Giving Compass' Take:
- Sarah Carr reports on a study demonstrating that speech, occupational, and other therapies pay off later on when used as early interventions for young students.
- How can investing in early interventions boost students’ test scores down the line? What can philanthropy do to ensure every child has access to the support they need for success?
- Search for a nonprofit focused on early childhood education.
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Afirst-of-its-kind study has found that early intervention services — which can include occupational, physical and speech therapies, among others — boost students’ test scores, even years down the road.
The study, conducted jointly by researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the New York City Health Department, showed that children who received the services between birth and age 3 outperformed similar peers on third grade reading and math tests.
Early intervention services are intended for children with disabilities, developmental delays or those who are at risk of them, such as children who are born severely premature. Federal law mandates such services, but states design their own programs and set their own funding levels.
I was especially interested in these findings after reporting several stories on early intervention, including one on racial disparities in access to services and another on the broken pipeline from the neonatal intensive care unit to receiving the crucial therapies.
Countless parents have described to me the pivotal role that early intervention played for their children. Jaclyn Vasquez, a Chicago mother, credits the timely start of more than a half-dozen therapies with her daughter’s thriving years later in elementary school.
“I was told my child would need a wheelchair by kindergarten,” Vasquez told me. “She is running, dancing, chasing siblings, dancing on trampolines — all because of the amount of time we poured into therapies at a very young age.”
Yet I have been surprised at how challenging it has been to find research on early intervention’s long-term effects, particularly when it comes to performance in school. “There is very little out there,” said Jeanette Stingone, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Mailman School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors.
Several studies have shown crucial developmental gains in speech and other areas after children receive early intervention therapies. But what makes the new study unusual is that it tracked children for several years, and it included a comparison group that did not receive early intervention to demonstrate how these services boost students’ test scores later on.
Read the full article about early interventions for young students by Sarah Carr at The Hechinger Report.