New America
Education Policy

New Report Highlights Impact of High Quality Preschool

Blog Post
By 

Clare McCann

Oct. 16, 2013
This week, New America's Early Education Initiative hosted an event reviewing the research on pre-K, published in a new report, “Investing in Our Children: The Evidence Base on Preschool Education," from the Foundation for Child Development and the Society for Research in Child Development.
The report was intended to update policymakers and the wider public on how high-quality preschool programs perform, particularly when scaled up. Per the event overview:
When policymakers and stakeholders talk about the need for more public investment in high-quality pre-kindergarten, they often refer to research based on the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian programs. These are high-quality preschool programs that show evidence of improving long-term outcomes for children and being wise economic investments. They are also sometimes criticized for being small, resource-intensive programs, making them difficult to replicate and scale-up. And they were implemented decades ago. But over the past several years, evidence of the impact of pre-K programs (including Head Start) has been emerging from many quarters -- providing a wealth of new evidence too important to ignore.
Thus, this report and event:
[The report] presents a synthesis of findings on high quality preschool education from an array of recent studies, including research focusing on large-scale preschool systems in major cities. We will talk with the authors of the report published by the Foundation for Child Development and the Society for Research in Child Development, “Investing in Our Children: The Evidence Base on Preschool Education,” and examine what it will take to bring high-quality preschool to more children.
The event was moderated by Lisa Guernsey, Director of New America's Early Education Initiative, and featured Laura Bornfreund, a senior policy analyst at the New America Foundation. New York University's Hirokazu Yoshikawa and the SRCD's Marty Zaslow presented the findings of their report, while Albert Wat  of the National Governors Association and Deborah Phillips from Georgetown University served as panelists.

Here's how the discussion panned out:

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