Why Preschool?

Effective pre-kindergarten helps kids become ready to learn and ready to read.  When done right, pre-kindergarten is an investment in school success and yields long-term benefits.

Ready to Learn: Effective pre-kindergarten provides eager young learners with early academic and social skills that prepare them to be effective learners in kindergarten. 

• 95 percent of California kindergarten teachers say their students who attended pre-k are better prepared for kindergarten in both social and academic areas.  For more from these teachers, including real-life stories from the classroom, read Preschool California's Praise for Preschool.
  
  
• The pre-kindergarten years are a time when children’s brains are rapidly developing. Pre-k is a time for children to learn about self-control, curiosity, cooperation, paying attention, and other skills that will prepare them for K-12 classrooms.  Read the National Institute for Education Research's Preschool Policy Brief.
  
  
• Forty percent of California’s preschoolers are English learners, and they are shown to make great gains in pre-k programs – when they have access.  Read the study, Pre-K and Latinos: The Foundation for America’s Future. 
  
  
• When kids start school behind, many will only fall further behind. It is wiser to provide pre-kindergarten programs that boost children’s abilities in early childhood than it is to make schools help them catch up in adolescence.

Ready to Read: Good reading skills are the foundation for all future learning. It’s best to build this foundation before kindergarten, in effective preschool programs.

• California has a reading problem: Half of our fourth-graders can’t read at a basic level, according to national tests.  See the National Assessment of Education Progress’s Snapshot Report: State Reading 2005, California Grad 4 Public School.
  
  
• Effective pre-kindergarten provides a language-rich environment that lays the foundation for learning to read and can prevent most early reading difficulties.  For more on this, read Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Catherine E. Snow, Susan M. Burns, and Peg Griffin, 1998).
  
  
• Research shows that much of the gap in fourth-grade reading scores between Latino and white children can be attributed to a gap that exists when they start kindergarten. Pre-kindergarten programs address the readiness gap before it becomes the achievement gap.  See Margaret Bridges' Preschool for California’s Children: Promising Benefits, Unequal Access.

When Done Right, Pre-Kindergarten is an Investment in School Success: To assure kids are ready for school, California must invest in pre-kindergarten programs with well-trained, fairly compensated teachers. Teachers with the skills to create lively, enriching classrooms put kids on track for lifelong success.

• Effective pre-kindergarten programs offer a learning environment with developmentally appropriate curricula and clearly defined goals and outcomes that help prepare children for success in K-12.
  
  
• The children who lack access to preschool are disproportionately children of color, children whose home language is not English, and children whose parents did not graduate from high school. In short, they are those who would benefit from it most.  Read the Advancement Project’s report, California’s Preschool Space Challenge.
  
  
• When kids start school ready to learn, California’s K-12 schools benefit. Education reform begins with effective pre-kindergarten programs.

Long-term Benefits: When kids enter kindergarten ready to succeed, the benefits spread rapidly to the K-12 education system, the economy, and public safety.  Ultimately, pre-kindergarten is an investment that pays significant social and economic dividends in both the short and long run. 

• One research study calculated that effective preschool programs targeted to the children who need it most return $7.14 for every dollar invested in pre-k.  Read “Age 21 cost-benefit analysis of the Title I Chicago Child-Parent Centers” (Arthur Reynolds, et al.,  Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 24, 2002)
  
  
• A 2007 study by the Economic Policy Institute determined that a targeted preschool program in California would begin to pay for itself within six years and continue to net substantial benefits for society by saving government spending on K-12 education, child welfare, and the criminal justice system and by increasing tax revenues.  See the Economic Policy Institute’s California fact sheet.

• In the long-term, studies tudies show that children who attend effective pre-k are:
  
  
• more likely to graduate from high school; 
• more likely to be employed;
• more likely to earn a higher income; 
• less likely to need public assistance;
• more likely to lead healthy lives;  and
• less likely to become involved in crime.  Read more about long-term benefits found in two major studies, High Scope/Perry Preschool (pdf) and Chicago Parent-Child Centers (pdf).

For more on the benefits of effective pre-kindergarten, please visit Preschool California's Reports and Studies page.