PISA study: Students benefit from pre-primary education

Angela Engel, director of Uniting4Kids says that expanding the state preschool program, rather than approving a controversial bill, would do more to advance early literacy. Read her commentary "A better path to literacy".

She is correct! So why do policy makers not care about what research studies reveal? Not even those done by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which administers the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), that the U.S. tries so hard to improve its standing in?

In their report, "Does participation in pre-primary education translate into better learning outcomes at school?" they state:

 “It’s elementary: students benefit from pre-primary education. The OECD’s PISA 2009 results show that in practically all OECD countries 15-year-old students who had attended some pre-primary school outperformed students who had not.

In fact, the difference between students who had attended for more than one year and those who had not attended at all averaged 54 score points in the PISA reading assessment – or more than one year of formal schooling (39 score points). While most students who had attended pre-primary education had come from advantaged backgrounds, the performance gap remains even when comparing students from similar backgrounds. After accounting for socio-economic background, students who had attended pre-primary school scored an average of 33 points higher than those who had not.”