Investing in Preschool Programs

TLDR

It is uncertain which skills, behaviors, or developmental processes are key to producing longer‑run impacts of early childhood education. The review aims to assess whether spending on early childhood education constitutes a worthwhile social investment by summarizing evidence on program impacts and identifying factors that enhance program effectiveness. The authors survey existing early childhood education programs, synthesize results from rigorous evaluations, and analyze human‑development models, heterogeneity, and program ingredients to explain impact variation. Evidence shows that while many programs improve short‑term cognition and school achievement, most effects fade within a few years, yet a few well‑known programs yield lasting gains in education, earnings, and crime reduction.

Abstract

We summarize the available evidence on the extent to which expenditures on early childhood education programs constitute worthy social investments in the human capital of children. We provide an overview of existing early childhood education programs, and then summarize results from a substantial body of methodologically sound evaluations of the impacts of early childhood education. The evidence supports few unqualified conclusions. Many early childhood education programs appear to boost cognitive ability and early school achievement in the short run. However, most of them show smaller impacts than those generated by the best-known programs, and their cognitive impacts largely disappear within a few years. Despite this fade-out, long-run follow-ups from a handful of well-known programs show lasting positive effects on such outcomes as greater educational attainment, higher earnings, and lower rates of crime. It is uncertain what skills, behaviors, or developmental processes are particularly important in producing these longer-run impacts. Our review also describes different models of human development used by social scientists, examines heterogeneous results across groups, and tries to identify the ingredients of early childhood education programs that are most likely to improve the performance of these programs.