In mid-November, I wrote about a program that the Clinton Foundation has developed and championed called “Too Small to Fail.” It is about the need for early childhood education. This week, the White House took up the challenge of investing in early childhood education.
I had the opportunity to interview J.B. Pritzker on Thursday during the White House conference. Mr. Pritzker’s family foundation just pledged $25 million for at-risk infants. Their family foundation has taken a leadership position in developing programs that can be researched and quantified. We have learned to fund programs that don’t just feel good but actually work.
Economists are jumping in and actually running the numbers about early childhood education and intervention. They have proven that it makes a difference in everything from gross domestic product in the United States to lowering incarceration rates.
We now know there’s an “achievement gap.” This “achievement gap” in lower-income families (and perhaps high-stress families) can be found in the skills of children as young as nine months old. This means that the neuro development in these young children starts lagging and continues to lag until the beginning of school. Children of higher income families simply start out ahead.
The numbers can’t lie. According to the report, “The Economics of Early Childhood Investments,” about 60 percent of three- and four-year-olds whose mothers have a college degree are enrolled in preschool, compared to about 40 percent of children whose mothers did not complete high school.
People may have laughed at the presidential aspirations of then-Gov. Howard Dean. He is a trained physician, and when he was governor of Vermont, he instituted a voluntary home visitation program in the state. Now we have the research to back up his idea.
The Nurse Family Partnership begins home visits when a woman is pregnant though a child’s second birthday. The research has shown that participants in this program have had few arrests, lower rates of drug and alcohol abuse and lower rates of child abuse. They also found that children whose mothers participated in the program had better cognitive abilities by age six, lower anxiety, better self-esteem and, by age 12, they had improved math and language ablates and fewer school absences.
The economic benefits of early childhood education are staggering. I often hear on radio that Head Start does not work. If it does not work in certain geographic areas, it is because it begins too late. Cognitive interventions, such as increasing the number of different words a child hears, should begin within the first year of life. The brain makes the connections then and prunes the connections that are not useful. Waiting until four years old is simply too late.
The research has now been completed, and we know there are real economic advantages to early childhood education. It is not just a feel-good program. One area has been public assistance. Those who participated in early interventions – both the mothers and the children – have had measurable lifetime income changes. One study showed that mothers who participated increased their lifetime earnings by $79,000 and the children who were the recipients by $44,000. In terms of “special needs,” children who were in early child intervention programs made far less use of special needs resources than children who were not in the program. This benefit continued when these children graduated high school.
Kids who were the recipients of early childhood programs had lower arrest and incarceration rates. This not only makes an individual’s life happier but reduces costs for society. The studies vary, but the overall benefits are great. One study puts the cost benefits to society at $3 for every dollar spent. Another study shows a whooping difference of $11 for every dollar spent in early childhood education and intervention.
Lastly, we know there are benefits in overall health-care costs and childhood obesity rates. The naysayers on government spending should love this program. It simply costs less to invest in early childhood education in the long run.
In talk radio, it is not unusual to hear the argument, “It should not be the government’s job. It is the job of the parents.”
What if the parents do not know what to do? What if the parents had an education gap of their own? We know early education and intervention works. Let’s invest now.
The Obama administration did the hard work of getting private foundations and corporations to invest in the very youngest and newborns. It knows it works.
It is a great program. Everyone – Republicans, Democrats and independents – should get on board and support it. It will make America stronger and save us tons of money in the long run.
Media wishing to interview Ellen Ratner, please contact [email protected].
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