A first-of-its-kind study has found that early intervention services — which can include occupational, physical and speech therapies, among others — improve children’s test scores, even years down the road.
The study, conducted jointly by researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the New York City Health Department, showed that children who received the services between birth and age 3 outperformed similar peers on third grade reading and math tests.
Early intervention services are intended for children with disabilities, developmental delays or those who are at risk of them, such as children who are born severely premature. Federal law mandates such services, but states design their own programs and set their own funding levels.
I was especially interested in these findings after reporting several stories on early intervention, including one on racial disparities in access to services and another on the broken pipeline from the neonatal intensive care unit to receiving the crucial therapies.
Countless parents have described to me the pivotal role that early intervention played for their children. Jaclyn Vasquez, a Chicago mother, credits the timely start of more than a half-dozen therapies with her daughter’s thriving years later in elementary school.
“I was told my child would need a wheelchair by kindergarten,” Vasquez told me. “She is running, dancing, chasing siblings, dancing on trampolines — all because of the amount of time we poured into therapies at a very young age.”
Yet I have been surprised at how challenging it has been to find research on early intervention’s long-term effects, particularly when it comes to performance in school. “There is very little out there,” said Jeanette Stingone, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Mailman School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors.
Several studies have shown crucial developmental gains in speech and other areas after children receive early intervention therapies. But what makes the new study unusual is that it tracked children for several years, and it included a comparison group that did not receive early intervention.
Stingone said that researchers at the Health Department started building a data set two decades ago that would allow them to assess the effects of early intervention services in New York City. In the end, the researchers focused on babies who were born in the city between 1994 and 1998 — a group of more than 200,000 children. Of those, roughly 13,000 received early intervention services.
Drawing from the full pool of more than 200,000, the team was able to compare the third grade test scores of the kids who received the services with those of similar children — based on more than 20 factors, including race, disability status, neighborhood, socioeconomic level, mother’s education level and insurance status — who did not.
“The findings … suggest that EI services for children younger than 3 years with moderate to severe developmental delays or disabilities had tangible academic benefits later in childhood,” the authors wrote in the study, published in JAMA Network Open in February.
The findings held across socioeconomic groups: Wealthier children who received early intervention, for instance, outperformed similar higher-income peers who did not. And they were particularly pronounced when it came to children who required special education services in school, suggesting that early intervention sets children with disabilities on a stronger path from day one.
The team hopes that their model of linking health and education data over decades can be used by other cities and communities hoping to conduct similar analyses.
This story about early intervention was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.