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COPYRIGHT 2008 Hoover Institution Press
Last year, more than 30 states increased public funding for pre-K education. Advocates Pre-K Now and its congressional allies are pushing for new federal spending and regulations. Some analysts project enormous long-term benefits to participants from publicly funded "universal" pre-K as well as societal benefits and taxpayer savings. Others question their methodologies along with their calculations. In this Education Next forum, two of today's leading authorities on early childhood education consider what the research tells us about the effects of preschool, how preschool programs should be designed, and what it all means for public policy.
EDUCATION NEXT: What does the evidence tell us about the effectiveness of early childhood education programs and interventions?
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DOUGLAS BESHAROV: The idea that early childhood education "works" stems largely from the widely trumpeted results of two experimental programs operated in the 1960s and 1970s. Both the Perry Preschool Project and later the Abecedarian Project [see Figure 1 ] reported substantial initial gains in cognitive indicators followed by significant long-term improvements in later school performance, rates of teenage and nonmarital births, and employment and earnings.
Debate continues about the validity of these findings, but there is no denying that these programs operated in a far different social and demographic setting than programs today and that they were "hothouse" programs: Run by top-notch specialists, the programs served fewer than 200 children, cost at least $15,000 per child per year in today's dollars, often involved multiple years of services, had well-trained teachers, and instructed parents on effective child rearing. Significantly, the children they served had low IQs or had parents with low IQs. Since these two pioneering initiatives, no other rigorously evaluated programs have had similar results, despite many efforts to replicate them.
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Recent assessments of school-based pre-K programs in Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia indicate that they substantially raise children's vocabulary, math, and reading comprehension test scores at the end of one year. This important development points to the promise of such programs, but questions have been raised about the studies. In any event, they have so far only measured immediate or early gains in learning. There is as yet no evidence that these programs will have a lasting impact on the children.
One additional note: American families are divided about how much time young children should spend in child care. Although some advocates seem to think that early childhood education can begin in infancy, many families--and experts--are worried about having young children spend too much time in nonparental care. In this discussion, I assume that the early education is being offered for older preschoolers.
CRAIG RAMEY: The evidence is quite strong in favor of early education benefits, particularly for children from low-resource families. Low-resource families have limited parental education, very low family incomes, and/or parents unable to consistently provide highquality learning opportunities essential for normal brain and behavioral development. Early education yields results in terms of later academic achievement that are greater and last longer than do educational interventions that begin after failure in school. The Abecedarian Project was not a one-time hothouse program; it was immediately replicated with a new group of similar children (in Project CARE) who demonstrated equal benefits throughout their school years and early adulthood. Next, we adapted this educational intervention for low birth-weight and premature children in the Infant Health and Development Program, conducted in eight cities with 985 participants, and found benefits in ail eight cities, with the greatest benefits for children from families with the lowest levels of parent education. The last time these children were assessed, at age 18, they showed continued benefits from their early education. Other rigorously studied interventions include the Milwaukee Project and the Chicago Parent-Child Centers, which served thousands of children in multiple locations and resulted in long-term gains.
Key features of the proven programs that most likely account for the benefits are 1) employing highly competent staff, trained for their positions and then actively supervised; 2) monitoring children's progress; 3) providing educationally focused professional development or in-service training; 4) directly addressing children's needs to become capable in language and...
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