To understand the case for public preschool and the benefits, we will explore the following:
Preschool children coloring. Photo by CDC on Pexels.
In recent years, U.S. education policymakers at the local and national levels have increasingly called for universal preschool education. In fact, “preschool for all” – free, high-quality preschool available for all 4-year-olds no matter their family’s income or where they live – has been a key initiative of recent and current presidential administrations.
Such initiatives build on evidence that preschool supports children’s development of fundamental academic skills in reading and math, with strong benefits for children from low-income communities. Thus, public preschool is considered a promising strategy for reducing income-based gaps in opportunity and achievement.
Critics of these initiatives often argue that the demonstrated academic benefits of preschool are short-lived, with some studies showing that benefits fade during kindergarten (e.g., Lipsey et al., 2018; Phillips et al., 2017). Why should policymakers seek to expand a program that might not produce lasting effects when there are many other demands for limited resources?
Similarly, caregivers making decisions for their own young children’s care must juggle multiple financial and logistical considerations and personal preferences for their children’s first years. Caregivers may wonder if they should send their children to preschool, uncertain what the benefits are and if they will last.
Public preschool is considered a promising strategy for reducing income-based gaps in opportunity and achievement.
Many of the studies that revealed only short-lived benefits of preschool focused on a narrow set of specific language skills (e.g., identifying letters and words) or math skills (e.g., solving word problems). These skills are important but leave out a vast array of other important foundational capacities that preschool might foster.
For example, does preschool facilitate children’s vocabulary word knowledge or their understanding of grammar and how sentences are structured? Does preschool help early development of discrete math skills that underlie multidimensional tasks like solving math word problems? Even if problem-solving benefits are short-lived, there might be longer-lasting gains in skills that are foundational to counting and arithmetic (e.g., the ability to quickly identify which numeral is bigger).
A preschool teacher reads to young children. Photo by Yan Krukau from Pexels.
To help clarify the benefits of preschool, we worked to capture a broader picture of children’s development. We relied on a diverse sample of approximately 1,000 students attending public preschool in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The students were exclusively from households with low incomes and were mostly students of color (approximately 50% Hispanic/Latinx and 20% Black).
Most children had attended public preschool in the year before kindergarten: either pre-kindergarten in a public school or a Head Start early-childhood center. We compared those public preschool students to children who stayed home with a caregiver in the year before kindergarten. Since researchers have documented differences between characteristics of children and families who enroll in preschool and characteristics of those who do not, we used statistical methods that partially adjusted for those differences. This approach allowed us to explore the role of preschool, specifically, on foundational skills for children’s academic learning.
Moving beyond letter-word identification and math word problem solving, we measured children’s abilities in different dimensions of language and literacy skills and of math skills, such as vocabulary, sentence structure, and numerical fluency (recognizing symbolic numerals quickly and accurately). We also compared the preschool students to non-preschool students on executive functioning skills – skills that underlie children’s abilities to keep rules and instructions in their memory, and follow those rules by controlling their impulses and behavior. We assessed all these skills – broader language, literacy, and math skills, as well as executive functioning skills – in kindergarten and again in first grade.
Our results showed that children who attended preschool scored higher than their peers who did not attend preschool in their understanding of math and language concepts. Even more significantly, this preschool boost did not fade out by kindergarten or first grade.
These results give us new reasons to believe and invest in the power of preschool: As children enter elementary school, the advantages they gained in preschool carry through with them, putting them ahead of their peers as they move forward in their learning. Although we have not yet formally studied these students into higher grades, the boost preschool students gained in foundational skills for classroom learning might help them continue to perform at a higher level than peers who did not attend preschool. This could mean that children who attend preschool are more likely to advance into higher skills-based learning groups (referred to as gifted and talented or tracking in some school districts) than their peers, or that they simply feel more successful in their classrooms going forward.
Preschool children eat fruit together. Photo by Naomi Shi on Pexels.
We did not find any benefit of having attended preschool to children’s executive functioning skills in kindergarten or first grade. While disappointing, this result mirrors other recent public preschool evaluations in Virginia and Boston. Some suspect that executive functioning skills may show a pattern of more gradual growth and benefit from preschool, so a boost from preschool attendance may show up later – a so-called sleeper effect. We will explore this possibility in our follow-up work as children age.
The positive effects of preschool on math and language skills may have been amplified by the makeup of our participants. All the children in our study were students from low-income households, a group that is especially advantaged by preschool attendance (Phillips et al., 2017; Yoshikawa et al., 2013). The magnified benefits for low-income groups show the importance of preschool even more, as it can help close early income-based learning and opportunity gaps. Our study’s participants were also primarily children of color, another marginalized group that could be lifted by expanding public preschool to help close historic race/ethnicity-based inequalities in access to quality education.
Rather than continue to argue over whether preschool works or is worth it, we should aim to make preschool more effective and accessible for everyone so all children – and especially those furthest from opportunity – have the strongest possible starts for their futures.
When we delved deeper to examine a broader array of skills than had been studied in past research, we found that children who attended preschool had greater abilities in foundational aspects of math and language learning. Furthermore, these benefits lasted longer than previously shown. With these results, it is clear that public preschool gives children from low-income backgrounds a sustained learning boost beyond kindergarten and into first grade, suggesting that there is more to the story than we previously believed. In fact, our newest publication discusses our findings from following these children into 3rd grade. See our website for more information.
Therefore, rather than continue to argue over whether preschool works or is worth it, we should aim to make preschool more effective and accessible for everyone so all children – and especially those furthest from opportunity – have the strongest possible starts for their futures.
Leave a comment