America’s Future Early Education System

WHAT’S IN IT FOR REPUBLICANS?

In 2012, 20 million Americans with incomes below $50,000 voted Republican in the presidential election. Many in this group who have young children can’t afford good-quality out-of-home care. These parents and their kids would benefit from universal early education. The same is true for some of the 20 million Republican voters with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000.³⁷ Republican leaders who want to improve their constituents’ well-being ought to be interested in early education.

Moreover, many of these Americans would embrace publicly-funded early education, at least after the fact. Yes, a significant share of them dislike the idea of big government, but they nevertheless like a lot of the public insurance and public services that our government provides.³⁸ Many of them happily send their children off to public elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools every day. They would do the same with early education. In Oklahoma, one of the reddest of red states, the enrollment rate in the public preschool program for four-year-olds is 74%.³⁹

PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE, BUT WHY WAIT?

America is a long way from universal early education, and the difficult part is the politics. But that’s often the case. Consider healthcare. We began by creating the Veteran’s Administration after the Civil War. Tax breaks for employer contributions to private health insurance came after World War II. Medicare and Medicaid were created in the 1960s. Medicaid coverage was expanded in the 1980s and 1990s, and Medicare in the 2000s. The Affordable Care Act arrived in 2010, and even when it is fully implemented we’ll still fall short of universal access and affordable cost. Advances in our public insurance and public services tend to come incrementally, and early education may be no exception.

Yet that doesn’t mean it’s best to proceed slowly. The case for universal good-quality publicly-funded early education is strong. For America’s parents and children, sooner would be better than later.
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Notes

^•1. Americans used to worry about mothers of young children working outside the home. In the late 1970s, 68% believed “a preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works.” But by 2012, the share had shrunk to 35% (General Social Survey, variable fepresch). Indeed, nowadays support for paid work among mothers of young kids spans the political spectrum. Many conservatives favor strict time limits on receipt of government benefits in order to encourage mothers’ employment, and gender egalitarians point out that four or five years out of the work force (more if there is a second or third child) puts women at a severe disadvantage for later employment and earnings. See Ron Haskins, Work Over Welfare, Brookings Institution Press, 2007; Janet C. Gornick, Marcia K. Meyers, et al, Gender Equality, Verso, 2009.
^•2. Deborah Lowe Vandell and Barbara Wolfe, “Child Care Quality: Does It Matter and Does It Need to Be Improved?” Special Report 78, Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2000; Jane Waldfogel, What Children Need, Harvard University Press, 2006; W. Steven Barnett et al, The State of Preschool 2012, National Institute for Early Education Research; Jonathan Cohn, “The Hell of American Day Care,” The New Republic, 2013.
^•3. The labor force participation rate of mothers with children younger than six is just 65%. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Characteristics of Families — 2012,” using Current Population Survey data.
^•4. OECD, Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care, 2006; OECD, Doing Better for Families, 2011; Miriam Nordfors, “Sweden Solves Two Problems at Once,” New York Times: Room for Debate, 2013.
^•5. OECD, Doing Better for Families, figure 1.9. There is additional U.S.-specific evidence suggesting the employment rate among mothers with young children would be higher if good-quality early education were more accessible; see, for instance, Janice Compton and Robert A. Pollak, “Family Proximity, Childcare, and Women’s Labor Force Attachment,” Working Paper 17678, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2011. Timothy Bartik concludes that the employment benefits of early education are not just in the quantity of jobs but also their quality. See Bartik, Investing in Kids: Early Childhood Programs and Local Economic Development, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2011.
^•6. Pew Research Center, 1987-2012.
^•7. Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane, eds., Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, Russell Sage Foundation and Spencer Foundation, 2011; Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods, 2nd edition, University of California Press, 2011.
^•8. Economic Mobility Project, “Pursuing the American Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations,” Pew Charitable Trusts, 2012. These numbers are for Americans born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s. In a society with perfectly equal opportunity, every person would have a 20% chance of landing on each of the five rungs of the income ladder and a 60% chance of landing on the middle rung or a higher one.
^•9. James J. Heckman, “Schools, Skills, and Synapses,” Working Paper 14064, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2008; Sean F. Reardon, “The Widening Academic-Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations,” in Whither Opportunity?, figure 5.5; John Ermisch, Markus Jäntti, and Timothy Smeeding, eds., From Parents to Children: The Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage, Russell Sage Foundation, 2012, pp. 465-468.
^•10. Douglas B. Downey, Paul T. von Hippel, and Beckett A. Broh, “Are Schools the Great Equalizer? Cognitive Inequality during the Summer Months and the School Year,” American Sociological Review, 2004; Karl L. Alexander, Doris R. Entwisle, and Linda Steffel Olson, “Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap,” American Sociological Review, 2007. For discussion of additional findings from natural experiments in which children go without schooling, see Richard E. Nisbett, Intelligence and How to Get It, W.W. Norton, 2009, ch. 3.
^•11. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, “What We Can Expect from Early Childhood Intervention Programs,” Society for Research in Child Development, 2003; Heckman, “Schools, Skills, and Synapses”; Douglas Almond and Janet Currie, “Human Capital Development Before Age Five,” Working Paper 15827, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2010.
^•12. Heckman, “Schools, Skills, and Synapses”; David Deming, “Early Childhood Intervention and Life-Cycle Skill Development: Evidence from Head Start,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2009; Arthur J. Reynolds et al, “Age 26 Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Child-Parent Center Early Education Program,” Child Development, 2011; Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Irwin Garfinkel, Wen-Jui Han, Katherine Magnuson, Sander Wagner, and Jane Waldfogel, “Child Care and School Performance in Denmark and the United States,” Children and Youth Services Review, 2012; Greg J. Duncan and Katherine Magnuson, “Investing in Preschool Programs,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2013.
^•13. Duncan and Magnuson, “Investing in Preschool Programs.” See also W. Steven Barnett, “Getting the Facts Right on Pre-K,” National Institute for Early Education Research, 2013.
^•14. Tarjei Havnes and Magne Mogstad, “Is Universal Child Care Leveling the Playing Field?,” IZA Discussion Paper 4978, 2010; Smeeding, Erickson, and Jäntti, eds., From Parents to Children; Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Incomplete Revolution, Polity, 2009, ch. 4.
^•15. A fourth potential benefit is higher fertility. Families that know having a child won’t severely interrupt the work career of either the father or mother are more likely to have the number of children they desire. If we look across Europe, countries with universal early education tend to have higher fertility rates; see Francis G. Castles, “The World Turned Upside Down: Below Replacement Fertility, Changing Preferences, and Family-Friendly Public Policy in 21 OECD Countries,” Journal of European Public Policy, 2003; OECD, Doing Better for Families, ch. 3; Esping-Andersen, The Incomplete Revolution. But this doesn’t seem to be a significant barrier to fertility in the United States.
^•16. See note 2.
^•17. Eric A. Hanushek, John F. Kain, Jacob M. Markman, and Steven G. Rivkin, “Does Peer Ability Affect Student Achievement?” Working Paper 8502, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2001; Heckman, “Schools, Skills, and Synapses”; Robert Bauchmüller, Mette Gørtz and Astrid Würtz Rasmussen, “Long-Run Benefits from Universal High-Quality Preschooling,” AKF Working Paper, 2011; Barnett, “Getting the Facts Right on Pre-K.”
^•18. Waldfogel, What Children Need, ch. 2; Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Wen-Jui Han, and Jane Waldfogel, “First-Year Maternal Employment and Child Development in the First Seven Years,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 2010; Maria del Carmen Huerta et al, “Early Maternal Employment and Child Development in Five OECD Countries,” OECD Social, Employment, and Migration Working Paper 118, 2011.
^•19. The apparent impact of California’s paid leave program is encouraging. See Maya Rossin-Slater, Christopher J. Ruhm, and Jane Waldfogel, “The Effects of California’s Paid Family Leave Program on Mothers’ Leave-Taking and Subsequent Labor Market Outcomes,” Journal of Public Policy Analysis and Management, 2013.
^•20. The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act.
^•21. Lynda Laughlin, “Who’s Minding the Kids? Child Care Arrangements: Spring 2011,” U.S. Census Bureau, 2013, table 6, using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). See also Ajay Chaudry et al, “Child Care Choices of Low-Income Working Families,” Urban Institute, 2011; ChildCare Aware of America, “Parents and the High Cost of Child Care,” 2012.
^•22. OECD, Education at a Glance 2012, table B2.3.
^•23. The other 10-15% are in private schools, home school, or dropped out.
^•24. OECD, Doing Better for Families, figure 1.11.
^•25. Obama Administration 2014 Budget Proposal; Cynthia G. Brown, Donna Cooper, Juliana Herman, Melissa Lazarín, Michael Linden, Sasha Post, and Neera Tanden, “Investing in Our Children: A Plan to Expand Access to Preschool and Child Care,” Center for American Progress, 2013.
^•26. According to Citizens for Tax Justice (“America’s Tax System Is Not as Progressive as You Think,” 2011), if we take all types of taxes into account — federal, state, and local (personal and corporate income, payroll, property, sales, excise, estate, etc.) — households in the bottom fifth of incomes pay about 2% of the taxes, those in the lower-middle fifth pay 5%, those in the middle fifth pay 10%, those in the upper-middle fifth pay 19%, and those in the top fifth pay 63%. Each fifth has about 24 million households. The amount paid by households in the bottom fifth is calculated as $160 billion (the total tax revenue needed) multiplied by .02 (this group will account for 2% of the revenues) divided by 24 million (the number of households in this group) = $133. The calculation is analogous for the other four groups.
^•27. The $4,200 tab for those in the top fifth might seem large, but that’s the average for this group. We can break this down further. Those between the 80th and 90th percentiles would pay $2,000 more per year, those between the 90th and 95th percentiles $2,933, those between the 95th and 99th percentiles $5,333, and those in the top 1 percent (average income above $1 million) $29,333.
^•28. Heckman, “Schools, Skills, and Synapses”; Esping-Andersen, The Incomplete Revolution.
^•29. Barbara R. Bergmann, Saving Our Children from Poverty: What the United States Can Learn from France, Russell Sage Foundation, 1996; Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers, Families That Work, Russell Sage Foundation, 2003; OECD, Doing Better for Families; Claire Lundberg, “Maybe Working Moms Can Have It All — in France,” Slate, 2012.
^•30. Charles Murray, “Response to Heckman: Weighing the Evidence,” Boston Review, 2012; Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, “Can We Be Hard-Headed About Preschool? A Look at Universal and Targeted Pre-K,” Brookings Institution, 2013; Will Wilkinson, “Does Subsidized Preschool Pay Off?” The Economist: Democracy in America, 2013.
^•31. Lane Kenworthy, Social Democratic America, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2014.
^•32. Mary Eberstadt, “The Post-Welfare State Family,” The Weekly Standard, 2013.
^•33. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology, Harvard University Press, 2008, figure 6.1; Census Bureau; National Center for Health Statistics.
^•34. OECD, “SF1.3: Living Arrangements of Children,” OECD Family Database.
^•35. Reihan Salam, “The House Budget Committee on the Inequality Landscape,” National Review Online: The Agenda, 2011.
^•36. Controlling for education and other relevant factors, federal government employees have higher compensation (wages and benefits) than their private-sector counterparts but state and local government employees don’t. Jeffrey Keefe, “Debunking the Myth of the Overcompensated Public Employee: The Evidence,” Economic Policy Institute, 2010; Philipp Bewerunge and Harvey S. Rosen, “Wages, Pensions, and Public-Private Sector Compensation Differentials,” Working Paper 227, Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies, 2012; Congressional Budget Office, “Comparing the Compensation of Federal and Private-Sector Employees,” 2012.
^•37. 127 million Americans voted. According to exit polls, 41% had incomes below $50,000, and 39% of them voted Republican; 31% had incomes between $50,000 and $100,000, with 52% of them voting Republican.
^•38. Lane Kenworthy, “What Do Americans Want?” 2013.
^•39. Barnett et al, The State of Preschool 2012, table 2.

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