Study shows economic benefits of early intervention

Research has long demonstrated the educational value of early intervention for America’s at-risk children, but a new study also shows the federal programs are a wise public investment.

Arthur Reynolds, a UW–Madison social work professor, and Judy Temple, an economist at Northern Illinois University, completed a cost-benefit analysis of the federally funded Chicago Child-Parent Center program, which serves children from low-income families in Chicago’s inner city. This Title I-funded program, similar to Head Start, provides comprehensive services and emphasizes literacy skills and parent involvement.

Reynolds and colleagues have been studying this program for more than 15 years, tracking the experiences of more than 989 program and 550 comparison-group youth.

His latest study asks a bottom-line question: Do the benefits of this program exceed the costs? He looked at five categories of benefits, including reduced need for grade retention and special education; reduced juvenile and adult crime and arrests; averted costs to crime victims; reduced child welfare expenditures; and greater earning potential due to educational advancement.

This latest study was reported during the June meeting of the Society for Prevention Research in Washington, D.C. The study was funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development and the U.S. Department of Education. It is the first cost-benefit analysis of a public early childhood program.

The researchers, including co-authors Dylan Robertson and Emily Mann, found:

–At an average cost of $6,730 per child for 18 months of participation, the preschool program generated a total return to society at large of $47,759 per participant.

— Overall, $7.10 was returned to society – in the form of downstream savings of tax expenditures and related benefits – for every dollar invested in CPC preschool. Of this amount, $3.83 per dollar was returned in government and crime-victim savings.

— The CPC program offered to school-age kids – up to the second or third grade – did not offer the same impact as the preschool program, returning $1.66 for every dollar invested. Comparatively, extended participation for four to six years returned $6.09 per dollar invested.

— The current value of all public benefits for the 1,000 Chicago study children in the program totaled $26 million (1998 dollars). Since 100,000 children have been served by CPC since 1967, the benefits translate to as much as $2.6 billion in public savings.

“The findings support greater levels of investments in young children’s learning by showing the long-term payoffs these programs can provide,” Reynolds says.

His longitudinal study compares the experiences of children in the Child-Parent Center programs with kids from the same demographic and economic background who did not participate in preschool. Among his findings were that the preschool group had a 29 percent higher rate of high-school completion, a 42 percent lower rate of juvenile arrest for a violent offense, a 41 percent reduction in special education placement, and a 51 percent reduction in child abuse and neglect.

Reynolds says he designed the study to give the U.S. Department of Education, which funds the CPC and other early literacy programs, a scientific review of their cost effectiveness. The results may be beneficial to federal and state lawmakers who are considering proposals to expand programs such as Head Start, Title I preschools, and state-run alternatives.