Early childhood programs found to significantly lower likelihood of special education placements in
Early childhood programs found to significantly lower likelihood of special education placements in third gradehttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150203102915.htm
"SNIP..................
Access to state-supported early childhood programs significantly reduces the likelihood that children will be placed in special education in the third grade, academically benefiting students and resulting in considerable cost savings to school districts, according to new research published today in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.
The findings suggest that the programs provide direct benefits not only to participating students but also to other third graders through positive spillover effects.
The study, by Clara G. Muschkin, Helen F. Ladd, and Kenneth A. Dodge at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, examined how investments in two high-quality early childhood initiatives in North Carolina -- a preschool program for four-year-olds from at-risk families and a program that provides child, family, and health services for children from birth through age five -- affected the likelihood that children would be placed in special education by the end of third grade from 1995 to 2010.
The authors found that an investment of $1,110 per child in the More at Four preschool program (now called NC Pre-K) -- the funding level in 2009 -- reduced the likelihood of third-grade special education placements by 32 percent. An investment of the same amount in the Smart Start early childhood initiative reduced the likelihood by 10 percent. Both programs together reduced third grade students' odds of special education placement by 39 percent, resulting in significant cost savings for the state. Nationwide, special education costs nearly twice as much as regular classroom education.
...................SNIP"
= new reply since forum marked as read
For low-SES kids, the high-qual EC program effects at 3rd grade a robust and have been found to be robust for decades. The reasons for the robustness have been known since the '60s--it's the parents. (All other reasons have been found to be small or confounds, not just in statistical re-analyses but on the ground: Train the parents in how to interact with their kids different support education without altering otherwise their income, geography, race, education levels, etc., all the things that make up SES, and you replicate most EC intervention consequences at 3rd grade.)
It doesn't matter that all of this is known. The problem is that this says that many childhood problems are the parents' problems passed along to the kids, and many researchers have a visceral hatred of such a claim. Sometimes because they view it as "blaming the victim," and if you leave some of those facts out you still get very good looking, very plausible statistical analyses. Sometimes because that means the solutions are probably unattainable--it's not what politicians and theoreticians can do, they have to remediate the "root cause" that's not found in some view of social justice. It also makes the future a problem, since in many areas at-risk kids have far more siblings than their not-at-risk peers, and that trend has grown in the last decade (as of 2013, who knows what's happened since then).
However one of the reasons for a push to stop exempting SpEd students from mods on standardized tests is that administrators have tended to warehouse low-achieving kids in SpEd programs. This peels out the bottom-most kids from the test score data and helps make AYP.
Another confound is old and long-since fought against: Many evaluations of cognitive functioning rely on verbal skills, whether production or processing or comprehension. And the biggest factor that's remediated in EC programs is language deficits caused by home environment. Remediating that helps with doing better on cognitive tests, helps in ELA classes, and promotes reading readiness (produces "phonemic awareness"
so that reading deficits don't impact other academic areas.
