I’ve been out of town and not keeping up with the morning papers like I usually do, so thanks to Blogging Belmont reader Rita for pointing me to this recent article in the New York Times about the difference that excellent early education – especially kindergarten – can have in the trajectory of children’s lives.
As many of you who followed this debate in town when the issue of funding full day kindergarten came up in 2007 and 2008, there’s a common belief, based on some academic research, that more kindergarten doesn’t end up improving academic outcomes, at least in populations that aren’t at risk to begin with.
The times article takes up that issue of the “fade” effect by talking about a new study by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, who observed that earlier studies about the benefits of early childhood education Programs like FDK based their conclusions on analyses of student test scores in middle and high school, rather than on life outcomes like a child’s health or eventual earnings.
When Chetty and fellow researchers looked at those broader measures, by studying the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s,they discovered that their success in life correlated strongly with their exposure to high quality early education.
From the Times article:
“Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.”
How much more? The economists calculated that a 5 year old who benefitted from an excellent kindergarten teacher who was able to improve their test scores from just the 50th to 60th percentile earned $1,000 more a year by age 27 than a student who didn’t get that boost.
Check it out- there’s a link to the researchers’ presentation, too. But this brings us back to the argument about cuts without cutting – the way that withdrawing resources from our kids education (libraries, anyone) seem harmless, but can actually have large and unforseen consequences later on.