[Vision2020] Lifelines for Poor Children

[Art Deco]

 [image: Opinionator - A Gathering of Opinion From Around the
Web]<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/>
  September 14, 2013, 6:33 pm Lifelines for Poor Children By JAMES J.
HECKMAN <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/james-j-heckman/>

What’s missing in the current debate over economic inequality is enough
serious discussion about investing in effective early childhood development
from birth to age 5. This is not a big government boondoggle policy that
would require a huge redistribution of wealth. Acting on it would, however,
require us to rethink long-held notions of how we develop productive people
and promote shared prosperity.

Everyone knows that education boosts productivity and enlarges
opportunities, so it is natural that proposals for reducing inequality
emphasize effective education for all. But these proposals are too timid.
They ignore a powerful body of research in the economics of human
development that tells us which skills matter for producing successful
lives. They ignore the role of families in producing the relevant skills
They also ignore or play down the critical gap in skills between advantaged
and disadvantaged children that emerges long before they enter school.

While education is a great equalizer of opportunity when done right,
American policy is going about it all wrong: current programs don’t start
early enough, nor do they produce the skills that matter most for personal
and societal prosperity.

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.

These established findings should lead to a major reorientation of policies
for human development. Because skill begets skill, the opportunity for
education should begin at birth — and not depend on the accident of birth.

The family into which a child is born plays a powerful role in determining
lifetime opportunities. This is hardly news, but it bears repeating: some
kids win the lottery at birth, far too many don’t — and most people have a
hard time catching up over the rest of their lives. Children raised in
disadvantaged environments are not only much less likely to succeed in
school or in society, but they are also much less likely to be healthy
adults. A variety of studies show that factors determined before the end of
high school contribute to roughly half of lifetime earnings inequality.
This is where our blind spot lies: success nominally attributed to the
beneficial effects of education, especially graduating from college, is in
truth largely a result of factors determined long before children even
enter school.

Improving the early environments of disadvantaged children is a promising
way to reduce inequality, but conventional wisdom is to level the playing
field with cash transfers, tuition assistance and raising the minimum wage.
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.

Critics say that early childhood education is expensive and that it is not
effective. They are right about the cost, but terribly wrong about the
large return on the investment. Quality early childhood programs for
disadvantaged children more than pay for themselves in better education,
health and economic outcomes.

Proof comes in the form of a long-term cost-benefit analysis of effective
early childhood programs. The Perry Preschool project was an intensive
two-year voluntary program administered between 1962 and 1967 to
disadvantaged 3- and 4-year-old, low-I.Q. African-American children in
Ypslanti, Mich. The curriculum emphasized the development of self-control,
perseverance and social skills in conjunction with basic cognitive skills.
It also worked with the mothers to foster attachment, develop parenting
skills and deepen their interactions with their children. The participants
were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, with the outcomes
evaluated over a period of four decades.

Perry did not produce lasting gains in the I.Q.’s of its participants, but
it did boost character skills that produced better education, economic and
life outcomes. 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.

A similar long-term early childhood study, the Carolina Abecedarian
Project<http://abc.fpg.unc.edu/>,
better known as ABC, gave cognitive stimulation, training in self-control
and social skills, and parental education starting in the first few months
of life. The children were also provided with health checkups and health
care. Four groups of individuals born between 1972 and 1977 were randomly
assigned to treatment and control groups, and their progress has been
monitored so far through studies conducted at ages 12, 15, 21 and 30. This
program had lasting effects on I.Q., parenting practices and child
attachment, leading to higher educational attainment and more skilled
employment among those in the treatment group.

Most dramatic were ABC’s effects on lifelong health. Now, over 30 years
later, those treated in ABC have lower blood pressure, lower abdominal
obesity, less hypertension and less likelihood of metabolic syndrome and
cardiovascular conditions as adults. This evidence clearly shows the power
of quality early childhood programs for producing flourishing people with
healthier lives, which increases productivity and lowers health care costs.

Why aren’t we moving forward and changing our ways by making investments in
life-changing early childhood development for disadvantaged children? Two
things: unfounded doubt and fear of doing things differently.

Doubters say that high-quality programs like Perry and ABC cannot be
replicated and scaled up. However private groups, states and municipalities
have used these models to custom-build their own programs, and they are
seeing substantial results and cost savings. What’s not working is taking
away funding for these programs in the face of budget cuts. Also holding
back progress are those who claim that Perry and ABC are experiments with
samples too small to accurately predict widespread impact and return on
investment. This is a nonsensical argument. Their relatively small sample
sizes actually speak for — not against — the strength of their findings.
Dramatic differences between treatment and control-group outcomes are
usually not found in small sample experiments, yet the differences in Perry
and ABC are big and consistent in rigorous analyses of these data.

These unfounded doubts feed our fear of taking new and more effective
approaches. American public policy throws money at programs that don’t
produce results as good or better than what is obtained from early
childhood education.

What doesn’t work? Investing in smaller class sizes is not as effective as
making sure each child has the foundational skills to do well inside the
classroom, regardless of its size. Because skill begets skill, it’s common
sense that adult literacy programs and many job-training programs are too
little, too late. It is much more effective and cost efficient to create
instead of remediate.

This is not to say that we should abandon all remediation programs; only
that our focus on fixing downstream problems should not preclude
enlightened upstream solutions.

Fortunately, the public knows that something is wrong and senses that early
childhood development might be the solution. A recent public opinion poll
commissioned by the First Five Years Fund found that 68 percent of voters
think that only half or even fewer children begin kindergarten with the
knowledge and skills they need to do their best in school. Eighty-nine
percent say it is important to make early education and child care more
affordable for working families to give their children a strong start, and
a similar number want the federal government to help states build better
preschools and make them more accessible to low- and middle-income children.

President Obama has proposed an early childhood initiative that combines
family visitation, infant health and development, early learning, quality
child care and more effective preschooling at ages 4 and 5. This is an
encouraging shift in American policy, one that could significantly reduce
inequality if it remained true to the evidence of what works — not to the
politics of what is convenient.

Our choice in these difficult economic times is not just whether to spend
or cut, but whether to choose knowledge over conventional wisdom. Will we
put money in programs that pay off? Quality early childhood programs for
disadvantaged children are not “entitlements” or bottomless wells of social
spending. They foster human flourishing and they improve our economic
productivity in the process. There is no trade-off between equity and
efficiency, as there is for other social programs. Early investment in the
lives of disadvantaged children will help reduce inequality, in both the
short and the long run.

*James J. Heckman is a professor <http://heckman.uchicago.edu/> of
economics at the University of Chicago and a Nobel Laureate in Economics.*


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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