High-quality preschool provides eager young learners with early academic and social skills that prepare them to be effective learners in kindergarten and throughout their education. 

• 95 percent of California kindergarten teachers say their students who attended preschool are better prepared for kindergarten in both social and academic areas, from pre-reading skills to early math concepts to the ability to share and play well with classmates.  For more from these teachers, including real-life stories from the classroom, read Preschool California's report, Praise for Preschool.
  
  
• The pre-kindergarten years are a time when children's brains are rapidly developing. Pre-kindergarten is a time for children to learn about self-control, curiosity, cooperation, paying attention, and other skills that will prepare them for their K-12 education.  Read the National Institute for Education Research’s Preschool Policy Brief.

• Latinos are shown to make great gains in pre-k programs – when they have access. Latinos are the fastest growing segment of California's population and forty percent of California's preschoolers are English learners.  Read the study, Pre-K and Latinos: The Foundation for America’s Future. 
  
  
• When kids start school behind, many will only fall further behind. It is wiser to provide pre-kindergarten programs that boost children's abilities in early childhood than it is to make schools help them catch up in adolescence.

Our Reports and Studies page features many studies documenting the effects of early childhood education on children's readiness to learn.  Among them:

• The Effects of State Prekindergarten Programs on Young Children's School Readiness in Five States (Rutgets, NJ: NIEER, 2005)
  When assessed, children enrolled in effective public preschool outscored their non-participating peers by 31 percent on vocabulary tests and 44 persent on tests of early math skills.
  
  
• The Effects of Universal Pre-K on Cognitive Development (pdf) (Washington D.C.: Georgetown University, 2005)
  Researchers found that children who participated in the state’s prekindergarten program were better prepared for kindergarten than similar children who did not.  At kindergarten entry, children who went to preschool showed an advantage of eight months in pre-reading skills, six months in early writing skills, and four months in early math skills.