Results for “preschool” 42 found
Arrived in my pile
1. Frank H. Buckley, editor, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law.
2. Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data.
3. Chester E. Finn Jr., Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut.
Assorted links
1. Scott Sumner speaks up for China, and Scott on movies.
2. On Finnish “preschool by any other name,” my previous post was wrong on this topic.
3. Paul Romer is on Twitter; so far he seems to be taking it seriously.
4. FDI performance for France, better than you might think but can it last?
5. How easily can the Fed back out of its portfolio? Sober Look and Arnold Kling.
6. Jobs where the gender wage gap is largest and smallest. And do the costs of minimum wage hikes fall mainly on outsiders?
7. How the Italian Senate works (doesn’t work), further explanation here, and why there was no real alternative to Monti’s Italian austerity.
Assorted links
2. Addition by subtraction?, or more on the Patrick Ewing theory.
3. How Australia handles youth, disabilities, and minimum wages. (Their “assessed capacity” metric seems screwy to me; who gets to decide and on what basis?)
4. Robert Cottrell on how to read the internet.
5. How are the details on the preschool plan developing?
6. The culture that is North Korea (music video, not Gangnam style, recommended nonetheless).
What do I think of Obama’s universal pre-school proposal?
Of course there are no significant details yet, but here are a few points.
1. The evidence that this can be done effectively in a scalable manner is basically zero. Aren’t massive policies (possibly universal?) supposed to be based on evidence? (How about running a large-scale RCT first, a’la the Rand health insurance experiment? And by the way, here is a quick look at the evidence we have on pre-school, and here, not nearly skeptical enough in my view. And think in terms of lasting results, not getting kids to read nine months earlier, etc. You can find evidence for persistent math gains in Tulsa, OK, but no CBA.)
2. That doesn’t mean we should do nothing.
3. Let’s say we have “the political will” to do something effective (debatable, of course). Is adding on another layer of education, and building that up more or less from scratch in many cases, better than fixing the often quite broken systems we have now? I know well all the claims about “needing to get kids early,” but is current kindergarten so late in life? Why not have much better kindergartens and first and second grade experiences in the ailing school districts? Or is the claim that by kindergarten “it is too late,” yet a well-executed government early education could fix the relevant problems if applied at ages three to four? Would such a claim mean that we are currently writing off many millions of American children, as it stands now?
4. This is what federalism is for. Let’s have an experiment emanating from the state and/or local level.
5. What should we infer from the fact that no such truly broad-based state-level experiment has happened yet? (Georgia and Oklahoma have come closest.) That the states are lacking in vision, relative to the Presidency? Or that a workable version of the idea is hard to come up with, execute, and sell to voters?
6. In Finland government education doesn’t really touch the kids until they are six years old. Don’t they have a very good system? Some call it the world’s best. Maybe the early years are very important, but perhaps pre-schooling is not the key missing piece of the puzzle. (NB: See the comments for dissenting views on Finland.)
Addendum: Here are good comments from Reihan. See also this Brookings study: “This thin empirical gruel will not satisfy policymakers who want to practice evidence-based education.”
What is the causal link between parental income and education?
…the connection between income and student performance “is no less true in the Age of Obama than it was in the Age of Pericles.” But, he points out, most of the connection is not causal, but due to other factors. He cites a study by Julia Isaacs and Katherine Magnuson (Brookings Institution, 2011), that examines an array of family characteristics – such as race, mother’s and father’s education, single parent or two-parent family, smoking during pregnancy – on school readiness and achievement. The Brookings study finds that the distinctive impact of family income is just 6.4 percent of a standard deviation, generally regarded as a small effect. In addition, Peterson calls attention to earlier research by Susan Mayer, former dean of the Harris School at the University of Chicago, which also found that the direct relationship between family income and education success for children varied between negligible and small.
Responding to Ladd’s claim that the gap in reading achievement between students from families in the lowest and highest income deciles is larger for those born in 2001 than for those born in earlier decades, Peterson points out that the achievement gap between income groups was growing at exactly the same time the federal government was rapidly expanding services to the poor – Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, housing subsidies, and many other programs.
“A better case can be made that any increase in the achievement gap between high- and low-income groups is more the result of changing family structure than of inadequate medical services or preschool education,” Peterson says. In 1969, 85 percent of children under the age of 18 were living with two married parents; by 2010, that percentage had declined to 65 percent. The median income level of a single-parent family is just over $27,000 (using 1992 dollars), compared to more than $61,000 for a two-parent family; and the risk of dropping out of high school increases from 11 percent to 28 percent if a white student comes from a single-parent family instead of a two-parent family. For blacks, the increment is from 17 percent to 30 percent, and for Hispanics, the risk rises from 25 percent to 49 percent.
That is from Harvard’s Kennedy School, from Paul Peterson. Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Ilya Novak.
Timothy Noah’s *The Great Divergence*
The subtitle is America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It. His policy conclusions are:
1. Soak the rich
2. Fatten government payrolls
3. Import more skilled labor
4. Universalize preschool
5. Impose price controls on colleges and universities
6. Reregulate Wall Street
7. Elect Democratic Presidents
8. Revive the labor movement
This book is well-written and it is a useful survey of left-democrat points of view on the problem. I do not think most of these recommendations will much limit inequality (though they may have other virtues), but my main wish is that he had offered some additional possible solutions. #1 on my list is “more innovations which benefit virtually everybody,” which is how the last great equalization (1870-1970 or so) came about. Parts of his list, such as #3, get at this obliquely but it should be front and center of the entire book. Let’s debate how we can make that happen. If there were a new invention as important as the toilet, shareholders would not and could not appropriate most of the gains. “Deregulate housing” and “deregulate medical care” also deserve a ponder, as does “abolish occupational licensing” and “subsidize basic science.” That global inequality has fallen radically is understood and recognized but not emphasized. It is culturally beyond the pale — on the left at least — to write “encourage conversions to Mormonism” but as a recommendation it is right on the mark. This book needs more which is culturally beyond the pale. How about “run some of the bad schools with lots of discipline, more like the KIPP academy?”
The culture that is Sweden
Director Lotta Rajalin notes that Egalia places a special emphasis on fostering an environment tolerant of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. From a bookcase, she pulls out a story about two male giraffes who are sad to be childless — until they come across an abandoned crocodile egg.
That’s a preschool, for children from ages one to six. The school does everything possible to obliterate traditional gender roles, including a refusal to use the words “him” and “her” (that is, their Swedish equivalents).
…she says that there’s a long waiting list for admission to Egalia, and that only one couple has pulled a child out of the school.
Jukka Korpi, 44, says he and his wife chose Egalia “to give our children all the possibilities based on who they are and not on their gender.”
There is even a markets in everything angle:
To even things out, many preschools have hired “gender pedagogues” to help staff identify language and behavior that risk reinforcing stereotypes.
For the pointer I thank Daniel Lippman.
The culture that is Manhattan James Heckman gone wild edition
A mad-as-heck Manhattan mom says her daughter’s Ivy League dreams have been all but dashed — and she’s only 4 years old.
Nicole Imprescia is suing the $19,000-a-year York Avenue Preschool, saying her daughter, Lucia, was forced to spend too much time with lesser-minded 2- and 3-year-olds when she should have been focusing on test preparation to get into an elite elementary school.
The suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, notes that “getting a child into the Ivy League starts in nursery school” and says the Upper East Side school promised Imprescia it would “prepare her daughter for the ERB, an exam required for admission into nearly all the elite private elementary schools.”
But “it became obvious [those] promises were a complete fraud,” the suit says. “Indeed, the school proved not to be a school at all but just one big playroom.”
The miffed mom yanked her daughter after just three weeks — but the school is refusing to refund the $19,000 she had to pay up front, said her lawyer, Mathew Paulose.
The article is here. For the pointer I thank Michael Rosenwald.
How much should the safety net grow? (and when?)
Lane Kenworthy thinks there is much more to be done. For instance:
Early education (preschool, child care), beginning at age one, is a very good idea. Not all states have full-day kindergarten; few have preschool for four-year-olds; none have much in the way of public funding of education for kids age one to three.
Paid parental leave is available in only a few states and covers a relatively short period.
Sickness insurance: ditto.
Unemployment insurance covers too few of us.
Unemployment insurance should be supplemented by or folded into a new wage insurance program.
Social assistance benefits have been decreasing steadily over the past generation.
If markets are now structured in such a way as to severely limit real earnings growth for those in the bottom half of the distribution, we may need to massively expand the EITC.
We ought to do more for children, working-age adults, and elderly persons with assorted physical, cognitive, emotional, and social disabilities.
These questions could and should be debated with thousands of pages. But, in the meantime, may I offer my little squib/splat of doubt?
At what wealth level are these protections supposed to arrive? Now? One also wonders which risks are considered to be insurable at the individual and family level, either through insurance proper or through social norms, savings, and other voluntary institutions. What will be the implicit marginal rate of taxation on earning additional income in this new arrangement? Has it been estimated? What will happen to the savings rate? What coercions will accompany these protections? What will the pressures be, legal or otherwise, to send your kid away at one year of age? Will job creation for women go down if there is mandatory paid parental leave? Probably so. Will women end up better off? Quite possibly not. How many people would count as falling under these disabilities? Is this all to be financed by higher taxes on the rich? We probably can't even pay for our current bills in that manner. If it is all done by VAT, how many people would prefer to have the government spend the money for them, as opposed to spending it themselves? Just asking. How about just sending the needy people some cash? What is the likelihood that such benefits will, in the longer run, discourage our willingness to take in immigrants, the most effective form of aid we know?
Another way to ask the question is to look for the low-hanging fruit, when it comes to social welfare. Let's take Social Security as more or less given, though it will see marginal adjustments. Are the big gains to be had from some new social welfare program, or from showing that Medicare and Medicaid and other regulated health care institutions can work better than the public health systems of other wealthy nations, without running the United States into insolvency?
In my view it is the latter, and I don't think that fruit is hanging especially low. Can we agree on a truce, and first improve the programs we already have? Will the new programs have the problems of the old?
If I were to pick some other piece of low-hanging fruit, I would cite the still-neglected problem of pandemic preparation.
On the Kenworthy post, here are comments from Matt.
The demand for authenticity
Eric Jorgensen, a programmer at Microsoft,
has invented PixelWhimsy, a computer program that allows toddlers to
sit at a regular computer and bang away on the keys to create sounds
and colors and shapes, but without damaging the computer.Asmin
Jalis, who also works at Microsoft and whose 2-year-old boy, Ibrahim,
has been using PixelWhimsy, said his son liked it better than his toy
computer. “We have a toy laptop for him, and he knows it’s a fake,” he
said.
Or more generally:
Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year. For preschoolers. Toy makers and retailers are filling shelves with new tech devices for
children ages 3 and up, and sometimes even down. They say they are
catering to junior consumers who want to emulate their parents and are
not satisfied with fake gadgets.
Could I ever become a Democrat?
Here is a symposium on whether progressives can believe in economic growth as a primary value. The impetus is Gene Sperling’s new and intelligent book The Pro-Growth Progressive. Here is a summary of the book. Here is a recent Sperling article. Scroll down MaxSpeak for left-wing criticism of Sperling.
Sperling pushes for markets and trade, but gives government a greater role in insuring against risk. This includes "wage insurance," more job training, and managed forms of free trade and globalization. On net his influence will be positive, but I have the following problems with his arguments:
1. He assumes that spending more on education will result in a better educated and more productive populace. The U.S. data do not support this view, although he does adduce some good evidence on the benefits of preschool.
2. He assumes that government-sponsored job training — including "pre-emptive" training (i.e., before you lose your job) — is effective.
3. He never puts on his right-wing public choice hat to consider what his proposed policies would end up looking like in the real world. He feels no shame in postulating dozens of finely honed micro-interventions, all implemented by ugly and brutish politicians and interest groups.
4. We are never told what we must forego to do all this.
5. He ties himself in emotional knots anytime his preferred policies are not unanimous pure Pareto improvements. He has to get over the fact that Democrats hurt people too.
6. When arguing against the Bush budget deficits, he ignores Cowen’s Third Law: "All propositions about real interest rates are wrong."
He does nail market-oriented views on the issue of risk; we don’t have a good explanation of why private insurance markets do not function better. But since single-payer national health insurance violates every economic law known to mankind, I am again unsure how I could leap on the Democratic bandwagon.
By the way, here is Reihan Salam on where the Republicans should go (Matt Yglesias comments here). He is another smart guy, but I just don’t believe that any political party can be mass-captured by the intelligent and brought around to sanity. Parties exist, in part, to enforce feelings of interpersonal solidarity and to make people forget about critical thinking. We cannot avoid parties in a democracy, but there is already too much interest in parties as a vehicle for ideas.
Tuned-in tots
According to the 1,065 parents surveyed for the national study “Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers,” a quarter of children under 2 have televisions in their bedrooms. Two-thirds of kids under 2 use some kind of screen media (computer, DVD, television) on a typical day, for an average of about two hours a day. And for children under the age of 6, the average of two hours a day spent with screen media is more than three times the amount of time they spend reading or being read to.
For the full story, click here.
And here is a whack at Teletubbies:
“When children watch television, they are being marketed to,” he said. ” ‘Teletubbies’ was targeted to 1-year-old children, when the purpose was to market those toys and it was effective. They sold a lot of toys. . . . We are making children consumers at age 1. I don’t know what’s educational about it. They are walking around going ‘ooh-ooh, ugh-ugh,’ and they talk like babies.”
My take: I am from an older generation (41!), and I love books far more than electronic media. So part of me is sad to read this. More realistically, I realize that the next generation will need significant computer skills, and that such skills will bring great benefits to the world. So I don’t see the harm in this, provided that electronic media become a complement to time spent with grown-ups, not a substitute for such time.