The Actual Value of Kindergarten
By Natalie Harris
I came across this article, The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers, by David Leonhardt, in the New York Times business section this morning, and with all the buzz about our recent Kindergarten Countdown event at Slugger Field, I thought the timing was too good to be ignored.
While the article is a bit of an opinion piece (ultimately treading into some potential education policy minefields), I thought the greater point of the study discussed was clearly worth mentioning: kindergarten, when done well, has an incredible long-term impact. As Leonhardt sums up:
Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.
An that “more” is nothing to sneeze at:
A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average.
The study discussed, “How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earings? Evidence From Project STAR”, ultimately concludes that an outstanding kindergarten teacher is worth $320,000 a year.
This could definitely be viewed as depressing news in these days of budget cuts, school closings (i.e. bigger classrooms), and big challenges for even the best teachers — the ultimate toll all this can take on the community is alarming — but it should also be viewed as a call to action.
The work Metro United Way does in support of early childhood education (Success By 6, Gheens Bridges to Tomorrow, Born Learning and more) pushes us towards one goal: making sure that our children arrive in kindergarten ready to succeed. This moment of economic crisis makes it even more imperative that we do the work, with our community’s help, to meet this goal.








At Metro United Way, our teams of volunteers are always looking for new ways to address the underlying causes of issues faced by our community. Last summer, Metro United Way’s Clark County Community Solutions Committee held a conversation with local agencies working to combat childhood obesity to see if there was something more we could be doing in this area. What emerged was a pilot “Neighborhood Outdoor Youth-Play Initiative” that is being led by the