WHO ARE WE?

“Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”      

Franklin D. Roosevelt

It is taking us too long to understand and accept the miracles of the very young. It is taking us too long to learn what we should already know.  

We should look at a young child and see the love and hope in their eyes rather than shut our eyes to the economic costs to our nation caused by neglecting our children.

Our failure, as a nation, to effectively deal with our children has resulted in what is called the “achievement gap,” defined by Wikipedia,  as: “The disparity on a number of educational measures between the performance of groups of students, especially groups defined by socioeconomic status.  On a variety of measures, including standardized test scores, grade point average, dropout rates, and college enrollment and completion rates.”

Achievement gaps in the US impose “the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.” McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm.

We have been talking about this “gap” for close to 50 years since the 1966 publication of Equality of Educational Opportunity, more widely known as the Coleman Report. That research suggested that both in-school factors and home/community factors impact the academic achievement of students and contribute to the gap.  

Why is it so difficult to absorb this? Americans are smart and fair, so why are we willing to fall so short for our children?  What is our problem that we haven’t been listening to the social scientists, the researchers? 

James Heckman is one of the economists of the hour, a quirky star whose work is now in the limelight. He teaches at the famously conservative University of Chicago, where previous Nobel laureates have also worked, including Milton "Free to Choose" Friedman and Robert "Rational Expectations" Lucas.   I had the good fortune to work with Jim in planning Indiana’s Symposium on Child Care Financing.  He was a research partner with Eli Lilly and Company, and a Lilly VP and I were co-chairs of the Indiana Child Care Fund along with Mrs. Lugar and Mrs. Bayh (the wives of a Democratic sitting governor and a Republican sitting senator).  Mr. Heckman taught us all so much. What a great experience!

Since his Nobel Prize in 2000, Jim Heckman has focused on early childhood education and something it was long thought impossible to achieve: boosting the IQ scores of disadvantaged children, and therefore, their economic futures. 

“Learning starts in infancy, long before formal education begins, and continues throughout life. Recent research in psychology and cognition demonstrates how vitally important the early preschool years are for skill formation. Significantly, this is a time when human ability and motivation are shaped by families and non-institutional environments. Early learning begets later learning and early success breeds later success, just as early failure breeds later failure. Success or failure at this stage lays the foundation for success or failure in school, which in turn leads to success or failure in post-school learning.” James Heckman,  Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago

The costs of not making these investments in our young are clear. Julia Isaacs, an expert in child policy at the Urban Institute in Washington, finds that more than half of poor 5-year-olds don’t have the math, reading or behavioral skills needed to profitably start kindergarten. If children keep arriving in school with these deficits, no amount of money or teacher evaluations may be enough to improve their lot later in life.

Let me give you another startling finding. If you take disadvantaged, minority children starting at age 6 to 8 weeks – I mean, they're literally just born – and you follow these kids and give them intensive interventions for about eight years, you can boost their IQ at least up to age 21. You can see permanent differences between the treatment and control groups in both men and women, boys and girls.  We can take these giant steps to close the achievement gap.  We need to get started.

In principle, the public has been behind closing the achievement gap, and schools have employed a variety of tactics to address it. Common reform recommendations have included reducing class sizes, creating smaller schools, expanding early-childhood programs, raising academic standards, improving the quality of teachers provided to poor and minority students, and encouraging more minority students to take high-level courses. Still, progress in reducing academic divides has been slow or nonexistent.

Achievement gaps seem likely to remain a focus in the next authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The requirement that schools, districts and states disaggregate students’ test scores and graduation rates by race, gender, language and socio-economic status remains one of the few parts of No Child Left Behind with broad bipartisan support for reauthorization. Moreover, the economic-stimulus law passed by Congress in 2009 required states to close achievement gaps and provide more equitable distribution of high-quality teachers for poor and minority students. Policymakers and educators hope to find new ways to close achievement gaps faster in the decade to come.

Here we are in 2013 and we have an achievement gap that is widening every minute.  What will it take for us to say yes to our children – no more “no more.”

carole stein