This paper considers whether expanding access to center-based early childhood education (ECE) will reduce economic inequality later in life. A strong evidence base indicates that ECE is effective at improving young children's academic skills and human capital development. We review evidence that children from low-income families have lower rates of preschool enrollment than their more affluent peers. Our analysis indicates that increasing enrollments for preschoolers in the year before school entry is likely to be a worthy investment that will yield economic payoffs in the form of increased adult earnings. The benefits of even a moderately effective ECE program are likely to be sufficient to offset the costs of program expansion, and increased enrollment among low-income children may reduce later economic inequality.

Although school attainment is a cumulative process combining mastery of both academic and behavioral skills, most studies have offered only a piecemeal view of the associations between middle childhood capacities and subsequent schooling outcomes. Using a 20-year longitudinal dataset, this study estimates the association between children's academic skills, anti-social behaviors and attention problems, all averaged across middle childhood, and their long-term educational outcomes. After adjusting for family and individual background measures, we find that high average levels of math and reading achievement, and low average levels of anti-social behavior problems, are positively associated with later attainment. Associations between attention problems and attainment are small. Associations are attenuated somewhat when sibling differences in these skills and behaviors are related to sibling differences in attainment outcomes.

In the United States, does growing up in a poor household cause negative developmental outcomes for children? Hundreds of studies have documented statistical associations between family income in childhood and a host of outcomes in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Many of these studies have used correlational evidence to draw policy conclusions regarding the benefits of added family income for children, in particular children in families with incomes below the poverty line. Are these conclusions warranted? After a review of possible mechanisms linking poverty to negative childhood outcomes, we summarize the evidence for income's effects on children, paying particular attention to the strength of the evidence and the timing of economic deprivation. We demonstrate that, in contrast to the nearly universal associations between poverty and children's outcomes in the correlational literature, impacts estimated from social experiments and quasi-experiments are more selective. In particular, these stronger studies have linked increases in family income to increased school achievement in middle childhood and to greater educational attainment in adolescence and early adulthood. There is no experimental or quasi-experimental evidence in the United States that links child outcomes to economic deprivation in the first several years of life. Understanding the nature of socioeconomic influences, as well as their potential use in evidence-based policy recommendations, requires greater attention to identifying causal effects.

Compared with their higher-income counterparts, children growing up in low-income families in the United States typically complete less schooling, report worse health, and work and earn less in adulthood. Moreover, changes in the American economy over the last 40 years have raised the level of skills and qualifications that children need to obtain a good middle-class job, as well as making it much more difficult for children from low-income families to attend schools that support their learning of these skills. We first review strategies used in the past to improve K-12 schooling-including investing more money, introducing more accountability, and putting in place new governance structures (eg, charter schools)-and show why these strategies have been relatively ineffective. Drawing on the research literature and case studies, we then describe education reform strategies for prekindergarten programs and for elementary, middle, and high schools that may help meet these challenges. All of the initiatives described in our case studies provide ample opportunities for teachers and school leaders to improve their skills through coaching and other professional development activities; incorporate sensible systems of accountability, including requiring teachers to open their classrooms to the scrutiny of colleagues and school leaders and to work with their colleagues to improve their teaching practices; and incorporate high academic standards, such as those described in the Common Core State Standards. By focusing directly on improving teaching and promoting learning, these successful initiatives have boosted the achievement of low-income children. They show that it is indeed possible to make a real difference in the life chances of low-income children.

Income inequality has increased steadily over the past 40 years. We briefly review the nature and causes of this increase and show that income-based gaps in children's academic achievement and attainment grew as well. To probe whether the increasing income gaps may have played a role in producing the growing achievement and attainment gaps, we summarize the evidence for the effect of family income on children, paying particular attention to the strength of the evidence and the timing of economic deprivation. We show that, in contrast to the nearly universal associations between poverty and children's outcomes as reported in the correlational literature, evidence from social experiments and quasi experiments shows impacts on some domains of child functioning but not others. At the same time, we have no experimental evidence on how economic deprivation affects children in the first several years of life in the United States. Family environments are all important in the first several years of a child's life, when they are developing most rapidly and have limited autonomy from family, yet family incomes tend to be the lowest in these early years of family development. We describe an ongoing experimental study of income effects on infants and toddlers.

A meta-analysis was conducted to examine gender differences in the effects of early childhood education programs on children's cognitive, academic, behavioral, and adult outcomes. Significant and roughly equal impacts for boys and girls on cognitive and achievement measures were found, although there were no significant effects for either gender on child behavior and adult outcomes such as employment and educational attainment. Boys benefited significantly more from these programs than girls on other school outcomes such as grade retention and special education classification. We also examined important indicators of program quality that could be associated with differential effects by gender.

This study uses data from a comprehensive database of U.S. early childhood education program evaluations published between 1960 and 2007 to evaluate the relationship between class size, child–teacher ratio, and program effect sizes for cognitive, achievement, and socioemotional outcomes. Both class size and child–teacher ratio showed nonlinear relationships with cognitive and achievement effect sizes. For child–teacher ratios 7.5:1 and lower, the reduction of this ratio by one child per teacher predicted an effect size of 0.22 standard deviations greater. For class sizes 15 and smaller, one child fewer predicted an effect size of 0.10 standard deviations larger. No discernible relationship was found for larger class sizes and child–teacher ratios. Results were less clear for socioemotional outcomes due to a small sample.

Research Findings: This study uses data from a comprehensive meta-analytic database of early childhood education (ECE) program evaluations published between 1960 and 2007 in the United States to examine the incremental effects of adding enhancement program components to ECE programs on children’s cognitive abilities, pre-academic skills, behavioral, health, and socio-emotional outcomes. Preschool enhancement programs include parenting programs, skill-based curricula, and teacher professional development programming. Our findings suggest that the addition of parent programs and skill-based curricula to ECE programs can result in improvements to a range of children’s ECE outcomes leading to better school readiness. We found no differences in the impacts of ECE programs with or without additional professional development enhancements. Practice or Policy: Designing fully-developed parent programs by explicitly targeting parents, developing academically focused and skill-based curricula, and providing additional teacher professional development enhancements to existing ECE programs can have a substantial impact on a range of children’s ECE outcomes leading to better school readiness. Further research is needed in order to determine what conditions are essential to enhancement program success as well as what conditions have negligible effects on or inhibit children’s school readiness.