HEAD STARTS

The intergenerational mobility of children is tightly linked to the neighborhoods in which they grow up. A child born in the bottom half of the income distribution in the United States will on average reach the forty-sixth percentile of income if he grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, but only the thirty-sixth percentile if he happened to be from Charlotte, North Carolina.

In 1994, the US department of Housing and Urban Development launched a program called Moving to Opportunity (MTO) that offered public housing residents the opportunity to participate in a lottery giving them the chance to move from high-poverty housing projects to lower-poverty neighborhoods. About half of the families who won the vouchers took advantage of it, and those who did ended up in much less poor neighborhoods.

A team of researchers was able to follow winners and losers of the voucher lottery to see if anything changed as a result. The early results for children were somewhat disappointing: while girls were in a better mental state and did better in school, the same was not true of boys.⁶⁵ However, in the longer term, some twenty-odd years after the initial lottery, large differences in their life outcomes were evident. Young adults whose parents won the vouchers earned $1,624 more per year than those whose parents did not. They were more likely to have gone to college, they lived in better neighborhoods, and the girls were less likely to be single mothers. Some of these effects will therefore likely transmit to the next generation as well.⁶⁶

What explains why some neighborhoods are “better” than others for mobility? Researchers are far from settling this, but there are clearly features of the environment that seem to be correlated with higher mobility, including most importantly the quality of schools.

Thanks to decades of research on education, we know a fair amount about what can be done to improve learning outcomes. In 2017, a study summarized 196 randomized studies conducted in developed economies on interventions (both in schools and with parents) to improve school achievement.⁶⁸ While there was a wide variation in how effective these interventions were, a good preschool education and intensive tutoring in schools for disadvantaged children seemed to work best. Some children have a higher chance of falling behind grade level and then getting totally lost; preparing them ahead of time in preschool, and then being ready to identify and address any major gaps in their learning before they become too large, stops it from happening. This is entirely consistent with what we have found in our own work in developing countries.⁶⁹

There is also evidence that short-term gains in school outcomes translate into long-term differences in opportunities. For example, an RCT in Tennessee that cut class sizes from 20–25 to 12–17 led to an increase in test scores in the short run and a higher chance of going to college later on. Students assigned to small classes had better lives later on, as measured by home ownership, their savings, their marital status, and the neighborhood they lived in.⁷⁰ High-dosage tutoring and small class sizes require staff, which would provide employment as well as helping kids throughout their school career.

The constraint in the United States comes from the local funding of education. This has the consequence that the places in the most desperate need of good public education have the least money to pay for it. A substantial financial effort could make a big difference. More generally, one consequence of the low levels of government funding in the US is that pre-kindergarten education is not federally subsidized, and as a result only 28 percent of children attend some sort of subsidized pre-K program in the United States,⁷¹ in contrast with France, say, where pre-K is subsidized, attendance has been near universal for years,⁷² and it was recently made mandatory.

The original evidence in support of pre-K programs came from some early randomized controlled trials that found large effects of high-quality preschool interventions both in the short and long term, leading Nobel Prize–winner James Heckman to advertise them as the best solution to reduce inequality.⁷³ However, some of these experiments were tiny, making it possible to ensure the programs were run exactly as they should be.

Two larger RCTs evaluating more realistic “at scale” pre-K programs (the national Head Start program and the Tennessee pre-K experiment) have been more disappointing; both of them found effects in the short run, but the effects on test scores faded or were even reversed after a few years.⁷⁴ This has led many to conclude pre-K programs are overrated.

But in fact a key finding of the national Head Start study is that the effectiveness of Head Start seems to vary tremendously with the quality of the program. In particular, programs that run for the full day are more effective than half-day programs, and those that include home visits and other forms of engagement with parents are also more effective. There is also separate evidence from RCTs in both the United States and other countries of the effectiveness of home visits, during which preschool teachers or social workers work with parents to show them how to play with their children.⁷⁵

The general takeaway right now is that there needs to be more research so we know exactly what works in early childhood. But what we do know suggests resources matter; when Head Start was scaled up, many centers tried to reduce costs by cutting services, making them ineffective. Maintaining quality is crucial and has the added advantage of offering a massive expansion of what would surely be attractive jobs for many people, especially if they were adequately paid. These jobs would be both rewarding and impossible to robotize (one cannot really imagine a robot visiting parents at home).

Equally importantly, it seems possible to train someone to be an effective pre-K teacher cheaply and fairly quickly, as long as there are the necessary materials to support them. In India, we worked with Elizabeth Spelke, a psychology professor at Harvard, to create a preschool math curriculum involving games that build on the intuitive knowledge of mathematics to prepare those who have not yet learned to read or write or even count for primary school. This was evaluated in an RCT in several hundred preschools in the slums of Delhi.⁷⁶ Liz was initially horrified by the conditions in Delhi—the tiny porches overcrowded with students of various ages and the teachers’ low level of training, many of whom had barely completed high school. It was a far cry from the conditions in her lab at Harvard. But it turns out those teachers, with one week’s worth of training and good materials, were able to sustain the slum children’s attention, who played math games for several weeks, progressing through the games fast and with gusto, learning a good deal of math in the process.

Inadequate access to childcare is also one of the most severe disadvantages faced by both married and single low-income women in the United States. The lack of subsidized high-quality full-day care means they either do not work (since childcare often costs almost as much as they would make) or have to take the best available job close to family (close to their mothers, in particular) to get help with childcare. Women bear a substantial “child penalty” in the labor market, which is responsible for a large fraction of the remaining gender gap in earnings in advanced economies.⁷⁷ Even in progressive Denmark, while there is almost no difference in the earnings of men and women before childbirth, the arrival of a child creates a gender gap in earnings of around 20 percent in the long run. Women start falling behind men in terms of their occupational rank and their probability of becoming managers right after the birth of their first child.

Elder care is another area with tremendous scope for expansion, since the United States has very little in-home care of the elderly and very few publicly funded old-people’s homes. Denmark and Sweden, in contrast, spend 2 percent of GDP on elder care.⁷⁹ A centralized e-health database where patient records are stored electronically helps hospitals and local authorities collaborate. All eighty-year-olds (not just the poor) are entitled to home visits and home help, and all widowed over-sixty-fives are monitored to see if they need help. Older people also get money for necessary improvements to make their homes safer. Those who need continuous care usually end up in publicly run nursing homes, paid for out of the public pension they are entitled to.

Working with the elderly can be challenging, and in the United States these jobs pay very little; in other words, they are not very attractive. But that again could change. We need to provide the money to hire enough people, train them adequately, ensure they have enough time to spend with each person, and pay them well enough to make them proud of the work they do.