October 24th and 25th at  Alfred Lerner Hall, Columbia University

The Promise of Early Childhood Education

Presenter:

• Clive R. Belfield
  

Summary:

Early childhood education offers two promises. First, it can reduce inequalities between children both at the start of school and later on in adulthood. Second, it can generate savings for society and for taxpayers.

Initial disparities between children are strong and these differences foreshadow the large disparities as children graduate from school and must become economically independent:

• In raw math scores, the average black child is 27 percentiles behind the average white child on entry to first grade. Hispanic children are 24 percentiles behind. Children from lower socioeconomic groups are similarly far behind.

Current pre-school options already work toward compensating for these initial disparities for some groups:

• Under age 6, black children are more likely to participate in pre-school programs than whites: the rates are 33% versus 26%. However, for Hispanic children the rate is only 19%. Across family income, the lowest rates of participation (at 20%) are for families just above the poverty line. In addition, even with compensatory programs, mothers with low education levels are the least likely to send their children to pre-school.
• The more important concern is the quality of the programs that different children receive, and whether these programs are sufficient to offset differences in family resources.

Early childhood education programs are effective in raising achievement levels:

• Family support programs show effect size gains of about 4 percentiles in cognitive and social development; typical center-based child care raises cognitive ability by 4 to 13 percentiles; and Head Start raises language and cognitive abilities by 4 to 9 percentiles; and social behavior by 4 percentiles.
• Programs may also be differentially effective in raising achievement levels more for disadvantaged groups. Participants in Oklahoma''''s universal program experience gains of 16% in overall language and cognitive skills tests, and the effects for black and Hispanic children are respectively two and four times as large as those for whites. Similar results, although not as strong, are reported from the universal pre-K program in Georgia.
• Simulations suggest that expanded pre-schooling will reduce the black-white achievement gap by about 12% and the Hispanic-white test score gap by 16%.

The real promise of pre-schooling in reducing inequities rests on its effects on a whole range of behavioral outcomes both for children in the short-term and into adulthood over the lifetime:

• Pre-K participation in model programs reduces high school dropout rates dramatically: the Chicago Child-Parent Centers program reduced high school dropouts by 24%; for the High/Scope Perry Pre-School program, reduction was 25%; for the Abecedarian EC Intervention, 32%.
• Reduction in special education placement associated with these programs ranged from 8% to 43%; reduction in the number of children retained in grade ranged as high as 47%.
• Reduction in teen parenting rates associated with these programs ranged from 7 to 19 percentage points. Drug use among graduates of Abecedarian EC Intervention was 21 percentage points lower than among a control group that had not attended the program, and female graduates of the Perry Pre-School Program were 22 percentage points less likely to have an abortion than non-participants. Head Start graduates were 12 percentage points less likely to be booked for or charged with a crime than controls.

These changes in behavior also hold the promise for reducing the economic burden to society and taxpayers. Consistently, economists find that pre-schooling can reduce the social costs of inadequate education:

• For the general public, there are gains in terms of: income tax revenues as participants earn more; expenditure savings as schools are able to reduce special education placements and grade retention; and cost-savings through reduced need for criminal justice system expenditures.
• For Perry Pre-School , every $1 investment returns almost $6. For Abecedarian Early Childhood Intervention, every $1 investment returns between $2 and almost $4. For Chicago Child-Parent Pre-School Center and Expansion Program, every $1 investment returns about $7. These returns are “more than sufficient to pay for the cost of provision.”

Presentation Papers

• The Promise of Early Childhood Education