Kevin Drum uses a new Chicago study to advocate for universal preschool:
[O]ut of 4 million kids [ages 3 and 4], 2 million are boys and about 250,000 are children of mothers who didn't complete high school. Within this group, about 30,000 more would complete high school and 30,000 fewer would commit serious crimes and become drug abusers. That's per year. Fast forward 20 years from preschool and that adds up to about 300,000 kids between the ages of 16-25, the prime problem years. Just on the grounds of reduced crime and substance abuse within that group alone, this is money well spent. Add in all the other benefits, and doing something like this on a nationwide scale is a no-brainer.
McArdle admits "we could replicate the results of Chicago's Child-Parent Center … then yes, it would be a no-brainer" but warns that " it's a huge mistake to assume that a pilot program can be rolled out on a large scale." Yglesias is somewhere between Drum and McArdle:
I’m all for more investments in preschool, but it continues to be the case that I see no particular reason to believe that talking about four-year-olds rather than ten-year-olds or sixteen-year-olds gets us out of the quality quandry. What we know from the research into preschool is that good preschool programs make a huge difference to kids’ outcomes. But what we know from the research into K-12 schooling is that good K-12 schools also make a huge difference to kids’ outcomes. The challenge in both cases is to actually provide quality at scale.
The Dish 