Greater investment needed in early childhood education

Business leaders, like those of Google, Facebook, Boeing, FedEx and some of the hundreds of Montana companies who attended Sen. Max Baucus’ Montana Economic Development Summit in Butte know the importance of having skilled, educated workers who can master complex tasks and spur innovation.

But to ensure that we have “Montana solutions for Montana jobs” and a strong workforce tomorrow, we need to start teaching children the skills to succeed from day one by making greater investments in early childhood education.

We must do more to make sure that children gain the knowledge and skills necessary to start life off on the right foot. I know firsthand through the efforts of many agencies and organizations that I have worked with across the state that investments in early childhood help cultivate the cognitive and character skills needed to thrive in the 21st century. Those who attend such programs also do better overall in high school, college and careers, and are much more likely to become the kind of skilled employees businesses want.

Such investments could fuel our innovation economy, and yield big returns for Montana. Nobel-prize winning economist James Heckman has found that every dollar invested in high-quality early childhood programs for disadvantaged children returns 7-10 percent per child, per year through better outcomes in education, health, reduced social spending and lifelong productivity.

Early childhood education is our opportunity to make investments into Montana’s future that will grow the economy without adding more debt.

Congress is considering a plan to help states like ours invest in quality early childhood development from birth to age 5. Montana could receive $12.5 million in its first year of participating in such a plan, supporting proven programs in the state such as home visiting, early learning for infants and toddlers and high-quality preschool.

Prioritizing investment in this plan is one of the best things Congress can do to improve outcomes for students, families and the economy.

I urge Sen. Baucus, those who attended the summit and our broader community to further deliberate and express support for this Montana-focused economic solution.

Read More

Investments in Education

James Heckman is one of the nation’s top economists studying human development. Thirteen years ago, he shared the Nobel for economics. In February, he stood before the annual meeting of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry, showed the assembled business executives a chart, and demolished the United States’ entire approach to education.

¶ The chart showed the results of cognitive tests that were first performed in the 1980s on several hundred low-birthweight 3-year-olds, who were then retested at ages 5, 8 and 18.

¶ Children of mothers who had graduated from college scored much higher at age 3 than those whose mothers had dropped out of high school, proof of the advantage for young children of living in rich, stimulating environments.

¶ More surprising is that the difference in cognitive performance was just as big at age 18 as it had been at age 3.

¶ “The gap is there before kids walk into kindergarten,” Mr. Heckman told me. “School neither increases nor reduces it.”

¶ If education is supposed to help redress inequities at birth and improve the lot of disadvantaged children as they grow up, it is not doing its job.

¶ It is not an isolated finding. Another study by Mr. Heckman and Flavio Cunha of the University of Pennsylvania found that the gap in math abilities between rich and poor children was not much different at age 12 than it was at age 6.

¶ The gap is enormous, one of the widest among the 65 countries taking part in the Program for International Student Achievement run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

¶ American students from prosperous backgrounds scored on average 110 points higher on reading tests than disadvantaged students, about the same disparity that exists between the average scores in the United States and Tunisia. It is perhaps the main reason income inequality in the United States is passed down the generations at a much higher rate than in most advanced nations.

¶ That’s a scandal, considering how much the government spends on education: about 5.5 percent of the nation’s economic output in total, from preschool through college.

¶ And it suggests that the angry, worried debate over how to improve the nation’s mediocre education — pitting the teachers’ unions and the advocates of more money for public schools against the champions of school vouchers and standardized tests — is missing the most important part: infants and toddlers.

¶ Research by Mr. Heckman and others confirms that investment in the early education of disadvantaged children pays extremely high returns down the road. It improves not only their cognitive abilities but also crucial behavioral traits like sociability, motivation and self-esteem.

¶ Studies that have followed children through their adult lives confirm enormous payoffs for these investments, whether measured in improved success in college, higher income or even lower incarceration rates.

¶ The costs of not making these investments are also clear. Julia Isaacs, an expert in child policy at the Urban Institute in Washington, finds that more than half of poor 5-year-olds don’t have the math, reading or behavioral skills needed to profitably start kindergarten. If children keep arriving in school with these deficits, no amount of money or teacher evaluations may be enough to improve their lot later in life.

¶ Much attention has focused lately on access to higher education.

¶ A typical worker with a bachelor’s degree earns 80 percent more than a high school graduate. That’s a premium of more than $500 a week, a not insubstantial incentive to stay in school. It is bigger than ever before. Yet the growth of college graduation rates has slowed for women and completely stalled for men.

¶ The Economic Report of the President released last month bemoaned how the nation’s college completion rate had tumbled down the international rankings, where it now sits in 14th place among O.E.C.D. countries.

¶ The report restated the president’s vow to increase the number of college graduates by 50 percent by 2020, and laid out how the federal government has spent billions in grants and tax breaks to help ease the effects of rising tuition and fees. Last year the government spent almost $40 billion on Pell grants, more than twice as much as when President Obama came to office.

¶ Mr. Heckman’s chart suggests that by the time most 5-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds reach college age, Pell grants are going to do them little good.

¶ “Augmenting family income or reducing college tuition at the stage of the life cycle when a child goes to college does not go far in compensating for low levels of previous investment,” Mr. Heckman and Mr. Cunha wrote.

¶ Mr. Heckman and Mr. Cunha estimated that raising high school graduation rates of the most disadvantaged children to 64 percent from 41 percent would cost 35 to 50 percent more if the assistance arrived in their teens rather than before they turned 6.

¶ Erick Hanushek, an expert on the economics of education at Stanford, put it more directly: “We are subsidizing the wrong people and the wrong way.”

¶ To its credit, the Obama administration understands the importance of early investments in children. The president has glowingly cited Mr. Heckman’s research. In his State of the Union address, the president called for universal preschool education.

¶ “Study after study shows that the earlier a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road,” Mr. Obama said at a speech in Decatur, Ga., in February.

¶ But the fresh attention has not translated into money or a shift in priorities. Public spending on higher education is more than three times as large as spending on preschool, according to O.E.C.D. data from 2009. A study by Ms. Isaacs found that in 2008 federal and state governments spent somewhat more than $10,000 per child in kindergarten through 12th grade. By contrast, 3- to 5-year-olds got less than $5,000 for their education and care. Children under 3 got $300.

¶ Mr. Heckman’s proposals are not without critics. They argue that his conclusions about the stupendous returns to early education are mostly based on a limited number of expensive experiments in the 1960s and 1970s that provided rich early education and care to limited numbers of disadvantaged children. They were much more intensive endeavors than universal preschool. It may be overoptimistic to assume these programs could be ratcheted up effectively to a national scale at a reasonable cost.

¶ Yet the critique appears overly harsh in light of the meager improvements bought by the nation’s investments in education today. A study by Mr. Hanushek found that scores in math tests improved only marginally from 1970 to 2000, even after spending per pupil doubled. Scores in reading and science declined.

¶ “Early education is an essential piece if we are going to have a better education system,” Barbara Bowman, an expert on early childhood education in Chicago who has advised the Education Department. “We’re inching in that direction.”

¶ Education is always portrayed in the American narrative as the great leveler.

Read More

Early childhood education for at-risk kids

In many ways, we do education backwards in this country. We skimp and shortchange the poor children who need education the most, while at the same we lavish public moneys on those who need it least. Take, for instance, this article about the outrageous practice of taxpayer subsidies for the legacy admits of rich alumni of elite colleges.

In this context, advocacy for educational programs that alleviate, rather than exacerbate, inequality is particularly welcome. That’s why I especially appreciated today’s New York Times’ Opinionator blog, in which economist James Heckman writes a great op-ed about the dramatic impact of early childhood education in the lives of poor children. Heckman, as you may know, is a Nobel Prize winning economist from the University of Chicago. He’s a typical University of Chicago economist in that yes, he’s a free market true believer type. But he’s been studying pre-K programs for poor kids for years, and he supports them for conservative reasons: because they are economically rational. Early childhood education for at-risk kids is one of those (relatively) rare government programs that the free market types like because it produces not just equity, but also efficiency.

The cognitive skills prized by the American educational establishment and measured by achievement tests are only part of what is required for success in life. Character skills are equally important determinants of wages, education, health and many other significant aspects of flourishing lives. Self-control, openness, the ability to engage with others, to plan and to persist — these are the attributes that get people in the door and on the job, and lead to productive lives. Cognitive and character skills work together as dynamic complements; they are inseparable. Skills beget skills. More motivated children learn more. Those who are more informed usually make wiser decisions.

Here’s how the early education programs work. Contrary to what you might think, they didn’t necessarily produce lasting gains in I.Q.’s. But they do teach character and cognitive skills of the sort that I.Q. tests don’t measure. As Heckman argues, these skills are crucial to success in life:

By the time they enter kindergarten, though, most children from disadvantaged backgrounds already lag far behind in those areas, and they never catch up. That is why pre-K for poor kids is one of the most powerful tools we have in the fight against economic inequality:

    High-quality early childhood programs are great economic and social equalizers — they supplement the family lives of disadvantaged children by teaching consistent parenting and by giving children the mentoring, encouragement and support available to functioning middle-class families. Children in these programs develop foundational skills on par with those of more affluent children and create a stronger family structure for themselves. Caring parents and early stimulation are essential ingredients of successful early childhood environments.

Heckman discusses two of the best-known studies, which show that at-risk children who participated in early education programs had dramatically better life outcomes, including higher educational attainment, more employment, and even better health.

Now, the more Scrooge-like conservatives tend to have a series of stock objections to these programs. One thing they say is that these programs, in Heckman’s words, “cannot be replicated and scaled up.” But actually, as Heckman notes, school districts across the country are doing just that. Even more bogus is the idea that early childhood education costs too much money. Yes, these programs don’t come cheap. But they truly are one of the best public investments we as a society could make. The rate of return is phenomenal:

    The economic rate of return from Perry is in the range of 6 percent to 10 percent per year per dollar invested, based on greater productivity and savings in expenditures on remediation, criminal justice and social dependency. This compares favorably to the estimated 6.9 percent annual rate of return of the United States stock market from the end of World War II to the 2008 meltdown. And yes, these estimates account for the costs of raising taxes and any resulting loss of economic activity.

Some complications are worth noting here, which Heckman didn’t get into in the piece. He studied the impact of early childhood education on poor children. If we instituted a pre-K program that was universal and not just for poor kids, it wouldn’t be quite so productive as a social investment, because the kids enrolling in the program would be better off to begin with, so they wouldn’t benefit from it quite as much. In addition, he specifies that “high-quality” programs have these results; cheaper, less intensive programs — which no doubt will be the kind many governments will be tempted to implement — probably would not be as effective. Finally, if early childhood ed programs were instituted, conservatives like Heckman would probably want to muck around with vouchers, school “choice,” and other market nostrums — even though more evidence keeps piling in demonstrating that those programs don’t work.

Finally, early childhood education programs effectively double as child care programs for working families, and working women in particular. Since child care is one of the great unfinished projects of the feminist revolution, this is yet another reason why early childhood education should be strongly supported.

A decade or so ago, I naively believed that early childhood education was one issue which the left and at least a fair portion of the right in this country could agree on. Social justice lefty types would like the equity, corporate bottom-line types would like the efficiency, and we could all hold hands and feel good about ourselves for getting these types of programs passed, right? Wrong.

In the interim, a lot of things happened. For one, the right went completely cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs crazy. Republicans have made it abundantly clear that they despise poor people and think they are worthless losers. They will never do anything to help them and they resolutely refuse to collaborate productively with Democrats on anything at all. So I don’t think we can expect any support from them for these program.

So, okay, maybe nothing will happen nationally on this issue. But surely some cities and blue states might pass something like it, right? Look at Bill De Blasio. He achieved his stunning come-from-behind victory in the NYC Democratic mayoral primary by promising he would fight inequality, and his plan to fund universal pre-K by taxing New Yorkers earning over half a million dollars a year was a big part of that.

Not so fast. Digby caught this jaw-dropping interview with Howard Wolfson. Keep in mind that Wolfson is a pillar of the Democratic establishment:

    MT: De Blasio wants to raise taxes on those making more than half a million dollars to pay for pre-K and after-school. Tell me exactly what’s wrong with that.

    HW: We’re already the highest-taxed jurisdiction at the high end in the country.2 People who live here are already making a decision that says, “It’s more expensive for me to live here then anywhere else, and I’m willing to pay that price.” What changes that? You can raise the price, and people could decide it’s not worth it anymore. Or it could be because crime goes up or it becomes dirtier. Or both of those things could happen. A combination of things could really have an impact.

Yes, as we see, it’s not just the Republicans who have gone completely cray cray. The one percenters, along with their loyal political fixers like Wolfson, have also completely lost it as well. Enacting early childhood education has programs turned out to be a far heavier lift than I ever dreamed it would be. Even in supposedly liberal New York, it sounds like the one percenters are ready to pitch a hissy fit rather than let the little urchins dine on their crumbs, so to speak.

I wish the (probable) future mayor the best of luck in enacting his universal pre-K program. It sounds like he’s going to need it.

Read More