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Research On Early Childhood Development – Recent months have seen the emergence of more concrete ideas for addressing the pressing problem of lack of access to high-quality, affordable child care and education—an issue that has not been considered a national priority in the past. decades. A growing body of new research is reshaping how we think about the importance of early childhood and highlights that quality, affordable child care and education is not only good for families but also for the U.S. economy. in total.
At the heart of the problem are child care costs, a huge burden on many families, especially single-parent households. The average cost to provide center-based, licensed child care is $1,230 per month—about a fifth of the median family income—and more for high-quality child care. In more than half of states, a year of child care costs more than the average annual cost of public college tuition. And rising costs are not explained by increased quality: A federal study found that only 10 percent of child care in the United States is considered high quality. In an era of high income and wealth inequality, high costs shut out low- and middle-income families and prevent their children from fully developing their human capital, while those at the top have resources to care for the best environment for their children.
Research On Early Childhood Development
Lack of access to affordable, high-quality child care is also a problem for the U.S. economy. in total. Research shows that rising childcare costs are pushing women out of work, as parents rely more on informal childcare arrangements that are less reliable. Princeton University economist Janet Currie specifically sheds light on another important aspect of the problem of high child care costs—the importance of early childhood care and education for children and their outcomes in future. Our nation’s failure to address child care means we have missed a critical stage of human capital development, thereby depriving the United States of future workforce productivity.
Economic Benefits Of Early Childhood Development Investments
Currie, a member of Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee, has made major contributions to shaping what we know about the role of child care as a broader part of an economic growth story. He is a pioneer in the field of human capital, known for his innovative research on public policy issues related to child health and welfare. In her work, Currie found that early childhood programs—including both child care and preschool—have significant short- and medium-term benefits, often greater for disadvantaged children. Research shows that small model programs, such as the Perry Preschool Project and the Carolina Abecedarian Project, improve educational and income outcomes and reduce crime and the use of safety programs later in life.
There’s also Currie’s research looking at the impact of larger programs like Head Start, the largest federal experiment that provides wrap-around child care for disadvantaged children. Currie’s study with economists Eliana Garces, formerly of the European Commission, and Duncan Thomas at Duke University tracked children enrolled in Head Start years after their participation and found lasting positive effects. in the results of education and criminal behavior from the intervention, which contradicts a series. of studies that found immediate gains in test scores “fade out” in the early years of elementary school.
However, Head Start falls short of producing results equivalent to smaller interventions such as the Perry Preschool Project because it has not proven scalable to serve relatively small numbers of children with intensive services delivered by well-trained staff. Amid the debate over Head Start’s effectiveness and how best to design the program, Currie and health economist Matthew Neidell at Columbia University looked “inside the black box” of Head Start, finding that participants in program have higher reading scores, especially those in poorer counties and where Head Start spending is higher. Head Start programs that targeted funds toward services for children rather than other services, such as programs for parents or community development, also saw reduced dropout problems. behavior and grade repetition in children. More recent research supports Currie’s initial findings.
More broadly, Currie’s research advances our understanding of early childhood and its impact on child and adult outcomes—a relatively new area of research for economists—showing that it is important for in the U.S. economy. In a 2011 summary co-authored with Columbia University economist Douglas Almond, Currie laid out research showing that the effects of prenatal environments are not confined to health outcomes in aging, but also extends to economic outcomes such as the likelihood of working and the level of income, based on the idea of the late British epidemiologist David Barker that prenatal conditions can have lifelong effects—the “fetal origins hypothesis.”
Pdf) Investing In Early Childhood Education: A Global Perspective
In a 2017 sequel to their first summary, Currie and Almond, along with economist Valentina Duque at the University of Sydney, expanded their analysis to include the latest research on the postnatal early childhood environment, which culminated in the events of first 5 years of a child’s life have significant long-term effects on adult outcomes. Child and family characteristics measured when a child enters school are as important in explaining future outcomes as more traditional factors such as years of education. Currie found in an early paper that children’s test scores at age 7 explained 4 percent to 5 percent of the variance in adult employment and more than 20 percent of the variance in wages. .
Child care as a federal policy issue was largely relegated to a “welfare” issue after President Richard Nixon vetoed a 1971 bipartisan bill to create a universal child care system. It was also about the time that women with children began to join the workforce in greater numbers. Today, as the lack of access to affordable child care creates an almost universal stress on families’ work-life balance, policymakers are catching up on the urgency of the issue. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who is running for her party’s 2020 presidential nomination, recently released a proposal to subsidize the cost of child care to make it free for low-income families and cost of no more than 7 percent of household income for all families.
And many states and localities have been expanding access to publicly funded pre-Kindergarten in recent years, though there is considerable variation in the scale and allocation of funds. Oklahoma’s program, which serves about 3- and 4-year-olds in the state, is implemented within the existing public school district system, while other states such as New York use “mixed-delivery model,” where community-based and The school sites provide pre-Kindergarten services with combined public and private funding.
The bottom line: Research done by Currie and other economists highlights the importance of the early childhood years for child well-being and future economic outcomes across the United States. Affordable, high-quality early childhood care and education is a critical need for families, as well as our future workforce. Policymakers must ensure that the renewed interest in early childhood care and learning is sustained and translated into well-designed and implemented programs.
Early Childhood Education Yields Few Academic Benefits — But Still Has Lifelong Effects
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3 Perspectives on Early Childhood Learning Standards and Assessment In an ideal world, those involved in developing a set of early childhood services at either the local or system level would begin by thinking about what is needed to improve children’s physical well-being and developmental abilities. They decide what outcomes can be expected for children who participate in a particular well-designed program or set of services. They then concern themselves with what standards and processes will be needed to ensure that participating children benefit from the program. Planners will select formative assessments to track children’s progress toward standards and use this information to guide instructional adjustments. And finally, reliable and valid Âprocesses to assess whether children’s overall development and learning have met planners’ expectations will be selected and used. The results of such an assessment will be used to refine program practices with the hope that outcomes for children will further improve. In the real world, this rarely happens. The underresourced complex of early childhood care and education settings in the United States rarely implements the perfect sequence of measures at the local, state, or national level. The federal government, individual states, and local providers often find themselves working at least partially behind schedule to create workable processes 43
Early Childhood Nature Connections Toolkit
44 EARLY CHILDHOOD ASSESSMENT to determine what expectations should be for children and their families, what program standards lead to the achievement of those outcomes, and how to assess children’s status relative to standard as a
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