economic benefits for children and for society. The Lynch study estimates that the total annual budgetary, crime reduction and earnings benefits from a universal pre-school program in place nationwide would be $779 billion by 2050. For Washington state, the benefits are estimated to be $17.3 billion in 2050. This estimated annual benefit represents almost eight times the estimated yearly cost of the program.

Conventional wisdom might best be described as "success breeds success." Or, parents who are college graduates will have kids who will also graduate from college. Steven Levitt, in Freakonomics, states, "A child whose parents are highly educated typically does well in school; not much surprise there. A family with a lot of schooling tends to value schooling. Perhaps more important, parents with higher IQ's tend to get more education, and IQ is strongly hereditary." But, Dr. Clayton Christensen in his book, Disrupting Class, commented quite pointedly on the Hart-Risley study.

"...the level of income, ethnicity, and level of parents' education had no explanatory power in determining the level of cognitive capacity that the children achieved. It is all explained by the amount of language dancing, or extra talk, over and above business talk, that the parents engage in. It accounted literally for all the variance in outcomes."

The amount of "language dancing" differences are profound. In the Hart-Risley study, "a child spoken to 50 times per hour will hear 700 utterances; a child spoken to 800 times per hour will hear more than 11,000 utterances."

If we extrapolate these differences over an entire year, the language exposure that a child receives can range from a low of 250,000 utterances to a high of four million utterances. According to the study, while the average four-year-old in a family receiving welfare has heard some 13 million spoken words, for example, a child from a working-class family has heard about 26 million, and a child from a