How much does it matter where your kids go to kindergarten? For a long time, many who study educational impact on child development have believed that early education didn’t have much lasting effect. The test scores of kids with excellent pre-school and kindergarten educations and kids without are about even by high school. But, these studies of the so called “fade out” of the effects of early education have always focused on high school test scores – not on more lasting factors like adult earning potential.
This year, five economists decided to look not only at kindergarten’s affect on school work, but on it’s effect on life. They examined the lives of 12,000 children who had taken part in a well-known educational experiment in Tennessee in the 1980’s. The subjects are now about 30. What they found was, as the New York Times puts it, explosive.
They found that, all other factors being equal, subjects made an average of $100 extra dollars a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution during kindergarten. And over time, the effect seems to grow. Kindergarten may not affect high school grades much, but these results imply that an excellent kindergarten education can affect your success for the rest of your life.
The economists running the study don’t try to explain the phenomenon – they’re studying economics, not child psychology. But, given that the life skills taught in kindergarten – good manners, patience, strategies for group work, discipline and perseverance to name a few – are vital to being a successful adult, it isn’t hard to guess why kindergarten is so important.
