A few years ago, preschool teachers in Santa Maria, a low-income, mostly Hispanic city north of Santa Barbara, CA, attended a series of meetings with kindergarten teachers in the district. Most had never met. Although their students were only a year apart in age, teachers had little idea what happened in each other’s classrooms. What [...]

In the United States, two-thirds of all 4-year-olds and almost half of all 3-year-olds are cared for outside the home before they start kindergarten. They may be in public or private school, family day care, for-profit childcare centers, or programs run by faith-based organizations or nonprofits. Children from the poorest families are eligible for the [...]

We’ve summarized five studies that show preschool helps most students, but with some caveats.

Do you know the difference between preschool, Head Start, religious school, child care? We lay out the details.

President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have often claimed that the “return on investment,” or ROI, for pre-k is 10-to-1, meaning there is a $10 payoff in the future for every dollar invested today in pre-kindergarten education. Both advocates and opponents of publicly funded pre-k often cite such figures, which can range from [...]

Need some tips for picking a high quality preschool program? We’ve got them.

By 2030, about one in four children in the United States under the age of 8 will be Hispanic. But these children are often not being served effectively by current preschool programs, which may lack Spanish-speaking teachers or culturally appropriate materials and activities. Increased enrollments of Hispanic children in early education programs reflect demographic trends, [...]

Head Start, the federal government’s school readiness program for the nation’s poorest children, has enrolled more than 25 million preschoolers since it started in 1965. Envisioned as an anti-poverty program within the Department of Health and Human Services, Head Start is the country’s oldest and best-known publicly funded preschool program. It tackles the needs of [...]

Seminal studies and reports: The High/Scope Perry Preschool Project — Compared low-income children who attended the program, beginning in 1962, with those who did not. As adults, preschool participants had higher high school graduation rates, higher monthly earnings, less use of welfare and fewer arrests than those who didn’t attend the program. Also showed that [...]