>> YOSHIKAWA: It is not possible to think about birth-to-five programs without thinking about the primary caregivers in children’s lives.
And the kinds of interactions between caregivers and infants, between caregivers and toddlers, and then between caregivers and preschoolers, not only in home environments,
but in center-based environments, in the foster care system, in interactions in the welfare system, that it all boils down to relationships.
>> BROOKS-GUNN: We have been able to demonstrate that some programs are effective in changing the trajectories that children have,
or, if you want, that help children become more successful later in life.
>> YOSHIKAWA The value of examining the evaluation science is that you learn which are the programs that are more likely to succeed.
So our goal is to then help states make the smart decisions about how to invest in particular programs, and to invest in the programs
that are effective, and guide them away from the programs, or the kinds of programs, that we think are not effective.
>> MAGNUSON: One of the more frustrating things is seeing money being spent on programs that don’t work because,
to me, that means that there’s a kid that needs services that’s not getting them.
And I think the appreciation that we have a way of sort of distinguishing what works and doesn’t work, and that can be used to
reach the kids that need to be reached and provide them with services that will make a difference.
>> YOSHIKAWA: Let’s take the example of preschool education.
Certain kinds of preschool have been shown to have the strongest positive impacts on kids’ learning, their early language development, and their early social development.
And these preschool programs, the hundreds of studies in this area show us that there are four or five effectiveness factors that make a difference.
So these programs have generally smaller overall class sizes, high proportions of adults per child, warm and responsive caregiving that the
caregivers are providing, and language-rich environments so that the teachers are not just reading books to children, but reading books with children.
And, finally, these preschools have to have a certain level of physical safety in the building.
I wanted to talk a little bit about three kinds of programs and populations to think about when you’re thinking about investments in kids' early learning and development.
The first is to think about what are the policies and programs that will support the development of all children, no matter what their backgrounds.
Yeah, so we find that there are three kinds of programs. One type of program that really should be available to all children, no matter what their background, some
interventions that target children who are broadly at risk, such as children in poverty, and then the kinds of very targeted programs for children who are experiencing toxic stress.
>> MAGNUSON: As Jim Heckman likes to say, and economists, skills beget skills. So we have a sense if we’ve at least made that movement,
both in terms of behavioral skills and more academic-oriented skills, if we’ve been able to move those skills, improve those skills, there’s a pretty good
chance that down the road, those kids will be doing better.
The rates of return are generally higher in the early years of life, and that is because of the cumulative impact of brain architecture and the
higher cost of remediating the kind of long-term effects of toxic stress, for example on the immune system, on brain architecture, on neural functioning.
When you think about benefits from a program, you can think about the benefits to the actual participants in the program,
and then more broadly to society, to taxpayers, so where there are additional benefits that society reaped.
And so it turns out the returns to society far outweighed the returns to just the participants in the program, and these include reduced welfare,
child maltreatment and injury costs, and increased tax revenue from the earnings.
And, in fact, the cost-benefit studies that have been conducted, that have followed children from very high-quality preschools into adulthood, show
that the payoff isn't just in areas like school achievement or grade retention, but also in reduced crime.
And when you factor in reduced crime, those are reductions to the taxpayer because of the amount of money that
incarceration costs, that serious juvenile delinquency costs, that adult crime costs.