Late Off the Blocks: Head Start and the Formative Years

In 1995, Betty Hart, a professor of Human Development at the University of Kansas, and Todd R. Risley, a professor of Psychology at the University of Alaska, published a study examining the difference in language heard by infants of varying socio-economic backgrounds.

The study found that the average low-income child heard just over 600 words per hour, less than half the average total of working class children (1251/hour), and less than one-third that of the average child in a professional family (2153/hour). Using some rudimentary arithmetic, the researchers projected that wealthy kids heard about 30 million words by age 3, while poor kids heard only 10 million.

This divergent led to what the researchers described as an “even-widening gap” between poor and wealthy children, whereby the poor children not only “had smaller vocabularies than did children of the same age in professional families, but they were also adding words more slowly.”

More recent science also supports this conclusion. A 2013 study out of Stanford found that children in different socio-economic groups display dramatic differences in their vocabularies by 18 months.

Thus, it should come as little surprise that Head Start—the pioneering Great Society program designed to improve early learning for poor children—has had limited success in closing the achievement gap. As noted in a column by UC-Berkeley Professor David Kirp this weekend, despite recent improvements to the program, “a 2012 federal evaluation that used gold-standard methodology and concluded that children who participated in Head Start were not more successful in elementary school than others.”

Kirp goes on to argue that one of the essential flaws in Head Start is that it only applies to poor students, in part because branding Head Start as a program for the poor weakens its political power, but more importantly because it concentrates the effects of poverty rather than allowing poor students to interact with and learn from their better educated peers. This interaction has been shown to help poor students narrow the vocabulary/literacy gap with their more well to do contemporaries without hurting the more privileged group.

While socioeconomic mixing in early childhood education can help to mitigate the effects of the “word gap”, we need to do more to narrow/eliminate the gap from emerging in the first place. This means placing a greater emphasis on the formative years 0-3, as well as providing new parents with the skills and tools they need to succeed. Simply put, Head Start is getting out of the proverbial blocks too late for many students to catch up.

Creating children may come naturally to humans, but parenting those children is anything but. And yet despite the incredible importance and difficulty of parenthood, government offers little in the way of supports for soon-to-be or new parents.

One program that has been effective in not only boosting pre-natal care but in improving parenting practices, is Early Head Start (EHS). Launched in 1995, EHS is designed to assist low-income women and families on a variety of childhood development/parenting mattes. A major study of the program in 2005 found that EHS children “performed better than did control children in cognitive and language development, displayed higher emotional engagement of the parent and sustained attention with play objects, and were lower in aggressive behavior. Compared with controls, Early Head Start parents were more emotionally supportive, provided more language and learning stimulation, read to their children more, and spanked less.”

[As previously noted in this space, Early Head Start or similar programs are perfect vehicles for Social Impact Bond financing.]

This conclusion isn’t surprising given that the vast majority of parents want to do well by their kids—they simply need the tools to do so.

Indeed, the fact that many parents do not read to their children as much as would be ideal is not a “choice” in the traditional sense of the term. Not only are many parents unaware of the benefits of frequent verbal interaction with infants, but they also may lack the resources needed to simply have books/newspapers in the home to read.  For instance, parents who are given books and “prescriptions for reading” by their children’s pediatricians have been found to be four times more likely to read and share books with their children.

This fall, New York City will introduce universal pre-K for the first time. It’s a huge step for equity and opportunity for our city’s youth and it is one of many bold ideas that Mayor de Blasio is putting into motion. But even as we navigate the challenges of pre-K, we should be planning for that next great leap forward in early childhood education—to the formative years where the gap first emerges—so that when the starting gun of life goes off, all children can get out of the blocks.

More and Less: Justice and the Plight of the Poor

“With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.”

-- Paul Bloom, “The Moral Life of Babies,” New York Times (9 May 2010)

This week, Annie Lowrey of the New York Times wrote a terrific, front-page story on how the poor in America have much greater access to material goods than in generations past, yet feel as if they are falling farther and farther beyond the middle class. As James Ziliak, director of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Poverty Research, stated, “Without a doubt, the poor are far better off than they were at the dawn of the War on Poverty. But they have also drifted further away.”

If people are better off, why does it matter if they’ve “drifted away” from the middle and upper classes on a relative scale? If the rising tide lifts all ships, what difference does it make if some seas rise faster and taller than others?

As it turns out, it makes every difference in the world—and not just in America, but also across most societies in every corner of the globe. Why? Because rising inequality, no matter how improved the objective standard of living is for individuals across the board, offends something deep within us—an innate sense of fairness, justice, and opportunity.

As Paul Bloom wrote in 2010, “You won’t find a society where people don’t have some notion of fairness, don’t put some value on loyalty and kindness, don’t distinguish between acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes, don’t categorize people as nasty or nice.”

As a result, it should come as no surprise that people are frustrated—even enraged—by how an emphasis on conspicuous consumption has replaced a more fulfilling vision of the American Dream with a vacuous conception of liberty and success.

For far too long, American policymakers have focused on “expanding the pie”, as if GDP growth was gospel sent down from on high—the embodiment of our collective pursuit of happiness. As we’ve explored in this space, however, achieving happiness is a much more complicated task than economic growth. It requires a deep understanding of human nature; a critical examination of the true material needs (as opposed to wants) of individuals, and a commitment to investing in the foundational elements of true prosperity—the infrastructure of opportunity.

That infrastructure is physical—inter-city high-speed rail, urban mass transit, affordable housing, reliable water/gas delivery, clean power—and human—education from K-graduate school, social institutions, mobility (where health care attaches to you as a human rather than an employee), and substantive and procedural justice.

Erecting this infrastructure is a mission statement that acknowledges that government’s primary role is to lay the groundwork (including a robust social safety net) for people to life the lives they’ve imagined, but that the State must also take aggressive steps, as necessary, to allay levels of inequality that threaten to create a “gilded class” (if Thomas Piketty is right that, over time, the rate of return on capital is greater than the growth rate of the economy, then individuals who start with capital are very likely to accumulate more) and undermine the citizenry’s belief in the very idea of Republican government.

While the incredible reduction in extreme poverty worldwide has brought billions of people the bare necessities of life, there remain 1.2 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day. These individuals remain in desperate need of economic growth and actions to address inequality. As the Economist noted last year, “Growth alone does not guarantee less poverty. Income distribution matters, too.” Indeed, while two thirds of the fall in extreme poverty was the result of economic growth; one-third came from greater equality.

As the cartoon above implies, the world has enough—enough to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless, enough to treat the sick and heal the injured. However, that bounty means little unless extreme poverty is eradicated in the developing world (an achievable goal by 2030) and unless the developed world creates an infrastructure of opportunity commensurate with our innate belief that all people deserve an equal chance to succeed.

Social Impact Bonds: Spurring Innovation in Mass./NYC

“Social impact bonds offer an innovative way for public, private, philanthropic and nonprofit actors to come together and align their skills and resources in pursuit of measurable, positive social change.”

-- Kristina Costa, Center for American Progress, 2014

Last week, Dax-Devlon Ross profiled Roca—a Chelsea and Springfield, Mass. based non-profit designed to steer “high risk” youth away from poverty and violence and toward gainful employment and a middle-class life. Roca has done something all too rare in the social service world—commit to a data-driven approach to securing its goals, whereby success must be proved, rather than assumed.

Roca’s latest project is designed to reduce recidivism among young men. As part of the project, Roca plans to track every interaction between its employees and the participants in an online data system. At the first sign of trouble, employees initiate an intervention to get at the underlying cause of concern and forge a plan to keep the participant on track.

Roca’s program was recently awarded $27 million in seed money from Governor Deval Patrick’s Juvenile Justice “Pay for Success” Initiative. As stated in the award release:

[I]n Massachusetts, 64 percent of young male ex-offenders reoffend within five years, and only 35 percent of these young men gain employment within a year of release. Roca’s groundbreaking approach to positive youth development aims to interrupt the cycle of recidivism by filling a gap in services for high-risk populations. Through this project, Roca will aim to reduce the number of days that young men in the program are incarcerated by 40 percent. If this goal is met, the project would generate millions of dollars in savings to the Commonwealth that fully offset the cost of delivering services. 

The Social Impact Bond (SIB) model (shown in the nifty graphic from the Rockefeller Foundation) holds great promise, not simply as a financing mechanism in an era of budget shortfalls, but as a spur to creative experimentation within cities and states to solve some of our most pressing problems. SIBs allow government to invest in programs today that improve the lives of thousands and save money over the long term.

On some level, this is not a particularly novel concept. Indeed, business owners have long understood that investing in new equipment or hiring additional employees imposes short-term costs in pursuit of long-term profit. American families understand that buying life insurance and depositing money in their children’s college savings plans will pay dividends down the line.

Government should be no different. And yet, we have encountered many situations in recent years where we fail to make short-term investments that yield long-term gains. For instance, in New York City, we continue to shelter families without homes for as much as $36,000 per family per year, while rental assistance with support services for families can cost less than $10,000/family annually.

While SIB programs have heretofore largely been confined to programs concerning recidivism and formerly incarcerated individuals, many have openly wondered whether they can be put to use in other fields, most notably early childhood education and public health initiatives that allow for concrete measurements over a discrete period of time.

In 2012, my boss, then-Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, proposed using a SIB to expand availability of Early Head Start (EHS), an early intervention and prevention program for pregnant mothers and families with children ages 0 – 3. Despite the fact that children who attend Early Head Start are more successful educationally and emotionally, the program is so poorly funded that it enrolls less than 1 percent of eligible infants. Only 7000 slots are funded for children in all of New York State. Once full-day pre-K is up and running, the Administration should turn its attention to the critical formative years before pre-K, with SIBs as a possible financing mechanism for EHS or other programs.

SIBs aren’t the only mechanism that should be used to secure long-term savings. Municipal labor should also play a key role in this effort through “gain sharing.” 20 years ago, Mayor David Dinkins launched a “Productivity Advisory Council” that advocated for a gain-sharing model that would streamline city services and share savings with city workers.

One of the great successes was a Parks Department effort to improve efficiencies in the mechanics of tree pruning throughout the five boroughs. In short, New York had been force to cut workers to balance the budget during the early 90s recession. In the winter of 1993, the city’s tree workers were given the power to craft their own strategy, with an implicit promise of hiring back some of those laid off should city workers prove the victors.

As noted in a Harvard Business School case study, “Prior to the study, climbers and pruners had no input into how the crews were configured or what work they would be assigned on a given day; these decisions were the prerogative of the supervisors, only some of whom had any prior forestry experience.”

In two months, the workers’ improvements made them far more efficient than contractors and saved the city an estimated $100,000.

Whether through a public-private SIB model or a gain-sharing model that leverages the expertise and ingenuity of public employees, cities and states owe it to taxpayers to do all they can to reduce preventable costs by proactively investing in innovative programs.

SCOTUSWatch: Popular Sovereignty and Affirmative Action

As we enter the final three months of the Supreme Court’s term, Bay State Brahmin will focus on a number of big cases on the current docket and will look ahead to the Supreme Court’s 2014-2015 term.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

-- Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007)

In Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the Supreme Court of the United States is considering the following question: “Whether a state violates the Equal Protection Clause by amending its constitution to prohibit race- and sex-based discrimination or preferential treatment in public-university admissions decisions.”

At issue in Schuette is the constitutionality of Michigan’s “Proposal 2”—an amendment to the state constitution, passed in November 2006 with the approval of 58 percent of Michigan voters, banning public universities and schools from using race as a factor in admissions decisions.

In an October 2013 editorial, the New York Times argued that because the Supreme Court has found that “race-conscious admissions policies may further a compelling governmental interest in educational diversity,” that efforts by citizens to limit the use of those policies is unconstitutional. However, the very use of the word may by the Times, rather than shall (or must), highlights the inherent weakness in its argument and a fundamental mischaracterization of what Schuette is really all about.

Schuette is not—despite its name—about whether affirmative action programs are unconstitutional. Rather, the case concerns whether a State may amend its constitution to prohibit race- and sex-based discrimination or preferential treatment in public-university admissions decisions. This is no small distinction; for while many Americans (including yours truly) believe that affirmative action programs are both constitutional as a matter of law and beneficial as a matter of public policy, few would argue that they are constitutionally required.

Nevertheless, the Times’ mischaracterization of the case continues to be repeated. Just this weekend, Julianne Hing, a reporter for Colorlines, wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe titled, “The Supreme Court Gives License to Discriminate,” as if it were the Supreme Court, and not the People of the State of Michigan, who decided to limit race-conscious admissions by constitutional amendment.

The American Civil Liberties Union (disclosure: I was a staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, the New York State affiliate of the ACLU, from 2009-2011) and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) took the mischaracterization a step further in an amicus brief filed on behalf of the challengers, asserting that Proposal 2, "cannot be explained on grounds other than race.” This blanket assertion suggests that opponents of affirmative action in higher education—including a majority of Hispanic Americans and a nearly majority of Black Americans, according to a 2013 Gallup poll—are motivated by animus directed at minorities.

However, the decision of voters to remove a preferential use of race in college admissions is a far cry from the decision of voters to impose unique barriers on a discrete and insular minority—as Colorado voters did in 1992 when they passed Amendment 2 banning municipalities from taking steps to protect the rights of LGBT people (the Amendment was later struck down by the Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996)).

Regardless of whether you agree with the argument above, it seems clear that a "win" by the challengers of Proposal 2 may well be Pyrrhic, since it will dissuade states from promoting policies that seek to rectify the effects of past and present discrimination out of the fear that, once enacted, said policies can never be repealed.

Nearly a decade ago—50 years to the day after the Supreme Court’s momentous decision in Brown v. Board of Education helped to launch the civil rights movement—I joined thousands on the steps of Cambridge City Hall to celebrate the first applications for marriage licenses from gay couples. I wrote at the time that while it was a “triumphant moment” there was also a sense that the battles were just beginning and that we could not rely on judges to make progress for us. Instead, “lasting victory [can] only be achieved if the fight [is] taken to the streets, churches, universities, barber shops, lunch counters, and workplaces of America.”

Rather than fight this battle in court, affirmative action proponents should engage the public in the marketplace of ideas to convince their fellow citizens that affirmative action is a tool that can and should be embraced as a means toward a more perfect Union.

P.S. For those interested in reading more arguments about Schuette and the critical issues raised by the case, check out SCOTUSBlog’s exceptional symposium.

Experimentation and Opportunity: Essex County Schools

[A] single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.

-- Louis Brandeis, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court,

New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262 (1932).

As reported in today’s Boston Globe, Governor Deval Patrick awarded five grants totaling $50,000 to the Pentucket Regional School District for innovative learning academies within existing schools. Other Essex County schools also received grants, including the O’Maley Innovation Middle School in Gloucester and the Tilton Innovation School in Haverhill.

The Commonwealth’s commitment to flexibility and experimentation in education is one of the critical reasons why Massachusetts’ public schools consistently rank near the top in the nation. Pentucket’s five programs will run the gamut—from an International Baccalaureate program and visual arts to a program focused on safety and public service.

What is most critical now is for the State to have measures in place to objectively analyze the successes and failures of each academy so that best practices can be shared with other districts and other ideas can be dropped if deemed ineffective.

But experimentation is not enough to ensure that all students have access to a quality education. Cities and towns in the Commonwealth that have excellent schools also have a responsibility to open their doors to students who, largely by accident of birth, do not have access to the same high-quality education.

One such school is my alma mater—Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School. Last week, the HW School Committee reauthorized the School Choice program at the Regional. There is no doubt that School Choice imposes significant financial costs on districts that welcome students to their schools. Indeed, it is high time that the State cast a critical eye on the amount of School Choice tuition (paid to HW by the town of the choice student), which has not changed since it was first set by the state legislature at $5,000 in 1991.

Nevertheless, the benefits of choice—both to the students who take advantage of it and the broader student body—should not be underestimated (and I don’t just say that because my sister married her high school sweetheart, who just happened to be a choice student from Essex).

Choice students add a diverse array of experience/perspective to a class that, for the most part, grows up in a relatively insulated bubble from K-8. Furthermore, with demographics data projecting fewer resident students at the high school over the next 10 years, School Choice students help the Regional maintain a critical mass of students necessary for a robust, engaging curriculum.

As Horace Mann, the Father of American Public Education and a Massachusetts native himself, said 165 years ago:

Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery…[and] [t]he people of Massachusetts have…appreciated the truth that the unexampled prosperity of the State…is attributable to the education, more or less perfect, which all its people have received.

The Commonwealth is stronger when we all have common experience and opportunity and I am proud that my hometown and my home county continue to embody the principles of Horace Mann and Louis Brandeis.