SCHOOLS

Parent Data - In the U.S., compulsory schooling begins in either kindergarten or first grade, depending on where you live. This means that is the point where you have to enroll your child in school (or register for some type of homeschooling). Before that, parents are not required to send their child to school and, importantly, the government is not required to provide schooling.

More and more, however, individual municipalities — cities, towns — have been offering school earlier. Pre-K, starting at either age 3 or 4, has become increasingly common. There are a lot of reasons for this. Providing “universal pre-K,” as this is sometimes called, can theoretically help lower inequality in school, by making sure that all kids have similar exposure to learning concepts before they hit school age. Parents generally like universal pre-K options.

Universal pre-K is not without its detractors, though. One source of debate is the question of whether pre-K is actually good for kids. I wrote more about that here, and the thrust of the literature is that yes, it is. A second issue is that it’s expensive for the government to provide. Providing free child care costs money, and one may question whether that is the right use of funds.

There is a new paper out, by several economists, that speaks to this whole debate but especially to the second part of it. Broadly speaking, the paper looks at the impact of universal pre-K on parent earnings rather than child outcomes, and asks whether providing this service increases paid parental work and whether that then makes it more cost-effective. (The answer is yes.)