Bookraft

Thank you, Mrs Gallagher. A bit belated, really not anticipated words of gratitude for my kindergarten teacher prompted by this New York Times story on the measured effectiveness of good early schooling - particularly in kindergarten. This is another case of contradictory signals from different measures of success.

Early measures and results of good kindergarten teaching shows up in the test scores of children in the next few grades. But by junior high school a fade out effect appears to take effect and early kindergarten learning advantages seem to fade away in educational test scores.

However, recent work at Harvard University which broadened the measures and looked at success
in economic and social terms found that good kindergarten training had a broader effect:

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more. All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.

By changing the viewpoint and measuring broader outcomes good kindergarten education appears to have very beneficial effects.

But this is not the only point of the article. Education and its efficacy is under attack not just for kindergarten but across a broad spectrum of grades and efforts. The whole issue is highly charged as teachers unions resist efforts to change compensation based on seniority /years of service and not scores outcomes. This dispute has opened the pandora's box of evaluating educational effectiveness in general - and conservative critics are using test-score only measures to show that education is a)highly overrated for effectiveness and therefore b)highly overcompensated.

As the US declines in international test scores in a number of categories, this becomes a hot button political issue. Thus the importance of this article which finds that measuring educational success, already a tough assignment on the basis of educational test scores - gets more difficult to do but more informative when broader and later economic and social measures are brought into consideration.