Arthur Rolnick: Championing the Economic Benefits of Early Education

Arthur Rolnick

Credit: Peter Hoey

For years, advocates of universal early-childhood education have emphasized the fairness and academic necessity of their cause, pushing preschool as a means of eliminating the achievement gap. But Arthur Rolnick, senior vice president and research director for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, expanded the debate with a powerful economic case: Spending on high-quality education for three- and four-year-olds yields a higher return than any other public investment.

That argument registered with policy makers, business leaders, and other financial movers and shakers. "The bottom-line message, coming from an economist, is compelling not just for governors and policy makers but also for business leaders," says Anna Lovejoy, an education-program director for the National Governors Association.

Recently, even Rolnick's boss, Federal Reserve Board chair Ben Bernanke, has begun talking up early education as a way to close the economic gap between low-income families and high-income families. "My job's secure for another year," Rolnick says with a laugh.

State-funded preschool "continues to be the most rapidly expanding segment of the U.S. educational system," the National Institute on Early Education Research [9] reported in March, citing combined state spending of close to $3.3 billion last year. (See "Preschool Comes of Age [10]".) At least thirty-eight states have some form of publicly funded prekindergarten program; Rolnick has fielded requests from all fifty -- plus a handful of developing countries -- to come talk about his rigorous, independent analyses.

He came to the issue a few years ago, through his Fed charge to evaluate government spending, when a former congressman challenged him to look at the economics of early education. Rolnick drafted colleague Rob Grunewald to help him, and their first paper -- released in 2003 and based mostly on their analysis of a forty-year-old preschool -- found returns of up to $9 for every dollar invested in high-quality education. (Their 2004 study calculates the total benefit-cost ratio at $17 for every dollar invested.)

The pair followed up with a 2005 paper proposing economic development through a market-based approach to early care for poor children, writing that "investing in early-childhood education is more likely to create a vibrant economy than using public funds to lure a sports team by building a new stadium." State or local governments, working with private industry and foundations, could establish a permanent scholarship fund, they reported.

This fund would support mentoring of parents of at-risk children -- from pregnancy through age two -- and give scholarships for their three- and four-year-olds to attend high-quality early-education programs. Parents would choose from among programs, including public and private preschools, child-care centers, Head Start settings, and family homes, that meet strict standards.

"Once you empower the parents, making them like middle class parents, the market will respond with improved options," Rolnick says.

A pilot program in St. Paul, Minnesota, will test that theory. The Minnesota Early Learning Foundation [11] -- on whose board Rolnick serves -- has nearly met its $15 million target for the program, a partnership with the city. In 2008, it will select 1,200 at-risk families to participate. It's not yet clear how much the mentoring will cost (some parents already may receive it through Head Start or other programs), but Rolnick and Grunewald estimate the yearly cost per child at roughly $6,500 for a half-day early-education program and $12,000 for a full-day program. The pilot will run five years, with independent evaluation.

Rolnick has become even more vested in the issue as codirector of the Early Childhood Research Collaborative [12], launched last fall to promote multidisciplinary research. His codirector is Arthur Reynolds, a professor at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development [13] and director of the Chicago Longitudinal Study [14] of early education.

Rolnick's wide-ranging focus on early education -- from research to developing ideas to presenting them in countless forums -- has had enormous influence in education-policy debate, but, he reports with a grin, it has taken a toll on another favorite field of study: "I haven't had much chance to do my pre-Civil War bank research."

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