With the economy in the dumps, states are cutting back on pre-school programs. 

Keven Drum reports on a new study that looked at the long term benefits of pre-school. 

A team of researchers has reported in Science on a long-term study of intensive preschool intervention in Chicago, and the results are pretty impressive. The study group is a cohort of mostly African-American children born in 1979-80, and the followup study was done when they were 28 years old.

When decisions about where to make budget cuts, the long-term costs of these cuts have to enter the calculus.