It’s been a pillar of public policy and thought: spend more on preschool, we get smarter, more well-balanced, less crime-committing, more successful kids and adults.
Head Start was therefore created during the Johnson administration, and over its lifetime has cost in excess of $180 billion.
But the selling point was that for every dollar we invest in Head Start, we save $10 elsewhere. The President even said as much in his most recent State of the Union address—four decades after the program started.
According to Travis Waldron of Think Progress, the benefits could be even greater than the President’s numbers:
Expanded childhood education would have substantial benefits for children who receive it. Chicago’s preschool program generates “$11 of economic benefits over a child’s lifetime for every dollar spent initially on the program,” according to one study, and at-risk youth who receive early childhood education are more likely to go to college and less likely to drop out of school, become teen parents, or commit violent crimes.
The benefits aren’t relegated to the children who receive better education. A 2009 study found that universal programs lead to increases in both human capital and the nation’s gross domestic product, while other studies found that every dollar spent on early childhood education generates roughly $7 in savings. A universal program would save money by reducing societal and economic costs later in the child’s life, while also increasing social and economic mobility for the children who receive it.
The Center for American Progress released a universal preschool plan last week that, at a cost of $98 billion over the next decade, would provide matching federal funds to make state programs stronger.
Gee, with benefits like that, who could oppose Head Start?
In 1998, Congress commissioned a study through the Department of Health and Human Services to measure just precisely how effective Head Start is.
The results were just released, and the study found:
there was little evidence of systematic differences in children’s elementary school experiences through 3rd grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group… by the end of 3rd grade there were very few impacts found for either cohort in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices. The few impacts that were found did not show a clear pattern of favorable or unfavorable impacts for children.
In simpler terms, this means there was no benefit to sending kids to preschool. When you’re spending $7,200 per child, $7 billion per year, and $180 billion of a program’s lifetime, those aren’t the results you want to see.
Instead, you’re running up the debt that these kids are going to have to pay as adults. That’s not a Head Start, that’s being left behind.
