Long-Term Studies of Preschool: Lasting Benefits Far Outweigh Costs

Abstract

Mr. Bracey and Mr. Stellar summarize the findings of three studies that provide strong evidence of long-term positive outcomes for high-quality preschool programs. All that remains now, they argue, is for the U.S. to make a commitment to universal, free preschool. THE NOVEMBER 2001 issue of the Kappan contained a special section offering a cross-national perspective on early childhood education and day care. Day-care programs in England, Italy, and Sweden were described and contrasted with day care in the U.S. other countries, especially Sweden, have coherent, comprehensive programs based on a set of assumptions about the positive outcomes of early education. In the U.S., by contrast, there is a nonsystem. Sharon Lynn Kagan and Linda Hallmark wrote that, in the U.S., only has early childhood never been a national priority, but decades of episodic, on-again, off-again efforts have yielded a set of uncoordinated programs and insufficient investment in the infrastructure. Often, the most important components of high-quality education and care -- financing, curriculum development, and teacher education -- are neglected.1 According to Kagan and Hallmark, the U.S. has historically resisted major government intrusions into the early years of education because such intervention would signal a failure on the part of the family. This resistance has produced a vicious circle: parents resist government intervention in the education of young children on ideological grounds; the government, for its part, doesn't produce high-quality day care; parental resistance to government day care solidifies because of the low quality of the care. Today, the ideology that seeks to keep government out of family matters is still very much alive. David Salisbury of the Cato Institute put it this way: The key to producing intelligent, healthy children does not lie in putting more of them in taxpayer-funded preschools. . . . Instead of forcing mothers into the workplace through heavy taxation, the government should reduce the tax burden on families and, thereby, allow child care to remain in the capable hands of parents.2 This view of day care is most unfortunate, as evidence is now strong that high-quality day care produces long-term positive outcomes. Three studies of specific programs provide the evidence. granddaddy of these three studies is known as the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project.3 In the mid-1960s, African American children whose parents had applied to a preschool program in Ypsilanti, Michigan, were randomly assigned to receive the program or not. Those who tested the children, interviewed the parents, or were the children's teachers once they reached school age did not know to which group the children had been assigned. Random assignment eliminates any systematic bias between the groups, although it cannot guarantee that they will be the same. By keeping the information on group assignment confidential, the experimenters sought to minimize any kind of Pygmalion effects stemming from expectations about the children who had been in preschool and those who had not. Few preschool programs existed at the time, and children in the control group remained at home. Parents of the preschool children had completed an average of 9.4 years of school. Only 20% of the parents had high school diplomas, compared to 33% of all African American adults at the time of the study. children attended preschool for a half day for eight months. first group of children, entering in 1962, received one year of the preschool program; later groups received two. program also included weekly, 90-minute home visits by members of the project staff. vision of childhood underlying the High/Scope Program was shaped by Piaget and other theorists who viewed children as active learners. Teachers asked questions that allowed children to generate conversations with them. Those who developed the program isolated 10 categories of preschool experience that they deemed important for developing children: creative representation, language and literacy, social relations and personal initiative, movement, music, classification, seriation (creating series and patterns), number, space, and time. …