MIDDLE-CLASS CHILDREN

Research suggests that middle-class children’s benefits from early childhood education vary by program type. For pre-K, benefits occur for a wide variety of income groups. For child care and parenting programs, benefits are limited to children from low-income families.

Across children from families with different income, pre-K has similar effects on improving a child’s test score percentile at kinder-

How Can Early Childhood Programs Best Be Designed? 45 garten entrance. In both Tulsa’s and Boston’s universal pre-K pro- grams, children eligible for a lunch subsidy have greater test-score percentile gains than children whose family income is too high for a lunch subsidy, but the advantage is slight and usually statistically

insignificant.56

Increases in kindergarten test scores by a given percentile pre- dict a similar dollar gain in adult earnings (Chetty et al. 2011). Say test scores increase by one percentile. Whether that one percentile is gained from the 20th to the 21st percentile or from the 70th to the 71st percentile doesn’t matter—in either case, it would result in a very similar amount of dollars being added to future adult annual earnings. Therefore, Tulsa or Boston pre-K participants from different income groups would be predicted to have similar future dollar gains in adult earnings.

Why are earnings effects of pre-K similar across income groups? Quality pre-K provides services that are difficult for even the best par- ent with the most resources to reproduce on his or her own. Quality pre-K provides opportunities to learn to get along with peers and with authority figures such as teachers. Quality pre-K provides peer pres- sure and teacher help in learning cognitive skills. This child-centered learning is hard for most parents to provide completely with their own resources.

Some parents may have sufficient resources to purchase quality pre-K on their own. But quality pre-K is expensive—costing, as men- tioned, $10,000 for a full-day (six hours per day) school-year pro- gram. Costs are even higher if we add in wraparound hours for the rest of the workday, and for the rest of the year, or if we consider adding in a second year of pre-K.

Such expensive services are difficult for most families to afford on their own. Many middle-class as well as low-income families will find it challenging to pay for quality pre-K on their own dime.

A high proportion of American children under the age of five live in families with modest resources. Based on data from the Cur- rent Population Survey, of children under the age of five, about one-

quarter are in families below the poverty line, and almost half (47 percent) are below 200 percent of the poverty line. Even if pre-K was needed only for children from poor and near-poor families, full-scale pre-K would need to serve half of all American children. But many children from families above 200 percent of the poverty line will also benefit from public funding for quality pre-K. These working-class and middle-class families find that publicly funded pre-K can provide an educational opportunity for their child that the family could not readily match.

Even though high-quality pre-K provides similar dollar benefits to children from low-income and middle-class families, universal pre-K would still help even out economic opportunities. Expected baseline future earnings—earnings without pre-K—would be much lower for the average child from a lower-income family, compared to one from a middle-income family. Similar dollar benefits for children from lower-income and middle-income families imply much larger percentage effects on future earnings prospects for children from lower-income families.

Table 5.1 shows a simulation of how pre-K benefits vary across

income groups.57 _{Even though pre-K’s dollar benefits for future adult}

earnings of middle-class children are nine-tenths of the dollar ben- efits for lower-income children, the percentage boost to earnings for lower-income children is twice that for middle-class children (10 per- cent versus 5 percent).

In contrast, effects of developmental child care programs or parenting programs appear to be limited to low-income families. Consider the Infant Health and Development Program mentioned in Chapter 2. IHDP provided child care services for children at ages one and two that were similar to the Abecedarian/Educare programs. Duncan and Sojourner (2013) find large and statistically significant effects of this program on children whose family income was below 180 percent of the poverty line, but not for children from families above that income level.

How Can Early Childhood Programs Best Be Designed? 47 Table 5.1 How Earnings Benefits of Pre-K per Child Vary for Children

from Different Income Groups

Earnings gains versus baseline earnings for a child from a

Low-income family Middle-income family

Gains from pre-K $53,000 $48,000

Baseline earnings $547,000 $997,000

Percentage gain 10% 5%

NOTE: Gains and baseline earnings are rounded to the nearest thousand, in present- value 2012 dollars. Baseline earnings are the present value of total career earnings without pre-K. Earnings and gains are averages per child for program participants. SOURCE: Author’s calculations, as described in text and endnotes.

Effects of high-quality child care might be income-targeted because there are big differences across different-income families in what the high-quality child care is substituting for. The high-quality child care for lower-income families may be substituting for either parental or relative care by parents and relatives who may be over- stressed by poverty. Alternatively, the high-quality child care may be substituting for the very-low-quality child care the family can afford on its own. For middle-income families, even high-quality child care is substituting for parental or relative care by families that have fewer stressors and more resources, or for better-quality child care that a middle-income family can afford on its own. It is more difficult for a high-quality child care program to surpass what a middle-class family can provide on its own in child care at ages one and two.

Similar findings occur for parenting programs. For the Nurse Family Partnership, the research suggests that this program had greater effects for more disadvantaged women (Olds et al. 1997).

On average, middle-income families may have more resources and support to provide high-quality parenting on their own. On aver- age, low-income families may be more likely to have fewer social supports and resources. Parenting programs might provide a valuable supplement.