Advocates for early-childhood education have had to contend with the fact that many studies have shown that the cognitive benefits of preschool appear to fade by the time the children reach 3rd grade.
They argue that you can’t just stop at preschool: The type of education that a child receives in grade school matters, too.
Research out of Tennessee backs up that contention, at least when it comes to 1st graders.
For a paper published late last year in the online journal AERA Open, researchers mined data on Tennessee’s state-supported preschool programs. They found that students who had attended a state-funded preschool and subsequently had a highly rated 1st grade teacher performed better than children who had a highly rated teacher but did not attend a state-supported preschool. That correlation was especially strong for students from a non-English-speaking family or those with early cognitive deficits.
