Uses of preschool

Crooked Timber's post Early Lessons gives several links to US preschool programs starting with High/Scope Perry PreSchool in Ypsilanti. Very interesting transcript of a radio program by Emily Hanford here a summary here. Excerpts from the summary (the transcript is more interesting):
"By the time study participants were 40 years old, the differences between the people who went to preschool and the people who didn't were startling.

The people who'd gone to preschool were more likely to be employed; they made more money. They were more likely to own homes and cars, to have savings accounts. They were more than twice as likely to say they had positive relationships with their families. The men who'd gone to preschool were more involved in raising their children. And the biggest difference of all had to do with crime.

The people who had gone to preschool had far fewer problems with the law. They were half as likely to be arrested. In other words, preschool cut the crime rate in half.

By cutting crime and sending fewer children to special education, the preschool saved society a lot of money. That got economists and business people interested in the Perry Preschool. They like Perry because it makes economic sense. Investing in preschool pays off.

The total cost of the program was $15,166 per child (adjusted for inflation from 1962 dollars to 2000 dollars). The return to society on that initial investment was $244,812 per child.

Preschool is a "social program from which everybody wins," says economist Steven Barnett, director of the Institute for Early Education Research. Good for the kids, and good for the taxpayers too.

Now states are rapidly expanding public preschool programs. State spending on preschool has nearly doubled in the last five years. More than 80 percent of American 4-year-olds go to some kind of preschool.

Everyone is hoping for the dramatic results - and the financial savings - the Perry Preschool achieved. But those results may be threatened by another movement in American education: the testing movement.

In recent years, education policy has come to be dominated once again by the immediate need to raise test scores. And preschool supporters fear that tests don't measure important things that preschool teaches children - how to get along in school, how to be curious, how to try hard. They say preschools are being pushed to "teach to the test" and that preschool will become too much like what kindergarten has become.

"Children now spend far more time being taught and tested on literacy and math skills than they do learning through play and exploration, exercising their bodies, and using their imaginations," write the authors of a recent report on how kindergarten has changed in recent years.

Preschool supporters worry that preschool is becoming too much like schools for older children, and not enough like the Perry Preschool.

And economist James Heckman worries too. He has analyzed the Perry Preschool results and published several papers. He believes the Perry Preschool helped children develop a set of what he calls "non-cognitive" skills - things like sociability, the ability to work with others, the ability to focus on tasks. His says these skills are crucial for success in school, and in life.

But he says schools don't focus enough on helping students develop "non-cognitive" skills. Those skills are seen as soft, squishy, too hard to quantify. He says schools today are too focused on cognitive skill testing much the way they were too focused on IQ 50 years ago. And the lesson of the Perry Preschool is that doing well in school, and in life, is about more than a test score."
P.S. See also the teaching experiments of L. P. Benezet Interesting teaching experiment and
The Benefits of Long Childhood
Change in play, change in kids