Kindergarten Teaching Affects Success Later In Life, New Study Shows

It has long been thought that the quality of kindergarten education does not have lasting effects on students as they mature into adulthood. This conclusion was based on the findings that by high school, children who had received a superior early education had equivalent scores to peers who had inferior teaching in their childhood.

Now, Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, and a team of researchers have found that kindergarten teaching does in fact continue to have an impact on students when they become adults. The information was gathered based on a study of 12,000 Tennessee residents -- all of whom participated in the Project Star education study in the 1980s and are now adults.

The New York Times reports:

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten.

Chetty and his colleagues have attached a monetary value to the impact of quality kindergarten teachers -- arguing that they should make $320,000 a year.