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intensive and long-lasting educational efforts. . . .

The challenge is to find the leadership and the moti-

vation to convince the public that intergenerational

poverty and undereducation is a preventable disease."38

Unfortunately, there is very little empirical evidence

to support those claims.  The largest body of evidence indi-

cates that the effects of early intervention fade after

children leave the programs.  "Fade out" is important to any

discussion of universal preschool because it means that

early intervention may be virtually irrelevant to how a

child turns out in adolescence or early adulthood.39

However, a number of experimental projects have had

meaningful short-term effects on cognitive ability, grade

retention, and special education placement.40   (Short-term

is defined as one to three years after program participa-

tion.)  Arthur J. Reynolds, professor of social work and

child and family studies at the University of Wisconsin at

Madison, and other researchers examined 15 reviews that

integrated the findings of hundreds of program evaluations

since the 1960s and concluded, "The hundreds of studies of

demonstration and large-scale programs that now exist pro-

vide very strong evidence that most programs of relatively

good quality have meaningful short-term effects on cogni-

tive ability, early school achievement, and social adjust-

ment."41   The consensus in the literature on early inter-

vention supports his conclusion.42  Nevertheless, research

on short-term effects should not be considered conclusive

because most of the studies are severely limited by

methodological problems such as small sample size, high

attrition rates, infrequent random selection, and infre-

quent use of comparison groups.43

A second problem with basing proposals for universal

preschool on findings from early intervention studies is

that most interventions have concentrated on "disadvan-

taged," or poor, children, so there is no evidence of uni-

versal replicability.  As David Elkind, professor of child

study at Tufts University and author of numerous books

including The Hurried Child and Miseducation: Preschoolers

at Risk, puts it, early intervention studies have been

"uncritically appropriated for middle-class children by par-

ents and educators."44   Zigler agrees: "A second source of

the momentum toward universal preschool education is the

inappropriate generalization of the effects of some excel-

lent remedial programs for the economically disadvantaged."45

Not only have early intervention findings been inap-

propriately generalized to mainstream children, there is

actually a tremendous amount of evidence that early