Huffington Magazine Issue 11 | Page 63

HUFFINGTON 08.26.12 SMART START? problems later in life. This idea has become commonplace in the world of educational studies, but that wasn’t always the case. Until recently, the mind of the young child was as obscure as a distant galaxy. People who believed in the importance of preschool had little hard evidence to back up their convictions. The field is still a “frontier,” as one advocate put it, but advances in brain science and data collection have made it possible to venture far deeper into this frontier than ever before. Some scientists now test the brains of young children for cortisol, a hormone associated with stress that is believed to interfere with normal brain development. Others slow down videos of infants to the point that every little eyelid flutter, every twitch of the lip can be coded and interpreted. As a result of these advances and discoveries, and of the advocacy groups that promote them, many states around the country have taken it upon themselves to provide preschool services for free. To gain the political support they need, the architects of these programs have argued that preschool helps not only poor people, but people in general. They cite the work of the economist James Heckman, invariably mentioning his Nobel Prize before noting that, according to his recent research, every $1 invested in preschool turns into $7 to $9 when the program’s graduates complete their education and start contributing to the economy. Advocates also point out that many state programs actually improve the quality of private childcare by requiring hybrid centers like Ms. Sabrena’s to meet a set of statewide standards in all of their classrooms, public and private. And they make the case that every kid in a public-school class benefits when the teacher doesn’t have to spend hours dealing with complex cases like Nawal’s. Last spring, Steve Barnett, the head of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, released a report Kate Gallagher is the director of the preschool at Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute.