Does it really surprise you that children entering kindergarten unprepared places them at a disadvantage over the long term? No, right! Well, it did surprise many Americans, according to a recently released survey from the Pearson Foundation.

According to the poll, about three-quarters of Americans assume that even if children enter kindergarten not ready for school, they will acquire the necessary literacy skills in elementary school to catch up with their peers. However, the research evidence shows the contrary – children who enter kindergarten unready usually do not catch up. In fact, research points out that children who enter kindergarten behind are three to four times more likely to drop out of school when they get older.

More than half of the population polled was unaware that family income is the best predictor of whether or not a child will succeed in school, nor were they aware that nearly half of the children from low-income families begin first grade up to two years behind their peers from higher income families. In addition, three-quarters of Americans are unaware that about 60 percent of low-income parents do not own age-appropriate books for their children.

While the vast majority of people polled acknowledged that early childhood illiteracy is problematic, they did not recognize that the simple act of reading to 3- to 5-year-olds can have significant impacts on children’s academic and life-long success.

“It’s common to under-estimate the importance of early literacy experiences for young children’s later language and literacy development, especially those experiences before the age of 3,” says Shannon Ayers, an assistant research professor at NIEER and a specialist on early literacy.

“Experiences of a caregiver cooing back at an infant provide the basis for conversation turn taking, and singing lullabies and silly rhyming songs provide experiences with the cadence of language,” she adds. “Lap reading and talking about stories and personal experiences with children offers exposure to story structure, print, and language (vocabulary development) in a comfortable, loving way that will provide the foundation for later learning.”

NIEER discusses literacy in the preschool classroom and its link to academic and lifelong achievement in the policy brief Early Literacy: Policy and Practice in the Preschool Years.

Worldwide, a huge source of human potential is lost as children grow up without the benefit of effective investments in their early development. More than 200 million children under 5 years of age are not reaching their full mental, physical, and social developmental potential, says a recent report from The Open University based in the United Kingdom.

Many people associate early interventions to support child development with preschool education. That is only a part of the story in countries where problems like growth stunting, hunger, disease and extreme poverty necessitate early investments that focus on directly improving nutrition and health as well as care and education. With wide variations in the approaches to investments in early development and in children’s environments in the international arena, policy makers around the globe are asking, “How effective are the various programs in improving the development of children and does this vary across countries with very different economic conditions?”

To help answer that, NIEER recently conducted a meta-analysis of studies that looked at 30 interventions with varying approaches in 23 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. What NIEER found is encouraging: Regardless of the type of program, all had moderate positive effects in all domains of child development. The size of the long-term effects is similar to that found in a comprehensive meta-analysis of the U.S. studies. On average, they were about one-quarter to one-third of a standard deviation, with cognitive effects at the higher end, which translates to a gain of about 5 points on an IQ test. Studies that evaluated effects at older ages showed positive effects being sustained through adulthood.

Policymakers want answers to questions like what types of programs are most cost-effective, whether single-focus or combined-focus programs are best, and what treatment dosage is likely to yield the greatest gain in a given set of circumstances. While many of those answers will require further research, our findings shed some light. Interventions providing direct child care and education were more effective than other types of programs, particularly in terms of cognition. Interventions that combined education and care with attention to nutrition or health were more effective than cash transfer programs that gave money to parents in order to achieve a goal such as making sure kids get medical attention or programs that were solely nutritional in nature.

Of the interventions in our study, eight were early education, five were child care, five were nutrition, four were nutrition and education, two were nutrition and child care, one was early education and child care and six were cash transfers. To conduct our analysis, we grouped children’s outcomes from the studies into four domains: cognition, behavior, health, and amount of schooling. For comparison purposes, we constructed a detailed dataset containing information on each outcome that the study measured and the study characteristics such as the type of intervention , when the follow-up occurred, length of intervention, and group targeted (infants/toddlers, pre-k children, etc.). We then explored how the characteristics of the intervention and the target population were associated with cognitive, behavioral, health and schooling child effects.

NIEER’s international meta-analysis is a first step in bringing international research to a common scale and points to the importance of program design in achieving goals. However, further research is needed to generate a better understanding about what dimensions matter, how much and for what reasons, so policy makers can identify the most cost-effective approaches to investing in child development for children growing up in mild to severe financial, educational, and nutritional poverty around the world.

Unfortunately, cost appears to have been greatly neglected in most international evaluations. The benefits analyzed here are only one piece of the puzzle. Early intervention studies would contribute more to policymaking if costs were also estimated so that we could compare interventions on a cost-benefit framework.

Our study, entitled “Benefits of early childhood interventions across the world: (Under) Investing in the very young,” appears in Economics of Education Review.

Milagros Nores
Assistant Research Professor, NIEER

Poverty is a problem in America, and it is a more serious problem here than in many other nations including some with average incomes considerably below ours. However, it is not the only problem in America, nor is it the sole cause or even most important cause of our student achievement problem. Nevertheless, our debates about education policy and education reform typically focus on reducing the “achievement gap” between rich and poor. While this is an admirable goal, focusing on the achievement gap as the primary problem is a mistake—conceptually, practically, and politically.

The conceptual mistake is to confuse the federal poverty line with a real and meaningful distinction that defines two clearly different populations. The federal poverty line is an artificial cutoff that many experts find unsatisfactory. Relatively few children and families stay below this line for long periods of time and many move back and forth across the poverty line. In reality, there is no sharp differentiation in school readiness or later educational success between those above and below the poverty line, instead there is a strong linear gradient along which school readiness, achievement, and high school graduation rates increase with income. There is no clear point at which risk for failure sharply changes. Canadian cardiologist, children’s advocate, and founding president of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Dr. Fraser Mustard has shown that gradients linking income to development extend to other domains including health and are not limited to the United States.

The practical mistake is to design education reforms to focus on poverty and the achievement gap by providing additional resources and programs only to children in poverty. This is how most government programs for young children are designed including child care assistance, Head Start, Early Head Start, and many state pre-K programs. Because children move in and out of poverty these programs end up either providing little continuity of service (child care) or arbitrarily serving children who happened to be poor at time of enrollment but often are not poor later on and failing to serve children who become poor later.

Moving the cut-off up to 130 or 185 percent of the poverty line doesn’t really solve the problem, it just pushes it up the income gradient. As a result we fail to treat most of the problem. Don Yarosz and I have shown that in sheer numbers most school failures and high school dropouts are accounted for by families in middle-income families. Similarly, most children who are poorly prepared for school, whether we look at cognitive or social development, are from middle-income families. Indeed, most children who have abilities below those of the average child in poverty at kindergarten entry are from middle-income families.

The political mistake is to create government programs that serve only poor (or low-income) families and then tax the rest of the population to pay for them. It seems to me that this is just the tack taken by the Obama administration and, to an even greater extent, Congress. It is a sharp departure from the rhetoric of a political campaign that captured the center by consistently talking about government serving all Americans, including quality preschool education for all. Yet, the legislative agenda has been quite different. For young children, large increases in funding were passed for means-tested programs—Head Start, Early Head Start, and child care assistance, but nothing for children in middle income families. The Early Learning Challenge Fund legislation making its way through Congress is similarly limited to improving services only on low-income children—the House version effectively discourages states from serving children from middle-income families.

While some have suggested that one lesson from the 2009 elections is that voters, particularly suburban independents, are allergic to higher taxes, I would suggest that the lesson is slightly different. Voters are particularly opposed to higher taxes when they view those taxes as paying for programs that benefit only other people—especially when they believe government is not trying to help them with their problems.

So what I am suggesting is that publicly supported preschool for all children is a better policy than targeted preschool education—conceptually, practically, and politically. The political party that figures this out and acts on it—not just with preschool education, but with policy more generally—can capture the center in the next election. Of course, that may be neither of the major political parties.

Steve Barnett
Co-Director, NIEER

UPDATE 12/3/09:
In response to requests for a reference.

Source: US Department of Education, NCES (1997). Dropout rates in the United States: 1995 (multi-year averages), and analyses from the U.S. Department of Education using data from the Current Population Survey, October Supplements, 2004 and 2005.

Although there is some question about whether these rates are exactly right, I don’t think there is any reason for error to vary by income level so the relative sizes ought to be right. Simply multiplying the percentages retained and dropping out by 60% for the middle group shows that they account for more of the problem than the lowest 20% by income (which is pretty close to the same as poverty).

Last week, the Associated Press (AP) reported on an evaluation of Tennessee’s state-funded pre-K program commissioned by that state’s Comptroller’s office (See, for example, Memphis Daily News, “Report: Tenn. Pre-K Not Effective After Second Grade”). As the headline indicates, the report is being widely cited as finding that pre-K has no lasting impact. This would be dismaying if true, because Tennessee has relatively high standards for its pre-K program, as indicated in NIEER’s 2008 State Preschool Yearbook. However, those claiming that Tennessee pre-K has no lasting effect might want to actually read the full report carefully, because it does not substantiate that claim.

Anyone reading beyond the executive summary will find that the authors themselves conclude, “Although the effects of Pre-K on long-term academic achievement are not evident in the present study, the lack of a statistically significant difference in measures of student achievement in the long term can not logically be attributed to an ineffective Pre-K intervention.” In other words, this study can’t really answer the question of whether Tennessee’s pre-K has lasting effects.

Readers can be excused for being confused by misleading statements in the executive summary that combine the conclusions of a rather one-sided literature review with an unjustified interpretation of this study’s findings. To wit: “Consistent with the results of the present evaluation, many studies find improved language or math skills in Kindergarten following Pre-K, but these effects have often dissipated by the First or Second Grade.” The literature review in this instance fails to acknowledge recent meta-analyses that find lasting effects and a number of rigorous evaluations that have reported lasting effects from higher quality early childhood programs in the last several years. They help perpetuate a fade-out myth that is no longer supportable by the research. (Stay tuned for a second installment on this topic.)

My own take is that just like the last report on this evaluation, this one provides clear evidence that the analyses have not been able to overcome serious design problems including selection bias. As my grandmother who taught school in Tennessee might have said, the stitching is mighty fancy, but it’s still a sow’s ear. The real question here is why the Comptroller spends taxpayer money on this flawed study year after year.

Steve Barnett
Co-Director, NIEER

If you’re a parent or pre-K provider, sizing up the flu threat this year is a bit like watching that troubling pattern on the weather radar. You hope it doesn’t develop into a full-fledged storm and if it does, you hope it doesn’t blow your way. Seasonal flu has always been a worry for pre-K providers but this year the H1N1 flu virus presents a special challenge since young children are more vulnerable to it than the bulk of the population and this virus has the potential to mutate into a more deadly threat. The rapid spread of H1N1 flu prompted President Obama to declare a state of emergency this week and vaccine makers, who haven’t been able to supply sufficient H1N1 doses to meet demand, are being pushed to redouble their efforts.

Research has shown that vaccinating young children is an effective weapon not only in protecting them from flu outbreaks but also in protecting high-risk groups such as the elderly since young children are known to spread the virus to adults. Vaccinations for flu administered to kids early in influenza outbreaks have particularly high benefits for the rest of the population because the vaccine is relatively effective and the flu is highly infectious. One study simulating an outbreak found the benefit to be greater than one case of flu prevented in the rest of the population per influenza vaccination administered to a child.

Findings like this have prompted the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to recommend that children between six months and 18 years old receive seasonal flu vaccinations. Of course, the CDC is not vested with the authority to require kids to receive them. That rests with the states. To date, only New Jersey has made it a regulation that kids must receive seasonal flu vaccinations (as well as pneumonia) as a condition of attending pre-K. Approved over the objections of the anti-vaccination lobby last year, the new regulation puts the state in a proactive position this flu season since getting kids vaccinated early is a key to containing outbreaks.

The vaccine for H1N1 flu, which requires two nasally administered doses to immunize children began arriving in October. Researchers looking at epidemiological models say that if a concerted effort is made to vaccinate 70 percent of children between six months and 18 years old for H1N1 flu first, it could lead to coverage of 70 percent of the entire U.S. population since kids are prime spreaders of the virus.

It is by no means clear that this goal can be reached. Much depends on how quickly adequate supplies of the vaccine arrive, how willing parents are to have their children vaccinated, and how quickly the H1N1 virus spreads. So far, the virus is moving faster than the supply of vaccine and a large proportion of parents are wary of having their kids immunized despite the impending threat. The National Poll on Children’s Health reports only 40 percent of parents plan to have their children receive the vaccine and only about one-third of parents believe H1N1 flu will be worse for their children than seasonal flu. Polls by Consumer Reports and CBS also found large segments of the population are fearful of having their kids vaccinated for H1N1 flu.

This concern has been on the increase in recent years, spurred in part by suspicion that thimerosal, a preservative in some vaccines, is linked to autism in children. British researcher Andrew Wakefield made that connection in a 1998 article in The Lancet. His data, drawn from the cases of 12 children, have since been called into question and subsequent research has found no connection between vaccines and autism. Large studies in California and Denmark found that the prevalence of autism in children increased significantly years after the use of thimerosal was discontinued.

Even so, the reluctance of parents to have their children vaccinated is a reality that increasingly concerns public health experts. In the case of H1N1 flu, the CDC is responding by mounting a public relations effort that includes sending “mythbusters” around the country to try and ease fears about vaccination. One reason vaccine makers have been unable to supply sufficient doses in the U.S. is because the U.S., unlike other countries, prohibited the use of substances known as adjuvants that increase the effectiveness of vaccines. That meant that vaccine makers had to use many times more active ingredient per dose of U.S. vaccine than they did for vaccines sent to Europe. While this was done to allay fears concerning the vaccine, there is no evidence it changed the minds of parents and the supply of vaccine continues to lag behind the spread of the virus.

Meanwhile, early care and education providers represent a critical line in the defense against this year’s flu threat. Their capabilities and decisions will largely determine whether their centers become the locus of outbreaks or of containment. Guidance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control spells out procedures ranging from detection and isolation of kids with symptoms to managing and protecting staff and disinfecting surfaces children come in contact with. They also contain a second set of criteria decision makers should consider if infection rates become more widespread. The recommendations emphasize the importance of educating young children on proper hand and respiratory hygiene. Toward that end, they have enlisted, Sesame Street’s Elmo who appears in a series of short videos.