Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads to Boston and other cities, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kritsof has another idea: Occupy the Classroom.

“Occupy Wall Street is shining a useful spotlight on one of America’s central challenges, the inequality that leaves the richest 1 percent of Americans with a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent,” he writes, “Most of the proposed remedies involve changes in taxes and regulations, and they would help. But the single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.”

Why? “A bigger source of structural inequity,” Kristof writes, “is that many people never get the skills to compete.”

The strategy to address the problem is high-quality early education.

“The reason early education is important is that you build a foundation for school success,” Dean Kathleen McCartney of the Harvard Graduate School of Education tells Kristof. “And success breeds success.”

Kristof runs through the research supporting the effectiveness of high-quality early education. He cites the Perry Preschool program in Michigan and the Abecedarian Project in North Carolina, model programs for low-income children that are the subject of gold-standard longitudinal studies that find a broad range of educational, economic, health and social benefits. He cites Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, who finds a 7-10% return on investing in early learning that, Kristof notes, is “better than many investments on Wall Street.”

He also cites Head Start, which has come under scrutiny for producing only fleeting improvements in participants’ test scores. David Deming, assistant professor of education and economics at Harvard, Kristof writes, has found long-lasting benefits of Head Start. Comparing Head Start participants with siblings who did not attend the program, Deming finds low-income children who attended Head Start are significantly less likely to be diagnosed with a learning disability or be held back a grade. They have significantly better health and are more likely to finish high school and go on to college.

“The question,” Kristof writes, “isn’t whether we can afford early childhood education, but whether we can afford not to provide it.”