Interventions That Work
An Interview with Economist Greg Duncan
Abstract: Studies indicate investments in social programs that raise a poor working mother’s income may be especially beneficial to her children when they are of preschool age. Other studies show that high-quality preschool education interventions can have long-term beneficial impacts on school dropout, lifetime earnings and incarceration rates for teenagers and young adults. Early interventions thus have the potential to produce substantial economic gains for society.
Council Member Greg Duncan is an economist and the Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy and Faculty Associate in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He directed the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research from 2000 to 2003, and directed the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data collection project at the University of Michigan. His research interests include the impacts of poverty, neighborhood conditions and welfare reform on children’s development. He is a member of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Family and Child Well-Being Research Network, and the MacArthur Foundation’s Network on Family and the Economy. He also was a member of the Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development for the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.
Based on the newest child development and economics research, is America doing enough to enable children to succeed in school?
No. The situation is bad and may be getting worse. Fewer adolescents finish high school now than was the case 20 years ago, despite our increasing need for highly skilled workers. We often ignore one of the more effective ways to assist kids, and that is through economic intervention for parents. Programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) put more income into the hands of low-income families. Then the question becomes: Can an economic boost improve school achievement of children in these families? The answer appears to be: most definitely.
To help illustrate solutions, I’m writing a book about the New Hope demonstration program, implemented from 1994 through 1998 in Milwaukee. It guaranteed income above the poverty level to people who were willing to work at least 30 hours a week. A community-based organization developed and ran the program with the help of Milwaukee’s business elite. There was rigorous assessment to determine the program’s effectiveness.
More than 1,300 applicants applied for the New Hope program. Each applicant was randomly assigned to either a control group or the New Hope program. If they were assigned to New Hope, they were eligible for services and benefits for three years, including a monthly earnings supplement, subsidized childcare and health insurance, all conditional on working 30 or more weekly hours. Differences that emerged between the two groups were tabulated. The New Hope program’s benefits had a very positive effect, especially on the boys. Teachers reported New Hope boys’ achievement levels were quite a bit higher than boys in the control group; their behavior was better as well. The boys themselves reported higher aspirations for attending and graduating from college. A set of other experiments, all of which shared New Hope’s focus on making work pay, also had beneficial impacts on children’s achievement levels.
That sounds encouraging.
It is very encouraging. In the last ten years, welfare reform has brought a lot of single mothers into the labor force, but the reforms in most states really haven’t done very much to boost family income levels. The paycheck has helped, but for a lot of women, the welfare check is reduced as the paycheck increases. New Hope and other programs offered a chance to test a framework that encouraged work at the same time that it increased a family’s real income.A synthesis of results across studies has shown that the effects of welfare and work policies on children differ substantially depending upon the age of the child and whether total household income rises as mothers enter the workforce. Children who benefited most from a rise in total household income were the kids three, four and five years old who were making the transition into school. The group carrying out these studies of welfare experiments is MDRC [known before a 2003 name change as Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation], a nonprofit, nonpartisan social policy research organization.
We know any number of circumstances affect children throughout childhood. Why do you think an investment in early childhood development is so important?
The Council’s Working Paper I, “Young Children Develop in an Environment of Relationships,” explains how the first year of life is a fundamentally important one for parent-infant bonding. This is when a child develops a secure set of relationships with caregivers. That’s vital in a person’s life. There are ways to provide for cognitive enrichment beyond those first years, including center-based care, for example, which seems to promote early achievement in the preschool period—kids who are three, four, and five years old. Once a child moves from infant to toddler stage and beyond, the family starts to become less important and peers obviously become more important. When the child starts school, that environment becomes more important; the neighborhood environment becomes more important. You can think of this as a nested set of influences, beginning with the family and moving out to the peers and so on.
Research also shows us how important it is to think about infants as being very different from toddlers and preschoolers, and those groups very different from elementary-school kids and adolescents. Each of those periods is characterized by different capabilities, obviously, but there also are differences in the ways family, peer and school environments influence them. Public policy that may make sense for a four-year-old, such as an education-focused intervention program, may not make sense for an infant or toddler. If you look over the pattern of effects on children of different ages from society’s viewpoint, it appears that early interventions tend to be especially desirable in terms of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. There are certainly examples of effective programs with adolescents, but early intervention programs are more consistently effective.
From your perspective as an economist, what’s the best investment we can make in children’s education?
We have evidence from several well-designed, well-evaluated studies that show interventions during the preschool period can result in improved achievement in children’s later years. These early investments are complemented by a decent school experience. For example, look at the High/Scope Education Research Foundation’s Perry Preschool Project, initiated in 1962 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. That study, which ran until 1967, randomly divided 123 African-American children ages three and four into two groups: half received a high-quality preschool program and a comparison group received no preschool program. By age 40, preschool participants had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes and were more likely to have completed high school than those in the control group. Attach an economic value to every time there’s a conviction or a crime committed, and you see benefits that much more than made up for the cost of the program. Some interventions, as can be seen in Perry Preschool, result in measurably improved behavior. In other experimental programs, such as the often-cited Abecedarian project, the improvements are measured more in terms of achievement than behavior. We don’t have enough of these studies, but what we do know is very encouraging.
I can’t say that we, as analysts, know exactly how these intervention processes work, but the evaluation of these programs consisted of well-designed experiments, so we know that something about the program is producing the effect. As an economist, I want to know what kinds of investments are profitable for society. The evidence indicates that a number of policy approaches to improving the economic status of families with preschoolers, and of educating preschoolers directly, provide profitable opportunities to improve the capabilities of our nation’s children.
The interviewer: Dean Stahl is a researcher and writer, and co-author of Abbreviations Dictionary (CRC Press), a desktop reference and one of the most extensive English-language collections of abbreviations. Also the author of Dolphins (Child’s World Inc., 1991), he is a longtime contributor to Pacific Northwest magazine. He worked for several years as an editor at The Seattle Times
For information about commonly used terms in Council publications, see Definitions.