Along these lines...
If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved. And that would be a miracle.
I work in family/education research, and can tell you that there is a huge pay-off when we invest in birth to 3 education and intervention. It's expensive, though, so no one wants to do it. Still, it's much, much better to get these kids started off on the right foot than to try to fix it later. No one gets this or at least no one WANTS to get it.
Geoffrey Canada, whose programs have been incredibly successful with poor kids in Harlem, starts before birth. You can read ablout it here:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/schoolhouse/archive/2008/09/12/the-zone.aspxA Brookings study "The Harlem Children's Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education"
http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2010/0720_hcz_whitehurst.aspx reaches more pessimistic conclusions about early intervention in general and the Harlem Children's Zone in particular:
"There is no compelling evidence that investments in parenting classes, health services, nutritional programs, and community improvement in general have appreciable effects on student achievement in schools in the U.S. Indeed there is considerable evidence in addition to the results from the present study that questions the return on such investments for academic achievement. For example, the Moving to Opportunity study, a large scale randomized trial that compared the school outcomes of students from poor families who did or did not receive a voucher to move to a better neighborhood, found no impact of better neighborhoods on student academic achievement.[x] The Nurse-Family Partnership, a highly regarded program in which experienced nurses visit low-income expectant mothers during their first pregnancy and the first two years of their children�s lives to teach parenting and life skills, does not have an impact on children�s reading and mathematics test scores.[xi] Head Start, the federal early childhood program, differs from other preschool programs in its inclusion of health, nutrition, and family supports. Children from families enrolled in Head Start do no better academically in early elementary school than similar children whose parents enroll them in preschool programs that do not include these broader services.[xii] Even Start, a federal program that combines early childhood education with educational services for parents on the theory that better educated parents produce better educated kids, generates no measureable impact on the academic achievement of children.[xiii]
This is not to suggest that factors such as parental education and income, family structure, parental employment, exposure to crime, and child health are not related to student achievement. Such statistical associations are at the empirical heart of the Broader, Bolder claims. However, evidence, for example, that single parenthood is negatively associated with children�s academic achievement is no evidence at all that investment in a community service that intends to keep parents together will succeed in doing so, much less have a cascading positive impact on the academic achievement of children in families that are served by the marital counseling program. Per our recitation of findings from studies of Moving to Opportunity, Head Start, et al., efforts to affect achievement in school through broad interventions outside of school have little evidence of success."
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I don't wish to be taxed still more for still more social services, preferring to spend MY money on MY children. The party controlling the House is sympathetic to this viewpoint.
