Education is economic development
The relative ease with which a bill boosting public school spending moved through the two chambers of the Legislature and went to Gov. Tom Vilsack’s office for his signature is good anecdotal evidence that policymakers are finally beginning to understand that education is as important a part of Iowa’s economic development efforts as incentives and monetary awards to businesses.
But the bill, which increases spending by 4 percent overall – financed by increases of 5 percent, or $99.5 million, in state aid, and 2.7 percent, or $27.7 million, in property taxes – is only part of what needs to be done in Iowa. The governor’s request for more than $39 million to make a down payment on preschool expansion deserves similar support.
Initiatives like the Grow Iowa Values Fund to attract new businesses and help existing ones expand are important, but they’re risky. Most states have some sort of economic development program targeting growth industries like biotechnology and information technology, and they recognize the importance of creating major recreational and cultural attractions to plug their own brain drains.
Iowa needs to set itself apart, and one way to do that is to improve Iowans’ access to nationally accredited, high-quality preschool programs. Currently, that’s a luxury available to only about 20 percent of Iowans. That’s not good enough for a state that bills itself as “the education state.”
Research clearly shows a return on investments in early childhood education. “The real benefits are not from making children smarter,” the non-partisan Washington, D.C.-based Committee for Economic Development concluded after studying myriad approaches to economic development, “but from nurturing children’s non-cognitive skills, giving them social, emotional and behavioral benefits that lead to success later in life…
“We can be certain that early childhood education offers much more promise of positive net social benefits than many of the territorially competitive incentive packages in which state and local governments invest billions each year, despite their frequent negative returns,” the report concluded.
Even if that weren’t the case, investing in early childhood education is plain common sense. Eighty-five percent of brain development occurs in the first six years of life, yet public spending for education doesn’t peak until a child is ready to graduate from high school. It’s time for Iowa to reverse that. The governor’s proposal is expensive and the return on the investment wouldn’t be realized for many years to come. But it’s the right thing to do for Iowa families.