A new longitudinal study shows the effectiveness of intense early education intervention in our schools.
excerpts:
“More than 20 years later, educational attainment is higher and felony arrests are lower for the alumni of a Chicago early-intervention program for low-income children.
The enrollees, who are now in their late 20s, are also less likely to describe themselves as depressed and more likely to have health insurance, according to a follow-up study released this week.
According to co-author Arthur J. Reynolds, a child-development professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, the gains in terms of reduced social-welfare costs already have far exceeded the program’s $5,000 per student-year cost to the Chicago public school system.
“By the time they’re 65, a conservative estimate would be a 10-to-1 gain,” Reynolds said, considering reduced societal costs for remedial education, health care, incarceration and underemployment.”
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“These results have profound and encouraging implications for our ability to close the achievement gap” among disadvantaged children, said Gordon Berlin, the president of MDRC, a New York nonprofit agency that identifies social policy strategies that work.
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“This study begins to answer the question of whether a high-quality intervention could fortify Head Start and other early-childhood interventions, and power bigger results.”
Robert Godfrey
AMPS 