Rx for President Obama’s Early Learning Budget: Tie it Firmly to Education Reform

February 5, 2010

Although I have long championed a big boost in the federal commitment for early care and education, I have a major concern with the FY 2011 early care and education budget increases President Obama proposed this week. The funding increases the president proposes for FY2011 are, if nothing else, big. They include:

• A $1.6 billion increase in the Child Care and Development Block Grant for a new total of $6.65 billion. That’s the biggest increase that program has seen in decades. Some $800 million of that would not require a state match.
• A $989 million increase for Head Start and Early Head Start, for a new total of $8.2 billion.
• Somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 billion over 10 years for a new Early Learning Challenge Fund (ELCF) that would make competitive grants to states to improve the quality of early learning programs to help children enter kindergarten ready to succeed. (This has not yet passed in the Senate, perhaps because it depends on savings in student loan costs that are being fought by business interests.)
• $450 million for a restructured literacy program the details of which are not yet available.

The President’s commitment to early care and education in tough budget year is admirable. Assuming the Early Learning Challenge Fund passes, we could be looking at a $4 billion expansion of resources in the coming year — and that’s before we take into account the President’s doubling of the child care tax credit! So why am I concerned?

I worry that the new spending will be effective only if it is accompanied by serious reforms. Recent studies find that child care subsidies mostly move children from informal to formal care and have little or no effect on maternal employment. Yet, the quality of subsidized care in the United States is so low that child development may not be improved and might even be harmed. Early Head Start and Head Start produce positive results for children, but are nowhere near good enough. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way; we can give children better programs.

If child care and Head Start are to receive more money, I would urge it be tied to higher standards, incentives for better performance, and accountability. This is the Obama Administration prescription for education reform (as I read it), and one the ELCF is designed to bring into the birth to five realm. If these new dollars are to be used effectively, the ELCF must be part of the package. And, I would encourage Congress to go even further. Tie new child care and Head Start funds to new requirements for competition, higher standards, accountability. That, combined with rigorous evaluation, can ensure our children truly benefit from these significant new investments.

Steve Barnett, Co-Director, NIEER

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Change we need: Responding responsibly to the results of the Head Start Impact Study

January 15, 2010

One prediction I make confidently is that most responses to the new report on Head Start’s effects will be wrong. Advocates of Head Start will try to “kill the messenger” by attacking the study and rejecting any notion that Head Start needs serious reform. Opponents of Head Start will claim that the program has been shown to be a complete failure. People on both sides will claim that the report shows “fade out” and many will blame poor public schools.

I make another prediction that the Obama administration, with its theme of “Change,” will avoid these errors and chart a new course for Head Start based on what can be learned from this study and others. Confidence in this prediction is tempered by the knowledge that real policy change never comes easy, but I have high hopes. In what follows, I set out six key lessons from the findings, make three specific recommendations for change, and close with some good news.

My comments and recommendations are not based on the Impact Study alone. Science is cumulative. New studies don’t simply obviate everything that has gone before, and the Head Start National Impact Study has to be interpreted in light of the full body of research on Head Start, early care and education, and child development.

What did we learn?

(1) In this study, and in others, Head Start’s initial impacts are modest. Just how small they are is hard to say because many children in the control group attended other programs including preschools in the public schools. Taking into account that some children in the study crossed over (some assigned to Head Start did not go and some control group children found their way into Head Start), the estimated gains are larger, and accounting for other preschool programs attended by the controls would lead to even larger estimates. However, even with generous allowance for effects of other programs, it seems highly unlikely that Head Start produced gains as large as have been found for quality programs elsewhere. Most private preschool programs are lower in quality and less effective compared to Head Start. State-funded pre-K varies tremendously; some state programs are likely less effective, while the best are more effective.

(2) There is little evidence of persistent effects on children’s cognitive and social development. This is exactly what other studies would predict given small initial impacts. Our comprehensive meta-analysis of research on the effects of preschool indicates that after school entry, cognitive effects are only about half as large as initial effects. Given how small the advantages from Head Start access were to start with it is not a surprise that they are no longer discernible at the end of kindergarten or first grade. What will surprise many is that this is not “fade out,” but catch up.

(3) The Head Start Impact Study provides some very interesting graphs that show how fast children learn year by year and demonstrate that the lost advantage overtime is not likely fade out. With the exception of the PPVT (the one cognitive measure with some evidence of persistent gain), learning rates on cognitive measures are much faster in kindergarten than during Head Start. Neither Head Start nor control children made much progress during the Head Start year, which is the fundamental problem. By comparison, kindergarten greatly accelerated learning for both groups, and the acceleration is slightly greater for the control group so they catch up. Many other studies have found that the public schools devote tremendous resources to catching up children who enter school far behind; this is inefficient and expensive, but it works. When initial gains from early education are small, they can be swamped by the effects of more intensive efforts in kindergarten and the early grades. Read the rest of this entry »

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For-Profit Pre-K Providers Faring Reasonably Well … So Far

January 8, 2010

One of many fascinating articles by Roger Neugebauer at ChildCare Exchange provides a snapshot of how the top 50 for-profit child care companies are faring and their major concerns.

Like most of the rest of us, CEOs of the top 50 are most concerned about the state of the economy and the rising cost of health insurance. Economists are already looking at shifts from private schools to public as parents find themselves less able to pay for education. Out of work parents don’t qualify for child care subsidies and state’s will have a very hard time maintaining child care subsidies once the stimulus funds run out. Look for more and more states to press for additional help from the federal government for FY 2011 and beyond. Concerns about health insurance may be influenced by the pending health care reform legislation and its implications for businesses that do not currently provide insurance to their employees. Concerns about the pending legislation also tie into worries over state budget shortfalls as states worry about their future obligations for health care costs.

Number three on their list of concerns is competition from public pre-K in the public schools. A growing population has allowed for some noncompeting growth in both public and private sectors. However, in the long-run private child care should view public pre-K as an opportunity rather than a threat. For-profit as well as not-for-profit providers can be integral components of mixed delivery systems for high-quality public pre-K. States like New Jersey have shown that with firm adherence to standards, adequate funding, and a continuous improvement process, private providers can improve service quality, provide a better living for their workforce, and grow. They can reap substantial benefits from the supportive infrastructure that public education provides while bringing more choice and competition than the public schools alone would offer.

Seventh on the list of concerns for CEOs is lack of subsidies for middle-income parents. We share that concern. With most states looking at dire economic circumstances for the foreseeable future and Obama administration initiatives taking an approach primarily targeted to the poor, a broad swath of working families stand to lose access or face declines in the quality of early education.

Neugebauer points out another fact. The two largest providers, Knowledge Universe (founded by Michael Milken) and Learning Care Group, decreased their capacity somewhat in 2009. Far and away the largest for-profit providers, they account for a combined total of nearly 400,000 children served. No doubt this reflects the effects of the economic downturn on effective demand. However, we as a field need to think carefully about the advantages and disadvantages of such concentrations of market share. The quest for bigness that led these and other companies to embark on aggressive acquisition campaigns earlier in the decade can lead to big problems, and we don’t need to look to the financial sector to see them. In Australia, where the mega-chain ABC Learning Centres went into receivership, parents and communities across the country were left scrambling to keep local centers open. As of last month it looked as if the ABC story will have a happy ending, however. A new kind of non-profit social investment syndicate called GoodStart bought 678 ABC Learning Centres for a small fraction of the $3 billion market capitalization the company once had and promised to plow the profits back into services for children.

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Clearing the Way for Better Benefit-Cost Analyses

December 23, 2009

Benefit-cost analyses (BCA) — quantifying benefits of interventions, often expressing them in dollars returned per dollar invested — are key drivers of early education policy. They’re widely consulted when early education decisions are debated, but few who use them have much in the way of an understanding of how they come about. A booklet just off the press from the National Research Council goes a long way toward explaining the issues.

Strengthening Benefit-Cost Analysis for Early Childhood Interventions is a summary of a March 2009 workshop where leading practitioners of the discipline, including NIEER Co-Director Steve Barnett, talked about the challenges of generating dependable BCAs and ways to strengthen them. Their discussions provide a window on the science — and art — of conducting BCAs. Here are some key issues:

• BCAs depend on rigorous program evaluations. Of course, the gold standard in rigor is the randomized controlled trial — a method that is not always available. Complicating matters is the fact that the control condition against which interventions are evaluated are seldom composed of kids who had no exposure to early childhood programs. These days, most kids in the general population attend a program of some type. These issues weren’t much of a factor in the era of the Perry Preschool Program — something that makes data from that era all the more valuable.

• Arriving at true program costs is a challenge. Budget figures gathered in advance of program implementation often don’t portray true costs and total costs may not be completely accounted for, particularly when programs involve matching or braided funding. Analysts often end up estimating cost using comparable market costs or deriving other measures such as “shadow prices.” For example, in many developing economies observed wage rates overstate the true marginal cost of labor while observed interest rates understate the true cost of capital. Accurate estimation of cost is one of the most neglected aspects of this work. All too often, cost receives little attention and the cost estimate used has no scientific basis at all. Yet, cost is just as important for arriving at a good decision as benefit.

• Assessing program value is arguably the area where researchers have the most work cut out for them. Some benefits of programs like greater socio-emotional development or better health behaviors are inherently more difficult to put a value on and have probably been under-estimated in the past. Manifestations of their value often don’t occur for years, even decades, in the future. In lieu of very long-term studies we must build on other research, linking pre-K to outcomes—grade retention, behavior problems, achievement, dropout—that other studies in turn link with later education, earnings and employment, mental and physical health, crime, and civic participation.

• Maintaining the integrity of study samples and having robust data available for long-term studies is a growing concern due to degradation of contact information and the growth of privacy concerns.

The presenters pointed to work done in other fields that has the potential to inform BCAs in early childhood education. In health economics, for instance, analysts are measuring the quality and length of lives saved by a health intervention in terms of a Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY). Researchers now estimate the value of detecting and medically treating lead poisoning at $1,300 per QALY gained. When they factored in the additional cost savings from remedial education not needed when lead poisoning is prevented, they found the intervention was a sound investment.

Other recommendations the group discussed include more standardization of economic measures such as discount rates that analysts apply over time and developing more standardized practices for research procedures in the field.

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Rx for Better Urban Schools: High-Quality Pre-K

December 11, 2009

Children’s math scores at fourth and eight grade haven’t progressed appreciably in most urban school districts over the last two years, says the most recent report from U.S. Department of Education. Only four of the 11 urban districts the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been tracking since 2003 showed significant gains. That doesn’t mean progress hasn’t been made. Urban districts, with their higher proportion of minority children and English Language Learners, represent the nation’s biggest education challenge and if we go back to 2003 when NAEP began, the urban districts have made some progress.

Nevertheless the leveling off suggested by the current report should be cause for concern because it tells us more needs to be done to move the needle toward continuing progress in these districts where the achievement gap between blacks and Hispanics and whites remains shamefully wide. We wish an urban New Jersey district were in the report because districts in cities like Newark and Camden have had the benefit of the state’s high-quality Abbott Preschool Program for a number of years. NIEER’s long-term research on the Abbott Program shows children who had two years of the program achieved gains in a variety of math measures including applied problems, calculation and math fluency through second grade.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who ran the Chicago public schools, champions high-quality preschool education as a prerequisite to success in school. That is also a key recommendation in a compelling new report titled “A New Deal for Urban Public Schools” authored by Andrew J. Rotherman and Sara Mead in the Harvard Law & Policy Review. When Secretary Duncan and I released the findings from the State of Preschool 2008 yearbook at the Oyster-Adams Bilingual School in the District of Columbia earlier this year, we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to a class of enthusiastic kids who shouted out each part of the story as we came to it. We need a lot more of that in urban districts as well as teachers skilled at recognizing and extending the math and science lessons in the caterpillar’s culinary exploits.

Steve Barnett
Co-Director, NIEER

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Did Michigan Create an Incentive to Sacrifice Pre-K?

November 30, 2009

When Michigan’s leaders finally settled on a FY 2010 budget, it looked as if the cuts to the Great Start Readiness Program (GSRP) weren’t so bad, considering the dire condition of the economy there. The part of GSRP that’s formula-funded received the same $88.1 million allotted to it in FY 2009. The portion that is competitively funded was reduced from $15 million to $7.5 million. That’s a big hit, especially considering those funds had gone to Head Start and other providers serving kids most at risk of school failure. Still, total state pre-K allocations appeared to have dropped by about seven percent — less than many had feared.

Or did it? Upon closer inspection, one finds the budget enables districts to opt out of providing formula-funded GSRP altogether and apply the pre-K funds to shortfalls in K-12 education. That will be a temptation for many districts since they received a $292 per-pupil reduction in K-12 funding. Districts that never started pre-K classes this year because of funding uncertainty may be especially tempted to make up their K-12 cuts by sacrificing pre-K. School districts must apply to the state superintendent if they choose to take this route and they must prove they are using the GSRP funds to plan some form of school reform or consolidation. They are not required to implement the plan, simply create one. Districts have until December 1 to tell the Department of Education what they will be doing with their pre-K funds.

The decision by Michigan’s leaders to include this provision was intended to provide districts flexibility in difficult circumstances. In early education circles, however, it looks more like a “stealth incentive” to chip away at a respected state pre-K program that achieves 8 out of 10 benchmarks on NIEER’s Quality Standards Checklist and serves 18 percent of the state’s 4-year-olds. That’s because Michigan school districts have little latitude when it comes to making up funding shortfalls. As a result of the 1994 tax reforms, school funding is essentially state-controlled. Districts have had to make up funding cuts by cuts in spending or dipping into their fund balances when they have them. Thus, the new wrinkle regarding GSRP funds stands as a new addition to a very short list of options.

The uncertainty all of this creates for those charged with providing early care and education is enormous. Lindy Buch, Director of Michigan’s Office of Early Childhood Education and Family Services says that 20 long-standing agencies have already lost funding and cut programs. Getting a handle on the number of districts intending to apply for flexibility is proving difficult because of the time needed and cost of re-programming the state’s electronic grants system to include this information. Parents and others concerned about early education, should try to get at least a rough idea of district plans sooner rather than later in order to forestall “penny wise and pound foolish” attempts to cut pre-K at the local levels.

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What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us

November 19, 2009

Does it really surprise you that children entering kindergarten unprepared places them at a disadvantage over the long term? No, right! Well, it did surprise many Americans, according to a recently released survey from the Pearson Foundation.

According to the poll, about three-quarters of Americans assume that even if children enter kindergarten not ready for school, they will acquire the necessary literacy skills in elementary school to catch up with their peers. However, the research evidence shows the contrary – children who enter kindergarten unready usually do not catch up. In fact, research points out that children who enter kindergarten behind are three to four times more likely to drop out of school when they get older.

More than half of the population polled was unaware that family income is the best predictor of whether or not a child will succeed in school, nor were they aware that nearly half of the children from low-income families begin first grade up to two years behind their peers from higher income families. In addition, three-quarters of Americans are unaware that about 60 percent of low-income parents do not own age-appropriate books for their children.

While the vast majority of people polled acknowledged that early childhood illiteracy is problematic, they did not recognize that the simple act of reading to 3- to 5-year-olds can have significant impacts on children’s academic and life-long success.

“It’s common to under-estimate the importance of early literacy experiences for young children’s later language and literacy development, especially those experiences before the age of 3,” says Shannon Ayers, an assistant research professor at NIEER and a specialist on early literacy.

“Experiences of a caregiver cooing back at an infant provide the basis for conversation turn taking, and singing lullabies and silly rhyming songs provide experiences with the cadence of language,” she adds. “Lap reading and talking about stories and personal experiences with children offers exposure to story structure, print, and language (vocabulary development) in a comfortable, loving way that will provide the foundation for later learning.”

NIEER discusses literacy in the preschool classroom and its link to academic and lifelong achievement in the policy brief Early Literacy: Policy and Practice in the Preschool Years.

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The Benefits of Investments in Early Development Around the Globe

November 13, 2009

Worldwide, a huge source of human potential is lost as children grow up without the benefit of effective investments in their early development. More than 200 million children under 5 years of age are not reaching their full mental, physical, and social developmental potential, says a recent report from The Open University based in the United Kingdom.

Many people associate early interventions to support child development with preschool education. That is only a part of the story in countries where problems like growth stunting, hunger, disease and extreme poverty necessitate early investments that focus on directly improving nutrition and health as well as care and education. With wide variations in the approaches to investments in early development and in children’s environments in the international arena, policy makers around the globe are asking, “How effective are the various programs in improving the development of children and does this vary across countries with very different economic conditions?”

To help answer that, NIEER recently conducted a meta-analysis of studies that looked at 30 interventions with varying approaches in 23 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. What NIEER found is encouraging: Regardless of the type of program, all had moderate positive effects in all domains of child development. The size of the long-term effects is similar to that found in a comprehensive meta-analysis of the U.S. studies. On average, they were about one-quarter to one-third of a standard deviation, with cognitive effects at the higher end, which translates to a gain of about 5 points on an IQ test. Studies that evaluated effects at older ages showed positive effects being sustained through adulthood.

Policymakers want answers to questions like what types of programs are most cost-effective, whether single-focus or combined-focus programs are best, and what treatment dosage is likely to yield the greatest gain in a given set of circumstances. While many of those answers will require further research, our findings shed some light. Interventions providing direct child care and education were more effective than other types of programs, particularly in terms of cognition. Interventions that combined education and care with attention to nutrition or health were more effective than cash transfer programs that gave money to parents in order to achieve a goal such as making sure kids get medical attention or programs that were solely nutritional in nature. Read the rest of this entry »

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Avoiding the “Poverty Trap”

November 9, 2009

Poverty is a problem in America, and it is a more serious problem here than in many other nations including some with average incomes considerably below ours. However, it is not the only problem in America, nor is it the sole cause or even most important cause of our student achievement problem. Nevertheless, our debates about education policy and education reform typically focus on reducing the “achievement gap” between rich and poor. While this is an admirable goal, focusing on the achievement gap as the primary problem is a mistake—conceptually, practically, and politically.

The conceptual mistake is to confuse the federal poverty line with a real and meaningful distinction that defines two clearly different populations. The federal poverty line is an artificial cutoff that many experts find unsatisfactory. Relatively few children and families stay below this line for long periods of time and many move back and forth across the poverty line. In reality, there is no sharp differentiation in school readiness or later educational success between those above and below the poverty line, instead there is a strong linear gradient along which school readiness, achievement, and high school graduation rates increase with income. There is no clear point at which risk for failure sharply changes. Canadian cardiologist, children’s advocate, and founding president of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Dr. Fraser Mustard has shown that gradients linking income to development extend to other domains including health and are not limited to the United States.

The practical mistake is to design education reforms to focus on poverty and the achievement gap by providing additional resources and programs only to children in poverty. This is how most government programs for young children are designed including child care assistance, Head Start, Early Head Start, and many state pre-K programs. Because children move in and out of poverty these programs end up either providing little continuity of service (child care) or arbitrarily serving children who happened to be poor at time of enrollment but often are not poor later on and failing to serve children who become poor later.

Moving the cut-off up to 130 or 185 percent of the poverty line doesn’t really solve the problem, it just pushes it up the income gradient. As a result we fail to treat most of the problem. Don Yarosz and I have shown that in sheer numbers most school failures and high school dropouts are accounted for by families in middle-income families. Similarly, most children who are poorly prepared for school, whether we look at cognitive or social development, are from middle-income families. Indeed, most children who have abilities below those of the average child in poverty at kindergarten entry are from middle-income families. Read the rest of this entry »

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How the Fade-out Myth Gets Perpetuated

November 2, 2009

Last week, the Associated Press (AP) reported on an evaluation of Tennessee’s state-funded pre-K program commissioned by that state’s Comptroller’s office (See, for example, Memphis Daily News, “Report: Tenn. Pre-K Not Effective After Second Grade”). As the headline indicates, the report is being widely cited as finding that pre-K has no lasting impact. This would be dismaying if true, because Tennessee has relatively high standards for its pre-K program, as indicated in NIEER’s 2008 State Preschool Yearbook. However, those claiming that Tennessee pre-K has no lasting effect might want to actually read the full report carefully, because it does not substantiate that claim.

Anyone reading beyond the executive summary will find that the authors themselves conclude, “Although the effects of Pre-K on long-term academic achievement are not evident in the present study, the lack of a statistically significant difference in measures of student achievement in the long term can not logically be attributed to an ineffective Pre-K intervention.” In other words, this study can’t really answer the question of whether Tennessee’s pre-K has lasting effects.

Readers can be excused for being confused by misleading statements in the executive summary that combine the conclusions of a rather one-sided literature review with an unjustified interpretation of this study’s findings. To wit: “Consistent with the results of the present evaluation, many studies find improved language or math skills in Kindergarten following Pre-K, but these effects have often dissipated by the First or Second Grade.” The literature review in this instance fails to acknowledge recent meta-analyses that find lasting effects and a number of rigorous evaluations that have reported lasting effects from higher quality early childhood programs in the last several years. They help perpetuate a fade-out myth that is no longer supportable by the research. (Stay tuned for a second installment on this topic.)

My own take is that just like the last report on this evaluation, this one provides clear evidence that the analyses have not been able to overcome serious design problems including selection bias. As my grandmother who taught school in Tennessee might have said, the stitching is mighty fancy, but it’s still a sow’s ear. The real question here is why the Comptroller spends taxpayer money on this flawed study year after year.

Steve Barnett
Co-Director, NIEER

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