This is from a recent report that evaluates the current research on the effectiveness of early education.
http://fcd-us.org/sites/default/files/Evidence%20Base%20on%20Preschool%20Education%20FINAL.pdf
Investing in Our Future: The Evidence Base on Preschool Education
Executive Summary
Large-scale public preschool programs can have substantial impacts on children’s
early learning. Scientific evidence on the impacts of early childhood education has
progressed well beyond exclusive reliance on the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian
programs. A recent analysis integrating evaluations of 84 preschool programs concluded
that, on average, children gain about a third of a year of additional learning across language,
reading, and math skills. At-scale preschool systems in Tulsa and Boston have produced
larger gains of between a half and a full year of additional learning in reading and math.
Benefits to children’s socio-emotional development and health have been documented in
programs that focus intensively on these areas.
Quality preschool education is a profitable investment. Rigorous efforts to estimate
whether the economic benefits of early childhood education outweigh the costs of providing
these educational opportunities indicate that they are a wise financial investment. Available
benefit-cost estimates based on older, intensive interventions, such as the Perry Preschool
Program, as well as contemporary, large-scale public preschool programs, such as the
Chicago Child-Parent Centers and Tulsa’s preschool program, range from three to seven
dollars saved for every dollar spent.
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. Interactions that help children acquire new
knowledge and skills provide input to children, elicit verbal responses and reactions from
them, and foster engagement in and enjoyment of learning. Recent evaluations tell us that
effective use of curricula focused on such specific aspects of learning as language and
literacy, math, or socio-emotional development provide a substantial boost to children’s
learning. Guidelines about the number of children in a classroom, the ratio of teachers and
children, and staff qualifications help to increase the likelihood of—but do not assure—
supportive and stimulating interactions. Importantly, in existing large-scale studies, only a
minority of preschool programs are observed to provide excellent quality and levels of
instructional support are especially low.
Supporting teachers in their implementation of instructional approaches through
coaching or mentoring can yield important benefits for children. Coaching or
mentoring that provides support to the teacher on how to implement content-rich and
engaging curricula shows substantial promise in helping to assure that such instruction
is being provided. Such coaching or mentoring involves modeling positive instructional
approaches and providing feedback on the teacher’s implementation in a way that sets goals
but is also supportive. This can occur either directly in the classroom or though web-based
exchange of video clips.
Quality preschool education can benefit middle-class children as well as disadvantaged
children; typically developing children as well as children with special needs; and dual
language learners as well as native speakers. Although early research focused only on
programs for low-income children, more recent research focusing on universal preschool
programs provides the opportunity to ask if preschool can benefit children from middle income
as well as low-income families. The evidence is clear that middle-class children can
benefit substantially, and that benefits outweigh costs for children from middle-income as
well as those from low-income families. However, children from low-income backgrounds
benefit more. Children with special needs who attended Tulsa’s preschool program showed
comparable improvements in reading and pre-writing skills as typically developing children.
Further, at the end of first grade, children with special needs who had attended Head Start
as 3-year-olds showed stronger gains in math and social-emotional development than
children with special needs who had not attended Head Start. Studies of both Head Start
and public preschool programs suggest that dual language learners benefit as much as, and
in some cases more than, their native speaker counterparts.
A second year of preschool shows additional benefits. The available studies, which focus
on disadvantaged children, show further benefits from a second year of preschool. However,
the gains are not always as large as from the first year of preschool. This may be because
children who attend two years of preschool are not experiencing a sequential building of
instruction from the first to the second year.
Long-term benefits occur despite convergence of test scores. As children from
low-income families in preschool evaluation studies are followed into elementary school,
differences between those who received preschool and those who did not on tests of
academic achievement are reduced. However, evidence from long-term evaluations of
both small-scale, intensive interventions and Head Start suggest that there are long-term
effects on important societal outcomes such as high-school graduation, years of education
completed, earnings, and reduced crime and teen pregnancy, even after test-score effects
decline to zero. Research is now underway focusing on why these long-term effects occur
even when test scores converge.
There are important benefits of comprehensive services when these added services
are carefully chosen and targeted. When early education provides comprehensive
services, it is important that these extensions of the program target services and practices
that show benefits to children and families. Early education programs that have focused in
a targeted way on health outcomes (e.g., connecting children to a regular medical home;
integrating comprehensive screening; requiring immunizations) have shown such benefits as
an increase in receipt of primary medical care and dental care. In addition, a parenting focus
can augment the effects of preschool on children’s skill development, but only if it provides
parents with modeling of positive interactions or opportunities for practice with feedback.
Simply providing information through classes or workshops is not associated with further
improvements in children’s skills.
Monday, October 21, 2013
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Universal Pre-K
Any thoughtful person.....
The Push for Universal Pre-K
By NANCY FOLBRE
The labor is going to be long and difficult, but this baby is on its way in most affluent countries. Japan and Germany, two countries long considered laggards in the child care area, are now increasing their spending. In the United States, President Obama is keeping the issue atop his domestic agenda, where it is gaining traction despite slim chances of Congressional approval. Many states and several big cities have developed innovative and successful pre-K programs.
I’ve touched on some of the reasons forresistance to increased public investment in children in earlier posts. Sometimes the issue is framed as one of disagreement over social cost-benefit analysis, but many economists, most famously James Heckman of the University of Chicago, offer powerful evidence of a high social rate of return in the form of improved outcomes for children. The net benefits loom even larger when the value of increased work flexibility for parents is added in.
Most families worry more about their own budgets and the relative well-being of their own children than the growth of the overall economy or average child outcomes. Persistently high unemployment and the decline of middle-class jobs increase apprehensions about competition among members of the next generation. Will there be enough future demand for all this human capital we are urged to invest in?
On the other hand, universal pre-K eases economic stress on parents and improves human resources. It helps counter economic forces that are bothdriving up the relative cost of child-rearing and increasing economic inequality.
Sustained below-replacement fertility will increase the share of elderly in the population, threaten national and ethnic identity, and weaken the links between present and future generations that are forged by family commitments. The taxes paid by the working-age population benefit all elderly fellow citizens, including those who have contributed relatively little to their care. In tomorrow’s global economy, the quality of future workers will matter even more than the quantity.
Entirely self-interested individuals have no reason to worry about what happens after they die. But a nation, like a family, hopes and plans to live on.
Currently, the United States ranks far below most members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (including Japan and Germany) in both public expenditure on child care services as a percentage of gross domestic product and child care enrollment among those under age 6.
Other countries are also making more rapid progress. Japanese anxieties about women’s labor-force participation and fertility recently prompted Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to promise a significant expansion of day care(enough to eliminate current waiting lists) by 2017.
In Germany, the recently re-elected government of Angela Merkel has taken a different tack, promising to increase the number of public child care slots but also creating an allowance for families who care for very young children at home.
President Obama couched his proposal as a federal/state partnership to expand high-quality public preschool to reach all low- and moderate-income 4-year-olds from families with incomes at or below 200 percent of poverty, to be financed by an increased tax on tobacco, which would also help deter youngsters from smoking. On Sept. 22 and 23, a summit of national business leaders in Atlanta mobilized support for early childhood education, though it stopped short of endorsing the president’s plan.
On both the federal and state level, efforts to cut government spending have taken a big bite out of public child care programs. This coming year, 57,000 children will lose access to Head Start as a result of sequestration.
While states vary enormously in terms of both levels and trends, average per-child spending has recently declined, leading the National Institute for Early Education Research report on the State of Preschool to characterize the 2011-12 year as “the worst in a decade for progress in access to high-quality pre-K for American’s children.” Still, the report noted that enrollment in state programs increased rapidly over the last decade and was now holding even.
It also singled out Washington for serving a higher percentage of 3- and 4-year-olds (and spending more per child) than any state. The city’s relatively large population means that more 4-year-olds are in pre-K there than in 15 states with programs. A recent post in The New York Times’s Motherlode blog vividly describes how the program changed one parent’s life.
Last month in San Antonio, Mayor Julián Castro greeted 4-year-olds taking part in a new pre-K program aimed at low-income families, financed by a 1/8-cent increase in the local sales tax. Once the program is up and running,about 4,000 children will benefit.
In New York City, the Democratic mayoral candidate Bill DeBlasio has called for an increase in the city’s tax rate on income over $500,000 (to 4.4 percent from the current 3.87 percent) to raise money for pre-K and after-school programs.
In the long run, such local conceptions could lead up to a big national delivery.
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