California Legislature, meet Arthur J. Reynolds. Sure, you're tied up with a few budget concerns at the moment, but when you come up for air, and can turn your attention to the future of California's children, this professor from the University of Wisconsin deserves your ear.
Reynolds directs the country's longest-running study on the effectiveness of preschool education, and his findings speak directly to this state's need to bolster its anemic offerings for young children. The Chicago Longitudinal Study has a remarkable 22 years of data on more than 1,000 impoverished children who entered the Chicago Child-Parent Center (CPC) preschools in the early 1980s. The study has tracked them from their preschool days as 3-and 4-year-olds, through their elementary and secondary years to their transition to young adulthood. It also has data on a control group of about 400 children who were socioeconomically similar but did not attend the centers.

The findings are stark. By age 20, graduates of the CPC preschools had a 29 percent higher rate of school completion and a 33 percent lower rate of juvenile arrest. They were 40 percent less likely to have been placed in special education or held back a year.

What educators did at the CPCs wasn't rocket science. They established preschools at schools where children would attend kindergarten, creating strong links with the elementary program. They focused heavily on getting children accustomed to print and pre-reading and math skills. They drew parents into the classrooms to teach them what their children needed to learn, and provided medical, dental and nutrition services for students. Perhaps most important, they staffed the preschools with highly trained teachers who had bachelor's degrees, something you don't always find in California state preschools and Head Start centers.

Above all, the program hasn't bankrupted anybody. It costs $6,730 per child for 18 months of part-day schooling. That's roughly comparable to what the federal government spends on Head Start and what California now spends on state preschool programs; neither of the two programs reach all the children that need them. Reynolds and his associates figure that the money saved on school intervention programs, incarceration, probation, welfare and so on amounts to about $7 for every $1 invested.

Where did Chicago get the cash? From federal Title I monies, which flow to every school district with poor children in the country. Chicago simply made the decision to invest those dollars -- wisely, it turns out -- in high-quality preschool.

Reynolds' research is exceptional for its scope and authority, but it is by no means the only study demonstrating big benefits from quality preschool. Longitudinal studies in Michigan (Perry Preschool) and North Carolina (the Abecedarian Project, which also considered interventions with even younger children) have shown similar findings.

Here is a model that works. The results are there for all to see. It's time for California to listen to the research and put the model into action.