An Economist’s Case for Pre-K

When city government leaders in San Antonio decided to fund a prekindergarten program using sales tax revenues, they made a case that doing so was an economic imperative as a growing city, that investing in the future workforce was about the city’s future prosperity, and that remaining attractive to companies and workers meant having a more educated population. Other compelling factors were the city’s increasing Hispanic population, its high poverty index, urban sprawl, and an underfunded early-education system. To get a sense of the potential impact of early-childhood efforts that take into account these and other characteristics, I spoke to Caridad Araujo, the lead economist in the social protections and health division of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C. She works in poverty-reduction and early-childhood-development programs, designing projects and allocating funds to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The projects usually emerge from policy reforms or enhancements initiated by municipal or state governments, similar