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Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

McCourt Conference Details Benefits of Universal Pre-K Based on 20 Year Study

The Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy hosted a hybrid conference about the benefits of early childhood education later in adolescence and early adulthood.

At the conference Sept. 20, Co-directors of McCourt’s Center for Research on Children in the United States (CROCUS) Dr. Bill Gormley and Dr. Deborah Phillips shared findings from their 20-year longitudinal study on Tulsa, Oklahoma’s government-funded universal pre-K (UPK) program. The conference featured Governor Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and Distinguished University Professor and Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne as keynote speakers, among others.

Tulsa’s program, which made pre-K available to all four-year-olds on a voluntary basis, demonstrated immediate positive effects on the mental development in math performance, early literacy and attention skills of the 71% of children who enrolled, according to Gormley.

“When a student enters kindergarten in Tulsa, the single best predictor of that student’s cognitive skills at kindergarten entry is not race or gender or the mother’s education or the presence of the biological father in the child’s home, but rather it’s whether the child attended pre-K the previous year,” Gormley said in an interview with The Hoya.

The researchers initially planned to study the intersection between childhood development and public policy more generally, but were compelled to shift their focus specifically to Tulsa’s program after learning about it, according to Gormley.

“In 2001, I decided to investigate Oklahoma’s universal pre-K program, which was the second oldest in the United States, and during that investigation, I learned that no one else was looking at it,” Gormley said. “And that there was a treasure trove of data sitting around in some basement in the Tulsa public schools that was just waiting to be analyzed. So we pounced on that opportunity, and we’ve never looked back.”

McCourt School | After over two decades of research, Georgetown faculty presented findings on how access to early childhood education improves life outcomes.

Phillips said they studied children who were part of the program from childhood to college, working both inside and outside of the classroom to examine the effects that pre-K had on their development and success.

“You can really shape children’s lives in pretty powerful ways with nine months of a high-quality program,” Phillips said. “The fact that we found such strong impacts on math and early literacy in and of itself was pretty groundbreaking.”

Not only were there clear positive outcomes related to math and early literacy skills, but they also noted that childrens’ attention and self-regulation skills seemed to be better among students who had attended pre-K.

Aside from academics, attending pre-K is associated with increased civic engagement and likelihood to pursue higher forms of education, according to Gormley.

“Students who were in the Tulsa pre-K program many years ago are today more likely to be registered to vote and are more likely to vote,” Gormley said. “We have also been delighted to see that students who were in the Tulsa public school’s pre-K program years ago are much more likely to attend college today than a comparable set of students.”

A parallel study called the Tulsa School Experiences and Early Development (SEED), led by Dr. Anna Johnson, who attended the conference, follows a second generation of students in the Tulsa UPK program.

According to Johnson, her research, which explores the ways pre-K improves long-term learning trajectories for low-income students, was only possible because of Gormley and Phillips’ work.

“I’m standing on the shoulders of giants,” Johnson said. “I have been invited into this research group and to continue this next generation of research building on that earlier work.”

Johnson hopes the findings from these studies will encourage policymakers to push for UPK to be rolled out in other states.

“Rather than expect one year of preschool to, you know, put kids in the top 10 percent of test scorers, I think a realistic expectation is that these kids are better prepared for school,” Johnson said. “They’re more persistent at hard things, and they do better in life, and I think we can hope that the states that are rolling out universal pre-K will see the same effects.”

Phillips said the best part of the day was being able to publicly express her gratitude for the group at Tulsa for facilitating their research.

Moving forward in her research, Phillips said she hopes to explore the reasons why pre-K helps set students up for future success.

“My main interest really is not only in documenting impacts on children, but trying to understand the mechanisms behind those impacts: what is it that happens inside these classrooms?” Phillips said. “What’s going on between the teachers and the children and among the children that produces the outcomes that we were seeing, which were astonishingly strong.”

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