Quality Preschool Is the ‘Most Cost-Effective’ Educational Intervention

By RANDYE HODER

A decade or so ago, when it was time to send my children to preschool, it never occurred to me to do anything else. For an upper-middle-class family like mine, enrolling my kids in a half-day nursery school program with all of its benefits (socialization and school readiness, among them) was a no-brainer.
Now, amid a highly contentious national debate about whether preschool should be made available to all children, a new study provides a mountain of evidence that my parental instincts were right on the money. Literally. High-quality preschool programs are “the most cost-effective educational interventions and are likely to be profitable investments for society as a whole,” concludes the study, financed by the Foundation for Child Development and produced in collaboration with the Society for Research in Child Development.
The report, written by an interdisciplinary group of 10 early-childhood experts, is actually a “research brief” — an overview of “the most recent rigorous research” on a hot-button issue. Among its key findings:

•Large-scale, high-quality public preschool programs can have substantial impacts on children’s early learning.
•Quality preschool education can benefit middle-class children as well as disadvantaged children, though children from low-income families benefit more.
•Quality preschool education is a profitable investment, with $3 to $7 saved for every $1 spent.

The analysis will undoubtedly be greeted as good news by the Obama administration, given the president’s call to make federally funded, high-quality preschool “available to every single child in America.” Not that the critics can’t find fault. The research brief points to evaluations of early-childhood education programs in Tulsa, Okla., and Boston, which found large gains in math and reading among participants. But scholars at the Brookings Institution and elsewhere have attacked the Tulsa and Boston studies for their supposedly unreliable methodology.

More broadly, those who question the wisdom of extending early-childhood education cite research showing that third and fourth graders who are part of the federal government’s Head Start program and other such initiatives perform no better on standardized tests than do their peers who never attended preschool.
But the research brief released today, titled “Investing in Our Future,” makes clear that this is a narrow way to look at things. While the analysis fully acknowledges that there is little, if any, difference in test scores between those who go to preschool and those who don’t, it also found that there are “long-term effects on important societal outcomes such as years of education completed, earnings and reduced crime and teen pregnancy.”
At last count, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research, 41 percent of 4-year-olds and 14 percent of 3-year-olds in the United States are enrolled in publicly funded state and federal pre-K programs. Millions of children, especially from lower-income homes, find themselves shut out due to a shortage of spaces. Lack of access, however, is only part of the story. As the research brief notes, “only a minority of preschool programs are observed to provide excellent quality, and levels of instructional support are especially low.”
This suggests that even low-performing preschool programs are better than none at all. Imagine the gains to children and to society if both access and quality were increased. The writers go on to assert that “the most important aspects of quality in preschool education are stimulating and supportive interactions between teachers and children and effective use of curricula.”
“Children benefit most when teachers engage in stimulating interactions that support learning and are emotionally supportive,” the report said. The best of these exchanges “help children acquire new knowledge and skills . . . and foster engagement in and enjoyment of learning.”
Of course, I didn’t really need a team of Ph.D.’s to confirm this last point. Any mom or dad whose kids have benefited from a good preschool program could have told you that.