Eduardo Porter has a great article in the New York Times about the importance of investing in the education of younger kids. Many studies have shown that 3-year olds with educated mothers have higher test scores than kids with less educated mothers, and that education gap is consistent as they get older. In addition, other studies show that disadvantaged kids who receive intensive help in their early years have a long term payoff.
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 Times has a great graph showing that United States invests less in early childhood education than other developed nations. We tend to put our dollars into high school and higher education, which has less of an impact on reducing inequality.
Even conservative agree that we're not spending the right way.
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.”
Hanushek isn't a tax and spend liberal. He has found limited benefits of reducing class size and similar policies. And Hanushek thinks that investing in pre-schools is right thing to do.
So, why are we doing things backassed in this country? Because the voters determine where tax money goes. Suburban, middle class voters want their kids' college education subsidized. I do, too, but couldn't we take a few dollars from the higher ed pile and put it into the pre-school pile? If we want to get serious about reducing income inequality, it's the right thing to do.
Apt. 11d 
I question the conclusion that just because a child of an educated mom has higher test scores, that the answer is education at the three year old level.
I wonder how they were able to isolate all the other less tangible social and cultural factors involved that result from coming from a home with an educated mother.
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Or how about we increase the education pile by taking from some other pile? Like the military pile. Investment in public higher education has been gutted over the past few years; I don’t think gutting it further is the answer.
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I vote for Shannon’s idea!
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The military pile might have something to give, but, really, in order to invest in preschool education, we’re going to have to pay higher taxes. All of us, who post here, I suspect, even those who don’t feel particular well off.
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Sadly, bj is right.
This calculus also comes into play when I’m deciding which issues to write about. Do I push for NSF funding for political science, when nearly all of the money goes to white quant guys at ivy league universities with billion dollar endowments, or do I push for programs like Head Start?
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Yes, I have the same issue. I do believe in basic medical research, but when the funding battle becomes the battle between research on decision making or food safety inspectors, I have a tough time sending on the letters of the professional organizations.
The political science funding is a bit more complicated, since there’s a political motivation for that push, a motivation I disagree with, and, political science doesn’t have the massive lobby behind it that biomedical research does.
As far as I can tell, the current Obama brain initiative is actually a welfare plan for the Salk & Allen Institute (with a soupcon of Kavli & Hughes, which are usually funders, but also have set up institutes of their own that are very dependent on leveraging NIH funds).
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Isn’t this one of the things Obama advocated for in his SOTU address? More investment in pre-school? Well, it would be spending money on 4 year olds, though, not 3… so I don’t know if it would help or whether it’s related to what you’re referring to here.
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It costs $40,000/year to keep an inmate in prison. I imagine that increased investment in Headstart could more than easily pay for itself.
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“It costs $40,000/year to keep an inmate in prison. I imagine that increased investment in Headstart could more than easily pay for itself.”
Headstart is a very dubious program, results-wise.
“We spend more than $7 billion providing Head Start to nearly 1 million children each year. And finally there is indisputable evidence about the program’s effectiveness, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services: Head Start simply does not work.
According to the Head Start Impact Study, which was quite comprehensive, the positive effects of the program were minimal and vanished by the end of first grade. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, “I guess they were trying to rerun the data to see if they could come up with anything positive. They couldn’t.””
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2081778,00.html
It’s conceivable that a real preschool program (Headstart is not that program for many reasons) could get better results, but Headstart is not that program.
I expect universal preschool will be one of those things that look fantastic in the initial pilot programs (with lots of highly-trained, conscientious teachers) but will tank once it has to be staffed to deal with almost every 3 and 4-year-old in the US. It’s most natural to expect that if we get universal preschool, it will exactly reflect the situation with our public schools–teachers will tend to gravitate toward the socioeconomically cushier jobs, leaving the poorest children in the worst preschools.
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It’s kind of bizarre that “success” for a preschool program requires evidence of differential impact after more than two years. Kids change so quickly at that age the variance must be huge.
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presuming the data on long term effects of head start to be accurate, does a similar argument apply to K-12? Because schools aren’t a perfect panacea doesn’t seem to have (many) people arguing that we’d be better off if there were no schools.
I’m sympathetic to the rug meant that te results of pilot programs in education (preschool or KIPP or . . . ) should be taken with buckets of salt. But, I also think more wrap around services for the the disadvantaged (free lunch was big, but pre school, after care, . . . ) would have effects. I’m wary of mandates that push for one thing though (like preschool).
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I commented on this a few days ago and it must have disappeared in the ether as I was travelling (on the fly commenting).
I am curious about why of all the factors that could influence the outcomes, that pouring money into educating three year olds is seen as the solution. How did they conclude that that would replicate having an educated mother?
How did they control for many other factors that may result from having educated parents? Off the top of my head, possibilities are more time off, deeper roots in the community, better nutrition, better access to special needs programs, more family time together, etc.
It just seems like a big leap to first make the causation argument and then jump to “hey, let’s pour money into educating three year olds”.
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