Big Thinking on Early Ed

The child advocacy group First Focus has put out a new publication called “Big Ideas for Children: Investing in Our Nation’s Future.” It includes several chapters on early childhood education, health, and safety, and ways to use public policy to improve the lives of young children. Two chapters in particular piqued our interests:

A Different Kind of Bell Curve: In his article, “The Case for Investing in Disadvantaged Children,” University of Chicago economist James Heckman takes aim at the argument presented by Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve. Contrary to the assumptions of Hernstein and Murray that genetics play a strong role in determining a child’s later success (leaving little room for policy intervention), Heckman argues that early interventions can have positive cognitive and non-cognitive effects on a child’s achievement later in life. Armed with his own set of economic curves, Heckman demonstrates that interventions that come earlier in life have the greatest returns per dollar invested when compared to programs that come later in life, such as job training and prisoner rehabilitation programs. Moreover, investment in children during the early years has a multiplying effect on later investments in children as they approach adulthood, producing greater returns on those investments as well. That’s a strong case for both early education investments and for continuing the investment through the elementary years and beyond.

A Pre-K Marketplace: Federal Reserve economists Arthur Rolnick and Rob Grunewald continue Heckman’s discussion by proposing one model for policies to realize the benefits of early intervention. In “Achieving a High Return on Early Childhood Investment,” Rolnick and Grunewald propose public and private investments to create an early childhood endowment that would provide scholarships to low-income children for existing preschool services. The endowment would shape the market for early education and care by setting minimum quality standards for the participating providers, but parents would be otherwise free to choose any provider they want. (The authors have been instrumental in establishing the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation, which has a pilot project modeling this idea.) Rolnick and Grunewald argue that this market-oriented approach allows for competition and choice that may produce greater efficiency, diversity, and innovation than top-down approaches to pre-k. They also propose using funds for both pre-k and other child development services, such as parent mentoring programs.

These articles remind us about the need to think outside the box when it comes to small children, both in terms of expanding the research base to imagine the lives of children in the future and maximizing the flexibility of policies to address child development. For more ideas on how we can improve early education, check out New America’s “Ten Ideas for Early Education in the NCLB Reauthorization“–and keep watching this space for more ideas.