Investing in Kids: Early Childhood Programs and Local Economic Development

4. The Economic Development Effects of High-Quality Early Childhood Programs

77 4 The Economic Development Effects of High-Quality Early Childhood Programs The previous chapter estimated how a state’s economic development is affected by business incentives. This chapter estimates how a state’s economic development is affected by early childhood programs. These economic development benefits are effects on the earnings per capita of state residents. Early childhood programs have not usually been thought of as economic development programs. But these programs have effects on state residents’ earnings, per dollar of program costs, that are of a similar order of magnitude to business incentives. This chapter provides estimates of economic development effects for three different early childhood programs: 1) universal prekindergarten (pre-K) education, 2) the Abecedarian program, and 3) the Nurse-Family Partnership program.1 The universal pre-K program that is examined would provide free pre-K education to all four-year-olds for three hours per day during the school year. The program is modeled after the Chicago Child-Parent Center program and the Perry Preschool program. The Abecedarian program provides disadvantaged families with free, high-quality child care/early education. This child care/education is “high-quality” in that it has low class sizes, high-quality teachers , and a curriculum focused on optimal child development. The child care/education is full-time and full-year for five years, from birth to age five. The Nurse-Family Partnership program provides first-time mothers from disadvantaged backgrounds with 30 nurse visits from prenatal to age two. These nurse home visits are focused on better prenatal care and better child care for the child. These visits also help the mother by providing advice and support for improvements in the mother’s education , job, and family life. The economic development effects are for operating these programs at full scale. For universal pre-K, “full scale” means sufficient for all four-year-olds whose parents choose the program. The other two 78 Bartik programs are targeted at disadvantaged families. For them, “full scale” means sufficient slots for all disadvantaged families. CONTExT OF THESE THREE EARLY CHILDHOOD PROGRAMS Why study these three programs? There are many early childhood programs. For example, the federal Head Start program serves almost one million children annually. This includes 8 percent of all three-year-olds and 11 percent of all four-yearolds . State-funded pre-K education programs have expanded in recent years. As of 2007–2008, such programs are estimated to enroll more than 1.1 million children. This includes 4 percent of all three-year-olds and 24 percent of all four-year-olds (Barnett et al. 2008). Federal- and state-subsidized child care for current and former welfare recipients probably serves more than 2 million children per year (Besharov, Higney, and Myers 2007). Many programs seek to improve parenting practices through home visits and parenting classes. These three particular programs—universal pre-K, the Abecedarian program, and the Nurse-Family Partnership program—were chosen for this project for two reasons. First, these three programs had evaluation data that allowed for reasonable calculation of economic development effects. Estimation of the economic development effects of early childhood programs requires estimates of program effects on the adult employment and earnings of former child participants. Out of the many early childhood programs, these three programs have the best long-term follow-up data on former child participants. Second, these three programs are model early childhood programs. I aim here to estimate the economic development effects of best current practice in early childhood programs. Focusing on best current practice is analogous to the previous chapter’s focus on well-designed business incentives. These best current practices are often only observed in small-scale experimental programs. This raises the issue of whether such results can be duplicated in full-scale implementation. I will explore this issue The Economic Development Effects of Early Childhood Programs 79 further in Chapter 5, which considers program design, and in Chapter 6, which considers uncertainty about program impacts. Even though much of the evidence for these three programs comes from small-scale programs, this evidence is consistent with what we know about larger-scale programs. For universal pre-K education, although the Perry Preschool program was small-scale, the Chicago Child-Parent Center program was run at a large scale. For state-funded pre-K programs, well-designed studies in five states have found evidence of short-term cognitive effects (Gormley et...