Some Harvard economists have provocatively calculated how much long-term value an excellent kindergarten teacher delivers to her students and opine that she is worth $320,000 a year, according to a recent New York Times story.

Rav Chetty and his team of researchers studied what happened to almost 12,000 children who had participated in Tennessee’s well-known Project Star education experiment in the 1980s. Those who’d had the best kindergarten teachers may have seen their test scores fade by middle school, but they were more likely to have gone to college and less likely to have become single parents than kindergartners from similar backgrounds with less effective teachers. The children in the kindergarten classes that had made the most progress ended up earning more and saving more for retirement. “We don’t really care about test scores,” the Times’ economics writer David Leonhardt quotes Chetty as saying. “We care about adult outcomes.”

The $320,000 a year that Chetty and his team suggest is the worth of a top-notch kindergarten teacher is based, Leonhardt writes, on “the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.”

Chetty’s findings mirror the long-term findings of longitudinal studies of children who attended high-quality preschools. The inaugural post on this blog — Perry Preschool: A Pioneer – looked at the research findings from the groundbreaking work of the Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, MI, in the 1960s.

For Leonhardt, the lesson from Chetty’s study is simple. “Given today’s budget pressures, finding the money for any new programs will be difficult,” he writes. “But that’s all the more reason to focus our scarce resources on investments whose benefits won’t simply fade away.”