Strictly speaking, it begins with parental education and maternal nutrition LONG before conception...
Agreed.
There are larger social issues education policy can't ( and IMNSHO, shouldn't, and shouldn't be expected to) tackle
Agreed. However, age of the mother, relationship status of the mother, birth weight of the baby are all factors in the child's future success, including academic and relationship success.
from preschool age onward, high quality compensatory education policies do have a good track record.
Do you have a source to share, which informed this belief?
Here is a source which does not seem to agree with your assertion:
The Head Start Impact Study (HSIS) has shown that having access to Head Start improves children’s preschool experiences and school readiness in certain areas, though few of those advantages persisting through third grade(P uma et al., 2012).
and
The frequency of statistically significant differences in impacts by quality levels is no greater than one would expect to observe by chance alone when no true differences exist. The one exception to this pattern is the discovery that, for 3-year-olds, lower exposure to academic activities is associated with more favorable short-run impacts on social development. There is almost no indication that either high or low quality Head Start in any dimension leads to Head Start impacts that last into third grade for either age cohort, consistent with the overall findings of the Head Start Impact Study not disaggregated by quality level.
A high level of interaction and child-led exposure to academics can be provided outside of the context of a preschool program. For example, in a family environment, informal play group, etc.
Well, there are the usual suspects, the abecedarian project, the perry project, all rather dated of course. The problem with Head Start results is twofold:
One, even if results are good in the short term, they do not last into third grade. Which begs the question: just what kind of school did the kids go to after Head Start? Four years of high poverty low quality schooling surely destroy any gains a kid might have made in one year of Head Start!
Two: what defines a high quality program? If you factor in SES composition, Head Start, like any preschool program designed for low SES children, CANNOT be high quality. For this, I refer you to "socioeconomic diversity and early learning" by Jeanne L. Reid, in The future of school integration. It's not just instructional quality or student teacher ratio.
Majority middle and high SES preschool classrooms can keep the average skills gap present at preschool entry (one standard deviation in language, three fourths of a standard deviation in maths) from at least widening. If you at least want to keep it that way, you have to make sure that children remain in in majority middle and high SES classrooms through out their schooling (which does not have to affect gifted programs, by design intended for 2% of the student population, at all). You will then not get equity in distribution by the time AP classes come around, but you will get better numbers.
You cannot get full equity unless you get perfect equity in both SES and intelligence of course. Khmer Rouge communism might get us there, nothing less. One would wish policy makers realized that.
