THE IMPORTANCE OF EARLY CHILDHOOD INTERVENTION ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

By E.D. KAIN IN American times/a forbes blog | http://bit.ly/dTevMD

Mar. 5 2011 - 4:13 pm | This chart via James Heckman [pdf] has been making the rounds:

Test scores by maternal education

What this chart shows is that kids from better-educated families (mothers specifically here) do better than kids that come from families with less education. Or, to put it another way, kids from poor families – which tend to have less education – do worse academically than kids from middle and upper class families. The more education a mother has, the more likely it is her children will do better at school.

Really, this is a global problem. The more educated women are the less likely they are to have more children then they can afford to take care of, and the less likely they and their children are to live in poverty. Anti-poverty activists say the most important thing anyone could do to help the poorest areas in the world is to educate and empower women. Of course, since poverty and education are so tightly interwoven it becomes a vicious cycle very quickly. It’s not easy to tackle one before the other.

In America this is also true. Impoverished, low-income areas are going to produce low-achieving students, generation after generation. To tackle poverty you need to give people – and especially women – a good education. But to give people a good education, you need to tackle poverty. One way to do this is to make sure everyone, and especially mothers and children, have access to healthcare – something America has been decidedly behind the rest of the world in doing.

Heckman’s idea is to get kids into early childhood education before kindergarten starts. If you miss that window, it’s pretty much too late. By the age of three kids from poor families are already going to be way behind their middle-class peers. Heckman argues that it’s important to get ahead of the problem – preventative education and parental support rather than remedial education later. This means more resources devoted to parents and more resources devoted to pre-K education.

Here’s Kevin Drum:

Heckman isn’t calling for an end to efforts to improve education, and neither am I. But both of us are skeptical about the flavor-of-the-month “reforms” that pop up periodically, are endorsed unanimously by the great and good, and then disappear within a few years to be replaced by some new silver bullet—and always without producing any scalable, practical, long-lasting results.

Intensive, early interventions, by contrast, genuinely seem to work. They aren’t cheap, and they aren’t easy. And they don’t necessarily boost IQ scores or get kids into Harvard. But they produce children who learn better, develop critical life skills, have fewer problems in childhood and adolescence, commit fewer crimes, earn more money, and just generally live happier, stabler, more productive lives. If we spent $50 billion less on K-12 education—in both public and private money—and instead spent $50 billion more on early intervention programs, we’d almost certainly get a way bigger bang for the buck.

Maybe somebody ought to make a documentary about that.

Yes, somebody should make a documentary about that. And it would also be nice to see some of the big foundations poor some money into pre-K programs in the poorest neighborhoods in this country with the same gusto they fund the school-choice movement.

I’m not sure I agree with Kevin’s solution, however. I don’t understand why we would need to spend $50 billion less a year on K-12 education in order to spend that money on pre-K education instead. We should be spending more money across the board on education, not trading out funding from K-12 to fund pre-K. I take Kevin’s point, and I understand the politics here, but I don’t agree.

Education is an investment, and it pays off in the long run. The more money we spend on education now, the less we spend on prisons later. A more educated populace makes more money, uses fewer government services, and pays more taxes. They also invest their money in private companies, buy more goods, and spend more money overall. Every dollar spent on education translates into two dollars of savings in prison costs alone [pdf].

It’s time to make universal pre-K education a reality. We can start small, working from the poor neighborhoods out. We could allow private preschools to become charters, and we could fund the creation of public preschools as well. The money spent now would be a generational stimulus, saving our kids billions of dollars down the road. It’s a shame the political will for this sort of investment is simply nonexistent.