The Importance of Being Early

Early-childhood education programs such as the federal Head Start initiative take the ounce-of-prevention approach to social problems like juvenile delinquency and high dropout rates. Getting very young children rooted in the business of learning, many believe, helps keep kids from veering off track later in life. But, as with most preventive medicine, there's always this question: how do we know if it's working?

Arthur Reynolds, a professor of social work, has produced some of the best evidence yet that programs like Head Start do work. During the past fifteen years, he and colleagues have observed more than one thousand graduates of early-childhood education programs that have run in Chicago neighborhoods since 1967. They've monitored carefully the academic and social progress of the children, noting such factors as readiness and achievement in school, retention rates, and incidence of delinquency and crime. And they've identified a "snowball effect" of positive outcomes.

The survey results, released this summer, show that students in the early-education programs were less likely to be arrested, less likely to be held back in school, and more likely to finish high school than children from the same neighborhoods who didn't start off in the preschool programs. The authors concluded that children in the program gained a "cumulative advantage" that persisted into early adulthood.

"We haven't had this level of long-term scientific evidence for public programs until now," Reynolds says. "These are really life-altering outcomes for young people, with major implications for society."

At the center of the study was the Child-Parent Centers program, which is offered through twenty-three schools in inner-city Chicago. Like Head Start, it is supported by federal grants, but the program is run by the schools, rather than social-service agencies. The centers enroll children as young as three and as old as nine, emphasizing literacy and parental involvement in learning.

By themselves, programs such as the Chicago example "cannot ameliorate the effects of continuing disadvantages children may face," Reynolds says. But he believes that his research shows that they at least offer real hope - and real results.

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