Why is High-Quality Early Education and After School so Important for Children and Families?
• 85% of who you are is developed by age 5. The human brain develops more rapidly between those years than during any other subsequent period. • Children who attend high-quality preschool programs develop better language and social skills, and have fewer behavioral problems once they enter school. They have a 20% higher rate of high-school completion, a 42% lower rate of juvenile arrest for violent offense, a 41% reduction in special education placement, and a 52% reduction in abuse and neglect. • Children from disadvantaged backgrounds (in which race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status play a role) start kindergarten with significantly lower cognitive skills than other children, sometimes two to three years behind their more affluent peers. These same disadvantaged children are then typically in low-resource, lower-quality schools, which magnify the initial inequality they can never catch up. • On average, children from professional families hear an average of 11 million words per y
