“Morally, the question is whether we are doing right by the youngest generation,” said Megan Gunnar, professor and director at the Institute of Child Development, in the March 8 Wall Street Journal blog post article Economists Study Early Education. Gunnar and Arthur Reynolds, professor at the Institute of Child Development, also quoted in this article, discussed the context and scope of research on the efficacy of early childhood programs. “There’s been a lot more research than the field has been given credit for,” Reynolds said, “It probably exceeds any other social program out there.”
The blog article accompanies the print article, No Easy Lessons in Assessing Preschool Payoff, a discussion of the investment costs of federal and state support for early childhood education. “There’s certainly a critical mass of evidence in the studies,” Arthur Reynolds says in the article, referring to the strong evidence of the benefits of early childhood education in the existing research. The focus of the articles is the response across the country to the support for public preschool education for all American children given by President Obama in his State of the Union address.