New Analysis Finds Long-Lasting Benefits From Early-Childhood Education

By Christina Samuels on November 16, 2017 11:00 AM

High-quality early-childhood programs boost graduation rates, reduce grade retention and cut down on special education placements, according to a new analysis of several other early-education research studies that adds fresh fuel to long-running policy debates about the effectiveness of pre-K.

"These results suggest that the benefits of early-childhood education programs do in fact persist beyond the preschool year," said Dana Charles McCoy, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in an email interview. McCoy was the lead author on the analysis, which was published Thursday in the journal Educational Researcher.

"Given how costly retention, special education, and dropout can be for both individuals and societies, our results suggest that investments in high-quality early-childhood education programming are likely to pay off in the long term," McCoy said.

The findings contrast with other research, such as on the federal Head Start program and on Tennessee's preschool program, that have found that the behavioral and academic benefits of those programs fade over time. 

The Head Start and Tennessee studies, however, examined child outcomes a few years into participants' elementary school years. In contrast, this new analysis took a longer view; many of the studies tracked children into high school and beyond. The researchers found that participants in early-childhood programs had an 8.1 percentage point reduction on special education placement and an 8.3 percentage point reduction in grade retention compared to similar peers. Participants also had an 11.4 percentage point increase in high-school graduation. 

New Analysis Combines Results of Previous Early-Childhood Research

The new paper combines the results of 22 research papers on early-childhood programs that were conducted from 1960 to 2016. The researchers included only papers that met a strict research design—for example, the comparison groups of children were similar at the outset, the studies didn't have a large percentage of children dropping out, and there was enough data to calculate the effects of the early-childhood program on each of three areas researchers were looking at.

Some of the studies included are well-known, such as the Perry Preschool project conducted in Ypsilanti, Mich., in the 1960s, or the 1970-era Abecedarian early-childhood program conducted in 1970s. Those particular programs have been well-studied for their long-lasting benefits to children. But they were particularly intensive, and early-childhood programs don't look much like that any more, critics have noted. 

The new analysis, however, includes newer research, including studies of children attending preschool in some of New Jersey's poorest urban districts; research on children attending a birth-through-5 program in Tulsa, Okla., and the Chicago Child-Parent Centers, which enrolled primarily black children from low-income families and tracked their outcomes.

"One of the primary advantages of our study is that we are able to include more than five decades' worth of programs, including recent studies that are more representative of the modern early-childhood landscape," McCoy said.

"With that said, because we are looking at outcomes that are only observable years—or even decades—after children attend preschool, we can't necessarily make conclusions about whether the programs that are being implemented today will show benefits like the ones we observe in our study."

Even so, the early-childhood field is "in agreement that high-quality early-education does work, both for supporting children and for supporting working families," McCoy said. 

What Is the Purpose of Preschool?

Student Opinion

By  CAROLINE CROSSON GILPIN JUNE 2, 2017

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Ashley Rzonca, a preschool teacher at Woodside Community School in Queens, with students last month.CreditEdu Bayer for The New York Times 

Did you attend preschool? If so, how old were you, and what do you remember learning?

What are your memories of the preschool years before kindergarten, and looking back, how do you feel about the experience?

In a May 30 article, “Free Play or Flashcards? New Study Nods to More Rigorous Preschools,” Dana Goldstein writes:

A group of students at Woodside Community School in Queens peered up at their teacher one morning this month, as she used an overhead projector to display a shape.

It looked like a basic geometry lesson one might find in any grade school, except for the audience: They were preschoolers, seated cross-legged on a comfy rug.

“What attributes would tell me this is a square?” asked the teacher, Ashley Rzonca.

A boy named Mohammed raised his hand, having remembered these concepts from a previous lesson. “A square has four angles and four equal sides,” he said.

As school reformers nationwide push to expand publicly funded prekindergarten and enact more stringent standards, more students are being exposed at ever younger ages to formal math and phonics lessons like this one. That has worried some education experts and frightened those parents who believe that children of that age should be playing with blocks, not sitting still as a teacher explains a shape’s geometric characteristics.

But now a new national study suggests that preschools that do not mix enough fiber into their curriculum may be doing their young charges a disservice.

The study found that by the end of kindergarten, children who had attended one year of “academic-oriented preschool” outperformed peers who had attended less academic-focused preschools by, on average, the equivalent of two and a half months of learning in literacy and math.

“Simply dressing up like a firefighter or building an exquisite Lego edifice may not be enough,” said Bruce Fuller, the lead author of the study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you can combine creative play with rich language, formal conversations and math concepts, that’s more likely to yield the cognitive gains we observed.”