A recent chapter by Kate Bailey of the Cambridge Centre for Evaluation & Monitoring contains a minor, nearly unremarkable fact that should worry more people than it does. According to her, a child’s progress during their first year of school doesn’t diminish. They remain. Exams and the long, awkward years of adolescence continue to leave their mark until the age of sixteen. It’s the kind of conclusion that sounds almost too neat, but the evidence supporting it is stubborn and has been accumulating for decades.
Bailey’s work in The First Year at School: An International Perspective is intriguing for reasons other than its ending. The geography is the reason. She and her colleagues examined children in the Western Cape of South Africa and England, two regions that had very little in common: different curricula, different languages, different levels of poverty, and different teachers with different training. Despite having a successful first year, both groups of kids made what she described as notable academic advancements that are uncommon in other facets of education. seldom observed. That’s a cautious statement from a cautious researcher, and it hits harder than the typical brags about education policy.
And there’s the cash. James Heckman, the Nobel laureate, has spent years calculating the returns on early childhood spending. His estimate, which ranges from seven to thirteen dollars back for every dollar invested, has become something of an article of faith among economists who typically don’t agree on much. UNESCO came to a similar conclusion, reporting a return of about 13% due to improved health, higher incomes, and what they referred to as social cohesion. For every dollar spent, the Chicago Child-Parent Center study reported benefits of about eleven dollars. These are not numbers from the fringe. These figures represent a consensus.
This is where it becomes uncomfortable. Early childhood education is still viewed as an optional extra in the United States, the nation that produced Heckman and provides funding for many of the studies cited by others. Access is inconsistent. The quality varies. For the majority of working families, the cost falls somewhere between punishing and unachievable. According to the Perry Preschool study, which was carried out in Michigan in the 1960s, low-income children who participated in a preschool program made 25–40% more money annually as adults than their peers who did not. The majority of American parents are younger than those in that study. Nothing at scale has taken its place, so it is still cited.
Walking through this evidence gives the impression that while everyone agrees on the diagnosis, very few take any action. Millions of children lost early learning opportunities as a result of the pandemic, and the federal government spent roughly $40 billion on child care stabilization through the American Rescue Plan. This amount may seem high, but it is actually much less than what a long-term national program might cost. According to estimates from the Center for American Progress, increasing preschool access could result in the creation of over 500,000 jobs and encourage more parents to return to the workforce. It’s not a specialized social program. That’s industrial policy in the open.
Citing the Tashkent Declaration from 2022, Stefania Giannini of UNESCO has been urging governments to allocate at least 10% of education budgets to early childhood care. The majority of nations—including some wealthy ones—are far apart. In contrast, only 35% of children in low-income nations receive early education, compared to 89% in high-income nations. Generational disparities compound in ways that are difficult to simulate but simple to perceive.
It’s difficult to ignore the pattern. The research becomes more robust. The economics become more apparent. Additionally, the policy, especially in the US, lags behind, waiting for a political moment that never materializes. Cambridge has contributed. Who is actually reading is the question.
