How Preschool Changes the Brain

We live in a world of scarce governmental resources, and they seem to be getter scarcer. This means it’s more important than ever to pick our public investments wisely. A new paper by Flavio Cunha, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, and James Heckman, a Nobel Laureate at the University of Chicago, documents the wisdom of one particular kind of investment: Preschool.

While the economists cite a wide variety of research, their most impressive evidence consists of a few different studies that looked at the long-term effects of early childhood education. Let’s begin with the Perry Preschool Experiment, which consisted of 123 low income African-American children from Yspilanti, Michigan. (All the children had IQ scores between 75 and 85.) When the children were three years old, they were randomly assigned to either a treatment group, and given a high-quality preschool education, or to a control group, which received no preschool education at all. The subjects were then tracked over the ensuing decades, with the most recent analysis comparing the groups at the age of 40. The differences, even decades after the intervention, were stark: Adults assigned to the preschool program were 20 percent more likely to have graduated from high school and 19 percent less likely to have been arrested more than five times. They got much better grades, were more likely to remain married and were less dependent on welfare programs.

By Jonah Lehrer

Full Story: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/how-preschool-changes-the-brain