John Thompson is an Oklahoma City teacher with 18 years of urban high school experience and an education blogger at thisweekineducation.com. He contributes regularly to our blog on education issues.

A large body of social science has demonstrated the long-term effectiveness of high-quality early education and teaching children to read for comprehension by 3^rd grade. New research and cognitive science is now explaining why investments in the early years are far more cost effective than trying to turnaround struggling schools.

In the classic Perry Preschool Experiment, 123 low-income, three year old, African-American children were randomly assigned to either a treatment group, and given a high-quality pre-school education, or to a control group. While kids exposed to preschool got an initial bump in general intelligence, those gains dissipated by second grade. That result has been used by both the political left and right to challenge the effectiveness of early education. However, after tracking the Perry Preschool subjects for nearly 40 years,  the research found that adults assigned to the preschool program were 20 percentage points more likely to have graduated from high school and 19 percentage points less likely to have been arrested more than five times. They earned much better grades, were more likely to remain married and were less dependent on welfare programs. Other scientific studies have shown that improvements in test scores due to early interventions often dissipate in subsequent grades. But when adult outcomes are considered, a dollar invested in high-quality early education can result in $8.70 savings to society. Read the rest of this entry »

In the heart of one of the poorest neighborhoods in Oklahoma City, in a state-of-the-art facility beside the railroad tracks, the smell of fresh-baked bread and cookies wafts down the halls, which wind around the building to simulate streets in a town.

This is Educare, a premiere early childhood education and child care program, and Oklahoma City is one of only a handful of cities to claim one. In fact, at the time OKC Educare opened this summer, Oklahoma was the only state to have two Educare centers. (Tulsa’s opened in 2006.) Read the rest of this entry »