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Poor children attending preschool doesn't necessarily mean that schooling is the answer. It could be that the parents who would send their kids to preschool (re

Poor children attending preschool doesn't necessarily mean that schooling is the answer. It could be that the parents who would send their kids to preschool (regardless of socioeconomic background) are the kind of parents who give their kids the skills needed to succeed later in life. There are tons of confounding variables when it comes to stuff like this, so the jump from "preschool is a good predictor of life success" to "we should invest more in preschools" isn't necessarily a logical one. Correlation does not imply causation, and all that.

gensym 15y ago
It's hard to study this sort, of thing, sure, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't been studied. Probably the most famous is the Perry Preschool Project in the 60s, which randomly assigned students to a control versus preschool group and followed the students until they were 40, finding significant differences in life outcomes (earnings, arrests, teen pregnancies, etc) between the two groups.