In 2008, the District of Columbia passed the Pre-K Enhancement and Expansion Act, which sought to make free, full-day, high-quality preschool available to all three- and four-year-olds in the district. The preschools run on roughly the same schedule as the city's elementary schools, and teachers are paid salaries on par with the city's elementary teachers. Today, approximately 90 percent of the district's four-year-olds and 70 percent of the district's three-year-olds attend public preschool thanks to this legislation.
In a new report, Rasheed Malik of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, reviews the effects of that expansion on a variable that's sometimes overlooked in discussions about the costs and benefits of publicly funded early childhood education: maternal labor force participation. Malik finds that maternal labor force participation (for women with at least one child under age five) in D.C. increased from about 65 percent (in 2008) to 76.4 percent in 2016; nationally, maternal labor force participation increased by only 2 percentage points during the time period studied.
To determine how much of this effect was due to the preschool expansion, Malik performed several analyses, comparing the labor force participation rates of mothers (with a child under the age of five) in D.C. to those of mothers in other big cities in the United States, mothers in neighboring areas, and D.C. mothers with elementary-aged children. Malik found that labor force participation rates for mothers in neighboring areas, as well as rates for D.C. mothers with elementary school-aged children were relatively flat during this time period. Malik ultimately concludes that D.C.'s preschool expansion was responsible for 10 percentage points of the observed increase in labor force participation.
[For more on this story by DWYER GUNN, go to https://psmag.com/education/dc...rogram-benefits-moms]
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