Investing In Preschool Programs

The article “Investing in Preschool Programs” by Greg J. Duncan and Katherine Magnuson (2013), is an attempt to illustrate the effectiveness of preschool education as a booster of cognitive and social skills. Early childhood programs have existed for many years, but they have been seen more as a way of facilitating parent’s labor rather than an outstanding way to promote human capital. Finding the way to improve human capital has kept the attention for decades among economist; since there is available information from sources like Barro-Lee (2013) and studies, like Assaf Razin (1977) and Hanushek E A and Wößmann L (2010), to prove the positive relationship between human capital and development , this study is well worth considering its contribution to society’s welfare.

The paper starts pointing out that there is a gap of more than one standard deviation between math and reading achievement of children from the top and bottom income quintiles and that rates of enrollment for children belonging to families with incomes in the bottom half of the distribution are 10 to 20 percent lower than those in the highest quarter; nevertheless, there are several preschool programs available especially for low income children. It also states that there is empirical evidence to support the relationship between the achievement of abilities and environmental enhancement during early childhood.

Although, findings may be mixed and in some cases it is difficult to identify the short and long run impact on non-cognitive outcome, the main result for existing preschool programs can be summarized as follow:

There are private and public (states and federal government) programs that provide early childhood education, the public ones are focused on increasing low-income children participation, having Head Start program as the largest federal compensatory preschool program designed to improve social and cognitive development by providing not only educational services but also, health, nutritional and other social services. There are also pre-kindergarten state programs that target low-income children and provide health, vision and hearing screenings.

The empirical evidence of the effectiveness of preschool education includes a wide range of programs and methodologies, but the article is focused on studies over the last 50 years regarding special attention to particular programs like Perry Preschool, the Abecedarian program and Head start Program.

For a sample of 84 programs, taken as a whole, the impact of early childhood education on cognitive and achievement is 0.35 standard deviations above the simple average. All of these programs met the minimum quality standard; however their duration is not the same, since there some of them lasted for two months while other for even five years.

A complementary fact that is important to notice is that there has been an increasing trend for low-income children participation in the programs along the last 40 years, there is also evidence of improvement of quality of home environment, since there has been a significant reduction of low-income mothers that lacked high school education.

Regarding specific programs, Perry Preschool and Abecedarian are several times larger than the weighted mean for all studies. Key reasons for this result in the Perry Preschool account for the two-year duration of the program, the emphasis on learning and solving problem activities as well as intellectual, social

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