Early childhood development and social mobility

Barnett, W. Steven and Belfield, Clive R. (2006): Early childhood development and social mobility. Published in: The Future of Children , Vol. 16, No. 2 (October 2006): pp. 73-98.

Abstract

Steven Barnett and Clive Belfield examine the effects of preschool education on social mobility in the United States. They note that under current policy three- and four-year-old children from economically and educationally disadvantaged families have higher preschool attendance rates than other children. But current programs fail to enroll even half of poor three-and four-year olds. Hispanics and children of mothers who drop out of school also participate at relatively low rates. The programs also do little to improve learning and development. Barnett and Belfield point out that preschool programs raise academic skills on average, but do not appear to have notably different effects for different groups of children, and so do not strongly enhance social mobility. In such areas as crime, welfare, and teen parenting, however, preschool seems more able to break links between parental behaviors and child outcomes. Increased investment in preschool, conclude Barnett and Belfield, could raise social mombility. Program expansions targeted to disadvantaged children would help them move up the ladder, as would a more universal set of policies from which disadvantaged children gained disproportionately. Increasing the educational effectiveness of early childhood programs would provide for greater gains in social mobility than increasing participation rates alone. The authors observe that if future expansions of preschool programs end up serving all children, not just the poorest, society as a whole would gain. Benefits would exceed costs and there would be more economic growth, but relative gains for disadvantaged children would be smaller than absolute gains because there would be some (smaller) benefits to other children.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Institution: The Brookings Institution
• Language: English
• Keywords: early childhood education; social mobility; benefit/cost analyses; income disparity; disadvantaged children
• Subjects: I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education and Research Institutions > I28 - Government Policy; H - Public Economics > H3 - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents > H31 - Household; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers

References

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1. Ibid.

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49. W. Steven Barnett and Leonard Masse, “Comparative Benefit-Cost Analysis of the Abecedarian Program and its Policy Implications,” Economics of Education Review, (in press).

50. Garces, Currie, and Thomas, “Longer-Term Effects of Head Start” (see note 15).

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53. See Stacey Dale and Alan Krueger, “Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 98 (2002): 1491-1527. Magnuson and Waldfogel simulate the effects on achievement from expanding ECE programs to clarify how wider access or upgraded preschooling can redress inequities. Expanding enrollments of black and Hispanic children to 80 percent (that is, one-third higher than the rate for white children), the initial gap would close by 4-20 percent [12-52 percent] for black [Hispanic] children. Expanding enrollments to cover all children below the poverty line would reduce the black-white [Hispanic-white] gap by at most 12 percent [16 percent]. In additional simulations, upgrading all types of preschooling has no effect on gaps across ethnic groups; improving the quality of Head Start reduces racial gaps by at most 10 percent [8 percent] for black [Hispanic] children. Katherine Magnuson and Jane Waldfogel, “Early Childhood Education: Effects on Ethnic and Racial Gaps in School Readiness,” Future of Children 15, no. 54. (2005): 169-96.

55. Long-term health effects may be significant. Single motherhood is associated with heightened rates of physical abuse / child neglect and parental income has a strong impact on child health. See Christina Paxson and Jane Waldfogel, “Parental Resources and Child Abuse and Neglect,” American Economic Review 89 (1999): 239-44; Anne Case, Darren Lubotsky, and Christina Paxson, “Economic Status and Health in Childhood: the Origins of the Gradient,” American Economic Review 92 (2003): 1308-34.

56. Peter Gottschalk, “Is the Correlation in Welfare Participation across Generations Spurious?” Journal of Public Economics 63 (2003): 1-25. David Green and William Warburton, “Tightening a Welfare System: the Effects of Benefit Denial on Future Welfare Receipt,” Journal of Public Economics 88 (2004): 1471-93. But the correlation may be muted, as the extent of welfare receipt scarring is debatable: scarring effects appear weak and welfare payments are increasingly becoming time-limited (most new EITC claimant families lose eligibility within two years).

57. Chris Lackey, “Violent Family Heritage, the Transition to Adulthood, and Later Partner Violence,” Journal of Family Issues 24 (2003): 74-98.

58. Sandra Stith and others, “The Intergenerational Transmission of Spouse Abuse: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62 (2000): 640-54; Jenny Williams and Robin Sickles, “An Analysis of the Crime as Work Model: Evidence from the 1958 Philadelphia Birth Cohort Study,” Journal of Human Resources 37 (2002): 479-509.

59. Rebecca Maynard, “The Costs of Adolescent Childbearing,” in Kids Having Kids: Economic Costs and Social Consequences of Teen Pregnancy, edited by Rebecca Maynard (Washington: Urban Institute Press, 1996).

60. Preschooling does not have a strong effect on “steady-state” family size. It delays or reduces childbearing, by raising the opportunity cost of time spent on child care and by lowering the probability of unplanned parenthood; but it raises childbearing, because of its association with higher incomes. Typically, the opportunity cost and planning effects are slightly greater than the income effect.

6 . Terrie Moffitt, “Adolescence-Limited and Life-Course-Persistent Antisocial Behavior – A Developmental Taxonomy,” Psychological Review 100 (1993): 674-701. Casey Mulligan, “Galton Versus the Human Capital Approach to Inheritance,” Journal of Political Economy 107 (1999): s184-s224.

62. They also adversely influence offspring test scores: being a teen mother at birth reduces the children’s test scores at age six by 0.07 effect sizes; independently, a two-parent family is associated with test scores that are 0.1 effect size higher. See Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt, “Understanding the Black–White Test Score Gap in the First Two Years of School,” Review of Economics and Statistics 86 (2004): 447-64.

63. Robert Haveman, Barbara Wolfe, and Elaine Peterson, “Children of Early Childbearers as Young Adults,” in Kids Having Kids: Economic Costs and Social Consequences of Teen Pregnancy, edited by Rebecca Maynard (Washington: Urban Institute Press, 1996). Christian Belzil and Jorgen Hansen, “Structural Estimates of the Intergenerational Education Correlation,” Journal of Applied Econometrics 18 (2003): 679-96.

64. Heather Antecol and Kelly Bedard, “Does Single Parenthood Increase the Probability of Teenage Promiscuity, Substance Abuse, and Crime?” Working Paper, University of California, (http://econ.ucsb.edu/~kelly/youth.pdf); Cesar Rebellon, “Reconsidering the Broken Homes/Delinquency Relationship and Exploring its Mediating Mechanism(s),” Criminology 40 (2002): 103-35; Jennifer Hunt, “Teen Births Keep American Crime High,” Working Paper 9632 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2003).

65. Based on sixteen studies of intergenerational earnings correlations: an increase in parental income of $1,000 raises offspring income by approximately $340. See Mulligan, “Galton versus the Human Capital Approach” (see note 42). The intergenerational earnings elasticity between fathers and sons is 0.4, that is, if father’s earnings are 10 percent above the average for his generation, then the son’s earnings will be 4 percent higher than the average for his own generation. See Gary Solon, “Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States,” in Handbook of Labor Economics: Volume 3A, edited by Orley Ashenfelter and David Card (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1999).

66. Robert Haveman and Barbara Wolfe, “The Determinants of Children’s Attainment: a Review of Methods and Findings,” Journal of Economic Literature 33 (1995): 1829-77.

67. See Mulligan, “Galton and the Human Capital Approach” (see note 42). Income effects on offspring attainment are similarly strong; and a two-parent family is associated with higher attainment by 0.43 years; Belzil and Hansen, “Structural Estimates” (see note 44).

68. Perry Preschool program participants averaged 2.4 children by age forty-two, and there is data on whether the first or second child has ever been arrested, repeated a grade, or been on welfare, and if the child is currently employed. There is no clear evidence of offspring advantages across these dimensions. However, sample sizes are very small.

69. Diego Restuccia and Carlos Urrutia, “Intergenerational Persistence of Earnings: The Role of Early and College Education,” American Economic Review 94 (2004): 1354-78.

70. This result accords with other research that finds investments in youth to be less efficient than investments in young children. See Steve Cameron and James Heckman, “The Dynamics of Educational Attainment for Black, Hispanic, and White Males,” Journal of Political Economy 109 (2001): 455-99. Our primary focus is on the efficacy of early investments rather than on their efficacy relative to other interventions.

7 . Families will have to invest resources, even if provision is publicly provided. Even with zero fees, some families do not enroll, so presumably the costs and inconvenience of enrollment must outweigh the benefits. It is possible that there is an informational problem: families do not appreciate the benefits of preschooling. However, the more likely explanation is that pre-K is not convenient for many families or that even relatively small direct expenses (such as transportation) are too much. 72. Janet Currie and Matthew Neidell, “Getting Inside the ‘Black Box’ of Head Start Quality: What Matters and What Doesn’t,” Economics of Education Review, forthcoming, 2006.

73. W. Steven Barnett and others, The State of Preschool: 2004 State Preschool Yearbook (New Brunswick, N.J.: NIEER, 2005).

74. W. Steven Barnett, “Maximizing Returns from Prekindergarten Education,” Education and Economic Development, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (November 2004). (http://www.clevelandfed.org/Research/EdConf2004/Nov/PapersPresntns.cfm)