

– Steve Barnett
Co-director, NIEER

4 Comments | Early Childhood, Economics, Preschool, Quality Early Childhood Programs, Research, State-funded programs, Stimulus Funds | Permalink
Posted by NIEER

Will New Jersey Gut Its Abbott Preschool Program? Or, How to Ruin Absolutely Everything

February 4, 2011

New Jersey Republicans are floating a proposal to cut the state’s highly effective Abbott Preschool Program from a full day of services to half a day. This, they say, would free up about $300 million in school funding that could be “more equitably” disbursed statewide. As is so often the case with such figures, the math is wrong—the plan might free up $150 million, but that is the least of the proposal’s problems.

They justify their proposal on the basis that the Abbott v. Burke V court decision did not specifically require the state to provide a full day of pre-K in order to provide a thorough and efficient education. Indeed, the justices wrote in 1998 that half a day of pre-K for kids in the state’s disadvantaged districts could represent an “initial reform.” (Emphasis added on the latter.)

It should go without saying that in the intervening years we have learned critical lessons about what it takes to provide disadvantaged kids with the kinds of experiences that enable them to acquire the skills necessary to narrow the achievement gap and enter school ready to learn. Chief among them is that more is better. NIEER conducted a randomized trial in the Abbott districts comparing extended-day, extended-year pre-K to the old half-day, school-year model. The longer day and year had larger effects on test scores than a half-day and these gains persisted. By first grade, effects of duration were apparent on more complex measures such as reading comprehension and calculation and not just on simple tasks like letter and number recognition. Other studies show that full-day Abbott preschool delivers high-quality education that significantly raises test scores and reduces school failure.

The Republican proposal would take money from disadvantaged children in the Abbott districts to address problems in New Jersey’s school funding scheme that are not without merit. Districts with a high percentage of senior citizens would get some of the money. So would those that transport children over longer distances or have demonstrated cost efficiencies. However, the state should address these issues without gutting the Abbott Preschool Program to do it. One suggestion: forgo the $1 billion dollar voucher bill that would bail out private schools hurt by the recession, but do little to raise test scores.

Backers of the pre-K cut proclaim its virtues based on three principles — equity, efficiency and accountability. It passes none of those tests. The Abbott program was developed to remedy the gap in equity between disadvantaged kids and their more affluent peers. Gutting one of its major components is hardly equitable. Neither does it pass the efficiency test. When kids receive high-quality pre-K such as the Abbott program, the subsequent costs of educating them go down, and the longer term benefits include lower crime rates and a more productive workforce. Sprinkling the funds freed-up around the rest of the state can’t be shown to produce any comparable returns for the taxpayer — who knows how the funds will be used? And that brings us to accountability. One must simply ask, “What accountability?”

I subtitled this essay “How to Ruin Absolutely Everything” because it illustrates the kind of state policy making that ruins public education. Hard evidence on what works and what doesn’t is ignored in favor of wishful thinking, ideology, and special interests. No studies are conducted to test out new proposals before they are widely implemented. Financial estimates are put forward that have no basis in reality.

It is a cruel irony that at the same time the proposal to gut the Abbott program surfaced the legislature is rushing to pass a voucher bill that research shows has no hope of significantly improving academic achievement and Governor Christie’s administration has announced a plan for the state to spend as much as $200 million to jump start a stalled Atlantic City casino project from which Morgan Stanley, in its wisdom, bailed out. The governor should insist that his advisors conduct cost/benefit analyses of both the voucher bill and the boardwalk empire plan. While they are at it they should also run the numbers on the costs and benefits of the state’s investment in the Abbott Preschool Program. If he does, he’ll find the current pre-K program provides a rich return to the public while the other proposals are, as they say, under water.

Steve Barnett

Co-director, NIEER

3 Comments | Achievement gap, Economics, Outcomes, Preschool, Research, State-funded programs | Permalink
Posted by NIEER

Suffer the Children: An Alarming Confluence of Events

January 14, 2011

While investors are celebrating brighter prospects, the news from the hinterlands continues in a much darker vein. The Wall Street Journal reports that wages for a broad swath of the labor force have taken a “sharp and swift” fall to an extent rarely seen since the Great Depression. Between 2007 and 2009 more than half of workers who lost jobs and then found new ones reported wage declines, with more than a third of them reporting declines of 20 percent or more. Experts say it will be years, if ever, before their wages return to pre-recession levels.

This — and the fact that real unemployment in the U.S. continues well above 10 percent — should be setting of alarm bells for anyone worried about the nation’s future. Research shows that children whose parents lose jobs and eventually find new ones at lower wages suffer from lower wages themselves. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) tracked the progress of people who, as children, lived through the post-war recessions that began in 1973 and 1980. Kids whose parents suffered layoffs end up with lower earnings when they became adults. The impact was concentrated in kids from lower-income families, presumably because parental unemployment posed a larger threat to things that were critical to family sustenance. It was especially pronounce for children who were the youngest during the recessions. The researchers conclude that:

“… children who fall into poverty during a recession will fare far worse along a range of variables than will their peers who did not fall into poverty. They will live in households with lower incomes, they will earn less themselves and they have a greater chance at living in or near poverty as adults. They will achieve lower levels of education, and they will be less likely to be gainfully employed. Children who experience recession-induced poverty will even have poorer health than their peers who stayed out of poverty during the childhood recession.”

We already know that poverty has been rising in the U.S. for decades. The latest Census Bureau data show the gap between rich and poor to be the widest on record. The ratio of earnings between the top and bottom is about double what it was when the Census Bureau began tracking it in 1967.

Confronting this threat to the nation’s future well-being with investments in high-quality early childhood education would help secure their future. Yet early education is not a high priority among the policy solutions we see being put forth to address our long-term rise in poverty. It’s encouraging to hear some suggest federal aid to the states. A portion of this should be dedicated to competitive federal grants to the states for high-quality early education.

Children are not able to vote and households with children are a declining percentage of American households. Yet they represent 100 percent of the nation’s future well-being. As we view our policy solutions, we should apply the cold calculus any successful business uses in making economic decisions. If we do that — and take even a rudimentary look at the returns to be had by investing in early childhood education — it should rise to the top of the policy priority list.

Steve Barnett

Co-director, NIEER

4 Comments | Early Childhood, Economics, Outcomes, Research | Permalink
Posted by NIEER

Early Education Seen in a Human Capital Framework

December 23, 2010

The idea that education leads to the accumulation of capital in the form of more productive workers and that this returns a profit to those who invest in it goes all the way back to Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, the man considered the father of capitalism and whose The Wealth of Nations is considered the first modern work of economics. It is ironic that in this day and age, the human capital rationale for investing in more and better early education continues to receive short shrift in this most capital-oriented of countries while China and other rising powers forge ahead of us on this front. Could it be that our policymakers are not sufficiently persuaded?

If so, Childhood Programs and Practices in the First Decade of Life: A Human Capital Integration, recently published by Cambridge University Press, provides all the evidence even the skeptics among our political leadership will need in a single volume. In it, leading scholars in human development and early childhood education discuss the effects and cost effectiveness of the most thoroughly studied model early childhood programs as well as state and federal programs. Head Start, Early Head Start, the WIC nutrition program, the Chicago Child-Parent Centers, the Nurse-Family Partnership, the Perry Preschool Program, and state pre-K are among them. Also discussed are various school reform strategies.

The book applies a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding and improving programs, practices, and policies with a goal of fostering increased human capital. This is reflected in the editors chosen for the assignment: Arthur J. Reynolds is a professor at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota and director of the Chicago Longitudinal Study. Arthur J. Rolnick is senior vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and associate economist with the Federal Open Market Committee. Michelle M. Englund is a research associate and affiliate member of the Graduate Faculty in Child Psychology at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. Judy A. Temple is an associate professor at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota.

State-funded early childhood education is well represented in the book. Georgetown University’s William T. Gormley who has studied Oklahoma’s universal pre-K program extensively provides his analysis of the impressive gains made by that program in Tulsa. Our NIEER team, including co-director Ellen Frede and fellow NIEER researchers Kwanghee Jung, Cynthia Esposito Lamy (now at Robin Hood Foundation), and Alexandra Figueras, contributes a chapter on the long-term effects of New Jersey’s well-regarded Abbott Preschool Program. Robert G. Lynch, Washington College, provides a state-level synthesis of the cost effectiveness of public investment in high-quality pre-K.

In addition to Arthur Reynolds, other NIEER affiliated authors in this book include Clive Belfield (Queens College, City University of New York), Henry Levin (Columbia University), Robert C. Pianta (University of Virginia), Lawrence J. Schweinhart (HighScope Educational Research Foundation), and Edward Zigler (Yale University).

Childhood Programs and Practices in the First Decade of Life: A Human Capital Integration emanates from a conference by the same name held by the Human Capital Research Collaborative. That’s the organization sponsored by the University of Minnesota and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis that explores links between human capital and economic development, public health, education, and other connections. With this effort, they have gone a long way toward accomplishing their mission.

1 Comment | Benefit-Cost analysis, Early Education, Early Head Start, Economics, Head Start programs, Preschool, Research, State-funded programs | Permalink
Posted by NIEER

When it Comes to Pre-K, New Mexico Has What it Takes

November 12, 2010

The New Mexico PreK initiative expanded quickly when it began in 2005. Five years later it was serving upwards of 5,000 children. Unlike other state programs with speedy ramp-up times, this one has undergone rigorous examination throughout its early growth period and stood up well. A multi-year evaluation study, funded by the State of New Mexico, began the same year as the PreK program itself.

This month, my research colleagues and I issued the latest in our series of reports focusing on the impacts of New Mexico PreK on children’s vocabulary, math, and literacy skills at the beginning of kindergarten. Our data (for the 2008-2009 school year) were gathered from a sample of 1,359 children from Public Education Department (PED) and Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD) PreK sites statewide. Kids attending the program scored significantly higher on assessments of vocabulary, early math, and literacy in comparison to children who did not attend.

These results show that children gained important skills in areas such as addition and subtraction, telling time, knowledge of letters, and familiarity with words and book concepts. The vocabulary test is predictive of reading success and general cognitive abilities. Our conclusion: Kids who attend New Mexico PreK are better prepared to enter kindergarten than those who do not.

These positive findings merit particular attention in the context of New Mexico’s current budget shortfall. First, the state has discontinued funding our PreK evaluation. More importantly in the day-to-day lives of New Mexicans, the state PreK appropriation has decreased for the current school year. This represents the first decline in state funding since New Mexico PreK began five years ago. And, as a result, PreK enrollment declined this fall by more than 10 percent.

Over the past five years, program administrators at PED and CYFD showed they know how to launch a good program and expand it with high quality standards. And a greater percentage of 4-year-olds in New Mexico were enrolled in state prekindergarten than in any other Western state except Colorado. But continued expansion of this effective program may be threatened. Even at its highest point of enrollment last school year, fewer than one in five children were enrolled. In her campaign, Governor-elect Susana Martinez said she will protect public education. Let’s hope that extends to maintaining and expanding the investment in New Mexico’s well-documented PreK winner.

Jason Hustedt

NIEER Senior Research Fellow

Assistant Professor

Department of Human Development and Family Studies

University of Delaware

3 Comments | Early Childhood, Early Literacy, Mathematics Education, Outcomes, Preschool, Research, State-funded programs | Permalink
Posted by NIEER

What Can Colombia Teach Us About Early Education?

October 28, 2010

So much of what we know about the effects of early childhood education is based on research conducted in North America where we have been fortunate enough to have studies like those conducted on the Perry Preschool Program. Of course, repeating the Perry study 40 years later would be difficult if not impossible here in the U.S. That’s because over the decades out-of-home child care and preschool have become so prevalent that any large sample of children against which researchers compare the early education treatment is far less likely to have attended no type of early childhood program. This complicates matters when measuring the true effects of access to quality preschool since it is difficult to gauge to what extent the “impure” control group affects the outcome.

That isn’t the case in Colombia where I grew up. There, preschool education as we in the U.S. have come to know it is far less prevalent. Colombia has about 4.9 million children under age 5 and sadly only 30 percent of these receive early childhood services. Currently, Colombia is experiencing a large, smooth expansion of its early childhood provision, increasing access and/or quality through public provision and through public-private partnerships. This makes Colombia a good place for conducting high-quality randomized studies, working with larger samples of children than the Perry researchers had at their disposal, and for impacting early childhood development (ECD) policy and growth in access through such research.

At NIEER we have begun a randomized study in partnership with AeioTU, a well-regarded preschool program whose mission is providing high-quality early education to children in poverty. Working with a sample of about 1,200 children in two sites, our research team will investigate child growth and development in the cognitive, socio-emotional and health areas. Over time, we will estimate children’s outcomes at primary school entry and throughout primary and secondary school, and program cost-effectiveness. We believe the results will not only update the field in terms of the impact of high-quality ECD, but also be relevant for ECD policies being implemented all over the region. Our project now counts on the collaboration of Los Andes, a leading university in Colombia and a wonderful local PI, Dr. Raquel Bernal, as well as the Jacobs Foundation in Switzerland and the Inter-American Development Bank.

NIEER co-director Steve Barnett and I recently visited the AeioTU centers participating in the study, and met with our local evaluation team to assess solutions to issues that have arisen in the fieldwork. To say the Colombians are enthusiastic about the study would be an understatement. The presentation we did on the study was profiled in leading newspapers in Colombia. In addition, we are able to count on wonderful support from community leaders, local government, and the national government. In Santa Marta, one of the cities where we gave our presentation, the mayor presented Steve with the keys to the city!

Milagros Nores
Principal Investigator
Assistant Research Professor, NIEER

4 Comments | Child Development, Early Childhood, Preschool, Research | Permalink
Posted by NIEER

The Perry Preschool Study Stands the Test of Time, but It Doesn’t Stand Alone

September 17, 2010

Perhaps because the Perry Preschool study is cited so often to demonstrate the long-term benefits of preschool, it seems the landmark study is often criticized – or at least its flaws underscored in an attempt to discredit its findings as relevant to today’s world. This week I decided to address the validity of some of the criticisms I hear most often. At the same time I add a word of caution about relying too much on this (or any) single study.

Claim: The Perry study was poorly randomized and so its results cannot be trusted.

Response: No study is perfect, and the Perry study had minor problems in random assignment. However, these do not invalidate the results. For example, a few children assigned to the treatment group crossed over to the control group because their mothers worked and getting their children to and from a half-day preschool program was difficult. As children of mothers who were employed tended to do better on tests and in school than others, this had the effect of making the control group look better, biasing estimated effects downward. A recent re-analysis of the Perry study by James Heckman and others at the University of Chicago that takes into account the limitations of the randomization finds that the basic results were not altered.

Claim: The Perry program was not preschool education in the usual sense, because it had an extensive home-visiting program to provide maternal training.

Response: The home visits were designed to work with child and mother. Their primary value may have been to help the teacher focus on individualizing their teaching to each child and providing one-on-one tutoring. Data collected on the families do not show any effects on the home learning environment, including such activities as reading to the child. After the Perry study, a curriculum comparison study was conducted in which the frequency of home visits was reduced in the next study to once every other week with no apparent impact on children’s learning gains. Neither meta-analyses nor direct experimental comparisons have confirmed the hypothesis that home-visiting involving parents adds to the effectiveness of preschool programs. The Perry study’s results point to the importance of the teacher’s interaction with the child with primary emphasis on the classroom. Other studies of programs that did not have home visits have produced similar results. Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Early Childhood, Outcomes, Preschool, Research | Permalink
Posted by NIEER

Three Easy Pieces (of Research) for Budget Deciders

August 27, 2010

As the recession drags on, it becomes ever-more-obvious the ABC (across-the-board cuts) approach to controlling government expenditures is harming our chances for a robust economy in the future. That’s because ABC looks at everything as a cost, ignoring investments in areas like early childhood education that are critical to future economic growth. ABC has been in especially heavy use at the state level. Over the past two years, some states have spared pre-K from ABC while others have not. Other early childhood programs have suffered from ABC, as well. Next year could see more of the same.

These cuts come at a time when evidence continues to mount on the critical importance of investments in children before they reach school. For budget deciders who may be considering future cuts and may not be not up on the latest findings, I offer three important, easy-to-understand pieces of research that have turned up just this year. Each looks at different impacts of investments on young children and underscores the importance of prioritizing investments in early learning and development.

1. Poverty’s Negative Effect on the Very Young. A University of California study tracking the lives of children born between 1968 and 1975 found that poverty during the period when children are infants to age 5 has a lasting detrimental impact on outcomes related to attainment such as earnings and hours worked. Negative impacts from poverty during this early period could be measured as late as age 37. Subsequent periods of poverty, when children were older, had fewer detrimental effects.

2. Why Good Teachers for Young Children Pay Off. Harvard economist Raj Chetty and colleagues have made public findings from a yet-to-be-published study of the life paths of children who were part of Tennessee’s 1980s-era Project Star. Chetty says students who learned more in kindergarten were more likely to attend college than kids with similar backgrounds and more likely to save for retirement and earn more. Here is his Power Point presentation: http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/STAR_slides.pdf.

3. Negative Early Experiences Last a Lifetime. A research paper just out from Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child presents evidence on how children’s early experiences become integrated into their response systems, leading to long-term effects in areas such as their overall physical health and ability to respond to stress and achieve. The authors call for, among other things, improving the quality of child care and preschool education.

Steve Barnett
Co-director, NIEER

4 Comments | Child Development, Economics, Outcomes, Research, Teachers | Permalink
Posted by NIEER