How everything you learned in kindergarten affects your salary, your chances of going to college and owning a home, and even your retirement savings

“We found that everything comes back,” he said. “Our paper shows that investments in early childhood education have potentially very large payoffs. In the U.S., kids from disadvantaged families attend lower quality schools because of property tax financing. That system basically perpetuates income inequality. Disadvantaged kids end up not doing so well. We should think about improving schools at the lower end of the school distribution.”

The bureau study, conducted by Friedman, Chetty and a team of four other economists from Harvard, Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley, draws on data from Project STAR, one of the most widely studied education experiments in the United States. The project included 11,600 students and their teachers in kindergarten through third grade across 79 schools in Tennessee from 1985 to 1989.

Continue Reading the Article (An example of the Matthew Effect that Malcolm Gladwell so well illustrates in Outliers) 

Abstract

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to different classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This paper evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR using administrative records. We obtain five results. First, kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. Second, students in small classes are significantly more likely to attend college, attend a higher-ranked college, and perform better on a variety of other outcomes. Class size does not have a significant effect on earnings at age 27, but this effect is imprecisely estimated. Third, students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings. Fourth, an analysis of variance reveals significant kindergarten class effects on earnings. Higher kindergarten class quality — as measured by classmates’ end-of- class test scores — increases earnings, college attendance rates, and other outcomes. Finally, the effects of kindergarten class quality fade out on test scores in later grades but gains in non-cognitive measures persist. We conclude that early childhood education has substantial long-term impacts, potentially through non-cognitive channels. Our analysis suggests that improving the quality of schools in disadvantaged areas may reduce poverty and raise earnings and tax revenue in the long run.

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