A first-of-its-kind study found that early intervention services – which can include occupational, physical and speech therapies, among others – improve children’s test scores, even years later.
The study, conducted jointly by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and the New York City Department of Health, showed that children who received these services between birth and age 3 outperformed peers on third-grade reading and math tests.
Early intervention services are aimed at children with disabilities, developmental delays or those at risk of developing them, such as children born very prematurely. Federal law mandates such services, but states design their own programs and set their own funding levels.
I was particularly interested in these findings after reporting several articles on early intervention, including one on racial disparities in access to services and another on the broken pipeline from the neonatal intensive care unit to receiving crucial therapies.
Countless parents have described to me the pivotal role early intervention plays for their children. Jaclyn Vasquez, a Chicago mother, credits the timely start of more than a half-dozen therapies for her daughter’s flourishing years later in elementary school.
“I was told my child would need a wheelchair starting in kindergarten,” Vasquez told me. “She runs, dances, chases after her siblings, dances on trampolines – all because of the time we spent in therapies at a very young age.”
Still, I was surprised to find how difficult it has been to find research on the long-term effects of early intervention, particularly as it relates to academic performance. “There is very little data available,” said Jeanette Stingone, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors.
Several studies have shown crucial developmental gains in speech and other areas after children received early intervention therapies. But what makes the new study unusual is that it followed children for several years and included a comparison group that did not receive early intervention.
Stingone said Department of Health researchers began creating a data set two decades ago that would allow them to evaluate the effects of early intervention services in New York. Ultimately, the researchers focused on babies born in the city between 1994 and 1998, a group of more than 200,000 children. Of these, approximately 13,000 received early intervention services.
Drawing from a full pool of more than 200,000 children, the team was able to compare the third-grade test scores of children who received the services with those of similar children – based on more than 20 factors, including race, disability status, neighborhood, socioeconomic level, mother’s education level and insurance status – who did not benefit.
“The results…suggest that EI services directed to children under 3 years of age with developmental delays or moderate to severe disabilities had tangible academic benefits later in childhood,” the authors wrote in the study published in JAMA Network Open in February.
The findings apply across socioeconomic groups: Wealthier children who received early intervention, for example, outperformed their higher-income peers who did not. And they were especially pronounced when it came to children who needed special education services at school, suggesting that early intervention puts children with disabilities on a stronger path from day one.
The team hopes their model of linking health and education data over several decades can be used by other cities and communities hoping to conduct similar analyses.
This story on early intervention was produced by The Hechinger Report, an independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequity and innovation in education. Subscribe to the Hechinger newsletter.
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