Pay $1, get $16

Society wins when education starts early in life

— Back in 2002, the Rogers School District initiated its pre-kindergarten program. Since then, the program has grown from three to 16 classrooms, serving a whopping 320 students, and has received high marks from the state's Department of Early Childhood Education.

Last year, the Bentonville School District opened its Early Childhood Center on Bella Vista Road. The school serves 3- and 4-year-olds. Andin April, the Early Childhood Initiatives Center - a place where Arkansas earlychildhood educators and professionals can gather to share resourcesand get training - opened in Bentonville.

These are encouraging developments because research shows that earlychildhood education is crucial to a person's success later in life. That includes staying out of trouble - and jail.

The reason lies in human biology.

"Ninety percent of a child's brain is developed before the child enters kindergarten," said Bruce Clash, Pennsylvania state director for Fight Crime:Invest in Kids, a nonprofit organization that advocates for earlychildhood education.

"Literally the neurons, the synapses of the brain, form in thosefirst five years of life, during which time the experiences of getting along with others, the ability to follow directions, the basisof conscience, the ability to feel concern for others, are all being formed at this age and hard-wired into the brain."

A study done by the group High/Scope, an educational research foundation, followed 123 black children who lived in poverty in Ypsilanti, Mich., during the 1960s.

From that group, 58 kids were randomly chosen to attend preschool, while the other 65 received no preschool.

The study found that 65 percent of those children who had attended preschool - versus 45 percent of the non-preschooled kids - graduated from regular high school. By age 40, 76 percent of the preschool group were employed, versus 62 percent of the other group. Also, those from the preschool group had been arrested far less frequently than those from the other group.

The study found that, per participant, the preschool program's economic return to society was $244,812 on an investment of $15,166. That breaks down to $16 of economic return for every $1 invested. The great majority of that return was based on money saved as a result of fewer crimes committed.

Why is this important?

According to a 2008 report, more than one out of every 100 adults in this country is behind bars.

Arkansas spends close to $300 million per year on corrections. The state ofCalifornia, with its severely overcrowded prisons, has been ordered to figure out how to reduce its prison population by 40,000 within two years.

America can't arrest and incarcerate its way to a safer nation. We would much rather build schools and pay more for teachers than build prisons and pay for more correction officers and public defenders.

If there's one thing almost all Americans canagree on, it's that our education system is worthy of our tax dollars. But we have to be smart about how we spend on education. If we want to improve high-school graduation rates, we must examine more than what we're teaching our teens, but what we're teaching our toddlers.

Investing in early-childhood education is, without a doubt, smart thinking.

Opinion, Pages 13 on 09/20/2009

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