Op-Ed: Universal Pre‑K: The Smartest Investment America Isn’t Making…Yet – By Dr. Tim Peck

Dr. Tim Peck – Courtesy photo

This OP-Ed was shared with the Bloomingtonian

August 20, 2025

By Dr. Tim Peck

With school underway in Indiana, it’s time to focus on how we give every child a strong start—and why doing so is one of the smartest investments we can make as a country. Universal pre-K is rocket fuel for our economy, our families, and our future. It’s time we treated it that way.

The long-term data from Head Start, a federal program launched in 1965 to provide early education and wraparound support to children from low-income families, is overwhelming. Head Start students are more likely to graduate from high school and college, less likely to become teen parents or be incarcerated, and more likely to hold steady employment with higher wages. One study found that access to Head Start increased high school graduation by 18 percentage points and college enrollment by 34 points. Another showed a 35% drop in teen parenthood. These outcomes don’t just change lives—they change budgets. When we invest in our children and families early, we reduce poverty, lower incarceration and healthcare costs, and grow the tax base with more productive workers.

Despite this overwhelming evidence, Representative Erin Houchin refuses to support early childhood education, saying “school starts at 5,” That belief is out of step with decades of developmental science and the lived experience of working families. By age five, children who didn’t attend preschool have already missed key windows of language development and socialization. Those developmental gaps persist, and they widen over time.

Universal pre-K isn’t just a moral imperative. It’s an economic strategy. It lets parents—especially mothers—return to the workforce sooner, boosting family incomes and national productivity. It’s a proven tool for closing the gender wage gap. And it’s not just a long-term bet: it yields near-term returns by solving real workforce and childcare shortages that are choking our economy right now. In a moment when we need workers, need tax revenue, and need to compete globally, this isn’t fluff—it’s the future.

So why isn’t pre-K a reality for every American child? We have the proof that early childhood education works. The problem isn’t the evidence, it’s the scoreboard.

Right now, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) only scores the cost of any proposed legislation over a 10-year window. That score becomes the headline—it’s what the press reports, what members of Congress quote in floor debates, and what shapes public opinion. But the biggest economic benefits of Universal Pre-K—reduced incarceration, higher earnings, better health—start paying off after year ten, when those pre-K kids are graduating from high school. 

So, even though the policy saves money over time, it looks like a cost under the current rules. That distorts the politics of legislating and rigs the game in favor of short-term thinking. Bills that actually serve the American people and strengthen the economy, our children will one day inherit, are too often dismissed as unaffordable simply because the return on investment lies just beyond that arbitrary window.

In a bipartisan attempt at reform, Republican Rep. Jay Obernolte and six of his Republican colleagues have joined four Democrats in co-sponsoring a bill to extend the CBO scoring window from 10 years to 30. It’s a common-sense reform that would finally allow Congress to evaluate long-term investments on their actual merits—not just their short-term optics. If we can change how we measure cost, we can unlock policies that lower the debt, grow the workforce, and pay dividends for generations. 

Just as importantly, we can give the American public a fuller, truer picture—one that makes it easier to build support for the kinds of transformational investments that have made this country great: early learning, preventative healthcare, environmental protection, public safety, and scientific innovation.

This is one of the first things I’ll work on in Congress: changing the way we measure value, and making Universal Pre-K a reality for every child in America. Because when we invest in kids, we don’t just improve their future—we build a stronger, freer, more prosperous country for all of us.

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