The Best Thing We Could Do About Inequality Is Universal Preschool

We've repeatedly seen that the urban problems of poverty, crime, unemployment, education gaps and inequality are intertwined. They reinforce and feed off of each other: A child of parents who never went to college is less likely to go to college herself. Her educational development influences her employment prospects and the money she's likely to make over her lifetime. And the clustering of poverty in whole parts of town threatens to cut her children off from access to good schools and healthy neighborhoods.

A growing body of research over the past decade, though, suggests that one intervention in particular could have cascading effects on all of these seemingly intractable challenges: Get to children as young as possible, and you can change not only their life trajectories, but also the income inequality, social mobility (and tax revenues) of the places where they live. This doesn't mean spending more per student in struggling high schools, or giving rehabbed computers to second-graders. It means reaching low-income children by the time they're 3, or even younger. It means putting them in high-quality preschool.