Kindergarten payoff

Reader Lindsay Merritt shared a link to a fascinating New York Times article about the long-term value of good kindergarten teachers.

It's especially intriguing as districts across the country, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg, try to figure out whether early education makes a lasting difference. Locally, gains from Bright Beginnings prekindergarten fade as officials track test scores over the years, a pattern that's nearly universal, according to the article.

But a Harvard economist and his team of researchers decided to track adult outcomes, using a group of Tennessee students first studied as kindergarteners in the 1980s. Those children had been randomly assigned to kindergarten teachers. Some classes showed much bigger gains than others, a result attributed to high-quality teachers.

Predictably, those differences faded on test scores in later grades. But the research presented this week found that kids in the most successful kindergarten classes, now adults in their 20s, were more likely to have gone to college, less likely to be single parents and earning more than peers who had less effective kindergarten teachers.

"The economists don't pretend to know the exact causes," writes Times reporter David Leonhardt. "But it's not hard to come up with plausible guesses. Good early education can impart skills that last a lifetime — patience, discipline, manners, perseverance. The tests that 5-year-olds take may pick up these skills, even if later multiple-choice tests do not."

Wow. I feel like I should write a thank-you note to Merry Deely, who did a great job of teaching my son in kindergarten 16 years ago.