The value of quality early education demonstrated again in Tennessee study

Another in a distinguished line of studies has shown that quality early education reaps significant economic rewards over the period of a student’s lifetime. The study conducted by a research team from Harvard, Cal-Berkeley and Northwestern examined the effect of smaller class size and teacher quality in kindergarten on the earnings and other key outcomes of people in their late-20s who had been part of Tennessee’s STAR education experiment in the 1980s.

STAR involved almost 12 000 students in Tennessee who were randomly assigned to kindergarten classes of small (13-17) or large (22-25) size. The researchers examined the effect of differences in class size, teacher experience and classroom quality in the kindergarten experiment on the earnings of those students more than twenty years later. They have found that smaller class sizes, more experienced teachers and modestly better quality teachers boosted earnings by at least $1000 (in current dollars) per year at age 27.

The random assignment of students in the STAR experiment enabled the research team to calculate that the very best kindergarten teachers, those who can raise average boys and girls in kindergarten to the 85th achievement percentile, boosted present annual earnings of those students by almost 15%. In a small class, such a teacher would be worth well over a combined $300 000 per year for the entire class, and much more if the teacher had years of experience behind him or her.

The findings are stunning. Critics of early education benefits have tended to point at the so-called fade out phenomenon, where the benefits of quality early education don’t appear to have an effect on test scores in later years. The focus on test scores and the absence of a critical examination of the role of the (poor) quality of schooling after early education years are but two problems that dog that line of thinking.

The multi-university team’s findings confirm the results found by James Heckman, Art Reynolds and others on the significant positive effects of quality early education on life after school. This is, of course, the real test of an educations’ worth, not test scores.

The researchers controlled for important demographic factors, including parental income and marital status, parental age at birth, parental savings, student gender, race and whether they qualified for a free lunch, and in other key findings showed that quality early education in a small class resulted in a higher likelihood of college attendance, better quality college attendance, owning a home and being married.

Clearly, a critical key to economic development is to maximize human potential. The message of this study repeats a key point, start quality education early because early learning enables greater skill acquisition throughout a lifetime.

A major policy challenge is to adequately fund early childhood education. Given the large and positive return on investment, lawmakers should be persuaded that even in the toughest of budget times, early childhood should be a high priority. A second challenge is to find and train high quality teachers. Ultimately this is a question of increasing the pay of the teaching profession so it attracts better talent, and then showing a commitment at the legislative and administrative level to professional development. As this study shows, this would be money well spent.