Investing in Preschool Programs.

A t the beginning of kindergarten, the math and reading achievement gaps between children in the bottom and top income quintiles amount to more than a full standard deviation. Early childhood education programs provide child care services and may facilitate the labor market careers of parents, but their greatest potential value is as a human capital investment in young children, particularly children from economically disadvantaged families (Heckman 2006). After all, both human and animal studies highlight the critical importance of experiences in the earliest years of life for establishing the brain architecture that will shape future cognitive, social, and emotional development, as well as physical and mental health (Sapolsky 2004; Knudsen, Heckman, Cameron, and Shonkoff 2006). Moreover, research on the malleability (plasticity) of cognitive abilities fi nds these skills to be highly responsive to environmental enrichment during the early childhood period (Nelson and Sheridan 2011). Perhaps early childhood education programs can be designed to provide the kinds of enrichment that low-income children most need to do well in school and succeed in the labor market. 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 begin with a short 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. We fi nd that the evidence supports few unqualifi ed conclusions. Many early childhood Investing in Preschool Programs