1. Prime time for learning: With attentive care, enrichment, and exposure to books, young children build the mental scaffolding that will process thoughts and ideas for years to come.
   
   
2. Ready for school: Children who enter kindergarten from quality prekindergarten have better reading, language, and social skills than those who didn't get prekindergarten.
   
   
3. Jump start for at-risk kids: Children in a Pittsburgh-area quality prekindergarten program, designed for kids at the highest risk of failure, were held back a grade or placed in special education at rates of only 2 percent and 1 percent, in school districts averaging retention and special education rates over 20 percent. They also showed better behavioral and social skills - a key factor in chldren's school success and classroom decorum.
   
   
4. Solution for school success: Children from quality prekindergarten get better test scores in later grades and are likelier to graduate from high school - itself a critical indicator of the adult's life chances.
   
   
5. Saving money: Quality prekindergarten saves $2 in reduced special education, remediation, and welfare costs for every $1 invested.
   
   
6. Preventing crime: Young children who received enriching early childhood education experiences, such as nurse home visitors, quality child care, and quality prekindergarten, are less likely to become delinquent as teens. In fact, nine U.S. police chiefs out of 10 believe that expanded early learning programs can "greatly reduce youth crime and violence."
   
   
7. Community prosperity: As much as 40 percent of today's workforce will retire in the next 20 years, so their successors - today's young learners - must be equipped with the skills for school success and, after graduation,
   
   
8. Better citizens: Children from quality prekindergarten are likelier to mature into responsible citizens - likelier to be married, with higher educational attainments and better-paying jobs.
   
   
9. Economic development: The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis recently cited early childhood development, including quality prekindergarten, as a better economic development investment than more traditional approaches. "The conventional view of economic development typically includes company headquarters, office towers, entertainment centers, and professional sports stadiums and arenas. . . . We have argued that in the future any proposed economic development list should have early childhood development at the top. The return on investment from early childhood development is extraordinary, resulting in better working public schools, more educated workers and less crime."
   

1. Higher test scores: In Ohio, full-day kindergartners scored higher on first-grade reading readiness tests, on reading tests in the early elementary grades, and on achievement tests in third, fifth, and seventh grades.
   
   
2. School success: Full-day kindergartners receive better report cards, experience fewer grade retentions, require less remedial instruction, and receive fewer special education placements than their peers who attended half-day programs.
   
   
3. More time: In full-day programs, teachers have more time for both formal and informal instruction and can give children more individualized attention and reinforcement for positive behavior. School officials also have more chances to spot learning and behavioral problems and address them promptly when kindergartners attend school all day. Full-day kindergarten also creates fewer disruptions and transitions in a child's day.
   
   
4. Better behavior: Full-day kindergartners are more creative and cooperative, more involved in classroom work with other children, and learn and think more independently than their peers in half-day programs.
   
   
5. Better nutrition: The longer school day provides more opportunities for nutritious meals and snacks - particularly important for low-income children.

1. Better test scores: Students in small classes got better achievement test scores in every grade and every subject.
   
   
2. Bridging the achievement gap: By lifting scores and test grades among at-risk students, small classes close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their advantaged peers.
   
   
3. School success: Children from small classes need fewer special education referrals or grade retentions, and they have better high school graduation rates.
   
   
4. Lasting gains: In an ongoing study of Tennessee students placed in small classes through third grade, gains have persisted so far through ninth grade.
   
   
5. Classroom decorum: Small classes experience fewer discipline problems.
   
   
6. Parent satisfaction: Parents indicate greater satisfaction with their children's school experience when their kids are in small classes.

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