ECONOMIC REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

Box 5-3: Expansions of Early Education Programs
The Administration has been committed to helping students access
a high-quality education at all levels of schooling, and the President’s calls
for universal preschool and a child care guarantee for working families
with young children serve as critical complements to his other proposals.
Gaps in educational achievement occur early in life and grow over
time, so it is critical to ensure that all children receive the educational
foundation to succeed in school and life. On nearly every measure of
school readiness, from health to early human capital, children born into
low-income households enter kindergarten at a substantial disadvantage
relative to their higher-income peers. Indeed, disparities in physical
and mental health, cognition, and socio-emotional and behavioral skills
develop in children as young as 9 months (Halle et al. 2009). By the time
children enter school around age 5, those in poor households are nearly
four times more likely to score “very low” on assessments of math skills
and over four times more likely to score “very low”’ on reading skills than
their peers in more well-off households (Isaacs 2012). This gap remains
relatively constant through the beginning of high school, suggesting that
achievement gaps in later years are established in the earliest years of
childhood (CEA 2016a).
Research shows that enrollment in high-quality early childhood
education accelerates cognitive and non-cognitive development during
primary school years (see CEA 2016a for a review), and can lead to
significantly better outcomes later in life—such as greater educational
attainment and earnings and less involvement with the criminal justice
system (for example, Heckman et al. 2010; Reynolds et al. 2011; Campbell
et al. 2012). That is why, in addition to calling for preschool for all and
high-quality care for all infants and toddlers, the Obama Administration
has worked with Congress to increase investments in early childhood
programs by over $6 billion from FY 2009 to FY 2016, including highquality
preschool, Head Start, early Head Start, child care subsidies,
evidence-based home visiting, and programs for infants and toddlers
with disabilities. Since 2009, 38 States and the District of Columbia have
increased investments in preschool programs by more than $1.5 billion.
community college only to students with at least a 3.0 high school GPA
who test out of remediation, found that these conditions limited eligibility
to only about 15 percent of the city’s high school graduates (Page and Scott-
Clayton 2015; Fain 2014). Additionally, research finds that reducing the cost
of lower-quality options can worsen outcomes for students, so attention
to college quality in the context of lowering prices to students is essential
(Peltzman 1973). A recent Department of Education report (2016a), the
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