In a landmark study of the effects of high quality early childhood education (ECE) the Perry Preschool study identified a group of low-income African-American children assessed to be at risk of failure in school and randomly assigned them into a control group that did not receive preschool and a treatment group that received high quality preschool at age 3 and 4. These two groups were then tracked through age 40. The study found that 60 percent of the kids receiving high quality preschool earned $20,000 or more by age 40 compared to just 40 percent of the control group. While 55 percent of the control group had been arrested five or more times by age 40, this was true for just 36 percent of the kids receiving high quality preschool (read more about the Perry Preschool study by clicking here).

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Subsequent studies estimate that for every dollar invested in high quality early childhood education there are 10 dollars of benefits that accrue from that investment. Despite these high returns we as a society fail to fully invest in ECE. Education is a classic example of a public good where markets left to their own devices fail to provide enough of the service. The results from the Perry study allude to why, although there are substantial benefits that accrue to children particularly as they enter adulthood there are also benefits that accrue to people other than the children receiving care and education, that is reduced future expenditures on welfare, the criminal justice system and of course higher adult earnings translate into greater tax revenue. In the United States the education and care of young children from toddlers up to age 5 is left largely to parents to finance, unlike the education of children from age 5 to 18. So while investments in ECE more than pay for themselves, leaving working parents to finance the bulk of the service, forces them to settle for substandard education and care which translates into children entering elementary school less prepared to learn, less likely to eventually graduate from high school and more likely to live at or near poverty as adults.

Fifty-years ago there was a consensus that robust transportation networks were crucial to an economy heavily dependent on manufacturing. That consensus produced large scale public spending on transportation networks like the interstate highway system. In an information economy we need a new consensus in support public investment in the basic infrastructure of the information economy, people. ECE is one part of that basic infrastructure. Our high standard of living is dependent on our capacity to create a workforce that is more productive than workers in Bangalore and Beijing.

In Philadelphia where one in four residents lives below the poverty line and 35 percent of children live in poverty, any comprehensive effort to reduce poverty must include greater investment in high quality early childhood education.

Mark Price is a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg. The views expressed in this post are his alone. The Keystone Research Center (http://www.keystoneresearch.org) a research and policy development institute, was created to broaden public discussion on strategies to achieve a more prosperous and equitable Pennsylvania economy.