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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Substantial gaps between the environments of advantaged children and those of disadvantaged children raise serious concerns about social mobility and the life prospects of the latter. For at least half a century, early childhood interventions have been launched to address this gap. Outcomes have been studied, sometimes extensively. A CEHD research project organized and synthesized research on a variety of early childhood education and child care programs, including means-tested programs designed for low-income families and universal programs open to all, regardless of income. This work sought to answer a key question: Are early childhood interventions effective? The answer to this question depends on the quality of the program offered, alternatives available, and their cost. The evidence shows agreement across studies: there is a strong case for high- quality early childhood education for disadvantaged children. It improves their early-life environments, which boosts early life skills. Because those skills are the foundation for later skills, these interventions are associated with lasting benefits later in life. Such programs have substantial economic and social rates of return Our analysis shows that disadvantaged children benefit most. In contrast, affluent families do not benefit from public programs aimed at the disadvantaged or median populations, because they generally have access to better quality child care and early education alternatives. The Importance of Quality Failure to account for the quality of child care alternatives and the quality of home environments leads to misleading conclusions about program effectiveness. For example, analyses of Head Start that do not consider child […]
There is a substantial body of evidence showing that early childhood programs can boost the skills of disadvantaged children. Most of this research has evaluated the short-run ‘treatment effects’ of these programs, focusing on outcomes such as cognitive test scores, school readiness, and measures of social behavior. So far, few studies have analyzed longer-term effects such as completed education, adult health, crime, and labor income. Heckman and Garcia (2020) aimed to bridge this gap in research, focusing on influential early childhood programs for disadvantaged children in North Carolina. Guided by economic theory, the study shows that it is possible to supplement experimental data with non-experimental data to ‘forecast’ the life-cycle benefits and costs of the programs. These predictions combine microsimulation using non-experimental data with experimental data from the midlife follow-up study. Empirical results As well as providing short-term boosts for school performance and social skills, this research shows that early childhood programs also benefit participants over the long term. The figure below shows the contributions to the present value of major program components. The high rate of return and benefit-cost ratio that we find has multiple sources. Our analysis is a template for estimating the life-cycle gains of social experiments for which there is less than full lifetime follow-up. Supplementing experimental data with non-experimental data enhances the information available from social experiments. Using economic theory and econometric methods to generate empirically concordant forecasts enhances the credibility of our procedure.