Sara Mead, Progressive Policy InstituteSeptember 2004
In this concise report, Sara Mead makes a strong case for effective preschool programs. Culling information from multiple studies, she argues that universal access to high-quality preschools could take us a long way toward closing racial and socio-economic achievement gaps. The core of her report is a specific proposal for universal preschool access. This could be pricey, Mead admits, but making it free for poor families and then increasing the burden for others on a sliding scale would be affordable - well, maybe $8.1 billion a year. (A billion here, a billion there....) Although Mead emphasizes the need for state-by-state flexibility in curriculum and other matters, she also thinks this federal money should come with accountability strings attached. Whatever the likelihood of such a program being instituted, Mead has put a coherent model on the table. Policy makers would do well to read her discussions of the preschool programs already implemented in Georgia and Oklahoma. A recent study of the latter, for example, found remarkable gains - 17 and 54 percent, respectively - in the cognitive and language assessment scores of African American and Hispanic children. You can find it here.