President Obama

Dear President Obama,

According to recent news accounts, you plan to focus your 2011 State of the Union address on the deficit. Your aides have been studying the recommendations of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Reform. We hope you take to heart the advice of a number of experts: Invest in young children and high-quality early education to promote economic growth, secure a sound fiscal future, and benefit children and families.

Nobel laureate James Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, sent the panel a 12-page letter to that effect.  “The fiscally responsible thing to do is to invest more resources in early childhood education,” Heckman wrote. “It is something for which we must find the dollars because it saves money as early as kindergarten and builds equity throughout the life of the child. Early childhood education creates a taxpayer who reduces his or her own tax burden through greater productivity, healthier living and stronger contributions to society.”

Heckman delivered a similar message to a recent gathering called by Chicago businessman J.B. Pritzker, according to The New York Times. Heckman, the Times reports, “contends that high-quality programs focused on birth to age 5 produce a higher per-dollar return than K-12 schooling and later job training. They reduce deficits by reducing the need for special education and remediation, and by cutting juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancy and dropout rates.”

Pre-K Now points out other two recent studies. In “Investing in America’s Economy: A Budget Blueprint for Economic Recovery,” Demos, the Economic Policy Institute and the Century Foundation call for investing high-quality early education and care to, among other things, upgrade the training and quality of the early childhood workforce, expand tax credits and increase access to Head Start.

“To harness the economic and social potential of the next generation, we will have to significantly expand our investment in the educational pipeline that begins with child care and preschool,” the report notes. “Investing in early childhood programs produces significant benefits for children, families and taxpayers and can make the workforce more productive, strengthen the economy, and in the long run provide budget relief.”

Likewise “Choosing the Nation’s Fiscal Future” from the National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration identifies investing in early education as an area where “expanded spending might be considered an investment in assets that yield economic growth and produce social benefits.”

Mr. President, you came tantalizingly close to establishing an Early Learning Challenge Fund in the session of Congress that just ended. We hope you use the occasion of your State of the Union address to lay out a fiscally sound agenda that starts with investing in our youngest children.