Head Start attendees were more likely to work and have professional jobs. These benefits translated to economic outcomes as well. Our results show the gains were pervasive, appearing throughout the distribution of educational attainment: We estimate that students who were eligible for three years of a fully implemented program were 3% more likely to finish high school, 8.5% more likely to attend college, and 39% more likely to finish college. The effect is largest for younger cohorts, who were eligible to attend Head Start for more years and benefited from the gradual improvement in classroom quality. Compared to children who were age 6 (and less likely to benefit) when Head Start arrived, children ages 3 to 5 saw a substantial increase in the likelihood of earning a four-year college degree. Our results show that Head Start had striking impacts on the long-run educational and economic success of its students. Are Head Start children more likely to finish high school, go to college, have stable employment, or escape poverty? These data allow us to test the effectiveness of preschool in terms of its effects on children’s lives–not just in terms of short-run test scores. Our analysis uses a new, large-scale dataset that connects children’s exposure to Head Start in its early years to their outcomes as adults. But, like today, its critics expressed skepticism about its effectiveness. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” Head Start was also explicitly intended to break the cycle of poverty. This period represented an enormous expansion of access to public preschool. Our research, just published in American Economic Review, provides new evidence on this debate from the early years of Head Start. While we must acknowledge that other recent work questions the methodological soundness of “fade-out” findings, a more fundamental issue is that studies of test scores and elementary-school outcomes provide, at best, an incomplete answer to the question we really want to answer: Does preschool help children build skills that will benefit them throughout life, even into adulthood? The latest example of this is a study of Tennessee’s pre-K program that reports results through sixth grade, and it has received considerable media attention in recent weeks. One common source of skepticism is an influential finding that, while preschool programs tend to improve children’s test scores in the short term, those gains tend to “ fade out” by the time they reach elementary school. That legislation is likely doomed, but these proposals have reignited questions over whether publicly funded preschool is worth the investment from taxpayers.ĭebate over preschool’s effectiveness has sparked controversy for decades. In addition, the president’s Build Back Better proposal includes universal preschool as one of its central planks. The latest federal COVID-19 relief package included a $1 billion infusion for Head Start, and the Biden administration’s latest budget proposal called for a similar increase for 2022.
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