Do you need to pay for preschool?

"President Obama's proposal for universal preschool for 4-year-olds has stirred up the debate about its benefits and cost....

"High-quality preschool has also been found to reduce participants' future reliance on welfare and likeliness of being imprisoned," says Barnett. In fact, research from the Ounce of Prevention Fund shows that at-risk children who don't receive quality preschool education are 25% more likely than their peers to drop out of school and 70% more likely to be arrested for a violent crime....

"And some industry critics argue that kids are better off at home with their parents. "If family care is an option, that's certainly preferable to center-based programs," says Lindsey Burke, the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.

Burke argues that preschool primarily benefits disadvantaged children. "Even those benefits dissipate over time, leaving children who attended preschool no better off academically than those who did not," she says, pointing to recent research.

Not so, says Barnett. "The most recent peer-reviewed meta-analysis summarizes the results of 123 studies and found that despite some decline in effects after children entered school, on average, the effects did not disappear and remained substantial."

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