The public preschool debate has been circling the same exhausting drain for years. Children who participate in Head Start or another city-funded program make early progress, and by the time they reach the second or third grade, their peers who do not attend have mostly caught up. This “fade out” effect is a point of contention for critics. They speculate that perhaps these programs simply teach children to count a little earlier—skills they would have learned regardless. Budget committees give their approval. stalls in funding. The cycle is repeated.
However, two recent studies are making it more difficult to overlook a part of this story that seldom appears in those budget meetings. Does preschool benefit children? is the question that researchers have been posing. It turns out that this is only half the question that needs to be asked. What happens to the parents is the other half.
One of the more environmentally friendly natural experiments in education policy is provided by a New Haven study. Researchers tracked the outcomes for families whose children won a spot versus those who didn’t using the city’s preschool lottery, which uses a random tiebreaker system when demand exceeds available seats. The numbers have actual causal weight rather than just correlation because the assignment was random. What they discovered was startling. During the preschool years, the annual income of families whose children enrolled increased by approximately $5,400, or 20% more than the baseline. And even after the program ended, that boost persisted. After enrollment, it continued for a minimum of six years.
In retrospect, the mechanism was clear and easy to understand. Fathers and mothers in particular were able to work longer hours thanks to full-day preschool. Private child care was not being paid for by them. They were staying at home without sacrificing their wages. Without being formally recognized as a policy outcome, the program successfully lifted a barrier that had been resting on their economic ceiling.
A different national study that examined states that extended full-day kindergarten in the 1990s and 2000s discovered a striking similarity. The employment rate for mothers rose by five percentage points. They put in about an extra hour a day at work. Crucially, the amount of time kids spent in school did not come at the expense of spending quality time at home, as this issue is constantly raised. Test results increased. According to the available metrics, family relationships remained stable.
The discrepancy between what these studies are measuring and what is actually discussed in most city budget discussions is difficult to ignore. Spending on early education is almost always framed by a mayor’s office in terms of kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading scores, and graduation rates—outcomes that take years to manifest and are genuinely hard to pinpoint. In contrast, the parent income effect manifests quickly, is recorded in tax records, and directly supports local economies.
Approximately 50% of 3 and 4-year-olds in America do not attend preschool. That equates to about 7.5 million kids, which means that about the same number of parents must figure out whether to cut back on working hours or pay market-rate child care, which is now truly unaffordable for the majority of households. Neither choice is free. No one’s education budget includes either as a line item.
The income effects were actually greater for higher-earning families, which makes the New Haven findings especially unsettling for the “targeted programs are enough” crowd. This is because an additional hour of work is worth more when your hourly wage is higher. The researchers hypothesize that universal programs might produce greater overall economic returns than means-tested ones, despite the fact that this goes against common sense regarding the allocation of limited resources.
Cities like West Sacramento, San Antonio, and New York have already begun to take this step, using public-private partnerships and tax reforms to finance universal pre-K. Social impact bonds were used in Salt Lake County. Funding for nurse-family programs was doubled in Delaware. Researchers like Tim Bartik at the Upjohn Institute have calculated a five-to-one benefit-to-cost ratio for high-quality preschool, so these aren’t ideological experiments. That forecast is not conjectural. That kind of return ought to put an end to budget discussions rather than spark them.
The fade-out dialogue isn’t entirely incorrect. However, it’s lacking in a way that has subtly cost families actual money. Not only does early education mold children, but it also influences what their parents can accomplish during their working years. At this point, any city that continues to compute ROI without that variable in the equation is using an antiquated spreadsheet.
