This article reports on a long-term study of the lasting effects of early childhood education.
The article is misleadingly titled “Project to Improve Poor Children’s Intellect Led to Better Health, Data Shows.”
But the study involved far more than improving young children’s intellect.
“In 1972, researchers in North Carolina started following two groups of babies from poor families. In the first group, the children were given full-time day care up to age 5 that included most of their daily meals, talking, games and other stimulating activities. The other group, aside from baby formula, got nothing. The scientists were testing whether the special treatment would lead to better cognitive abilities in the long run.
Forty-two years later, the researchers found something that they had not expected to see: The group that got care was far healthier, with sharply lower rates of high blood pressure and obesity, and higher levels of so-called good cholesterol.
The study, which was published in the journal Science on Thursday, is part of a growing body of scientific evidence that hardship in early childhood has lifelong health implications. But it goes further than outlining the problem, offering evidence that a particular policy might prevent it.
“This tells us that adversity matters and it does affect adult health,” said James Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who led the data analysis. “But it also shows us that we can do something about it, that poverty is not just a hopeless condition.”
Professor James Heckman, a Nobel-prize winning economist from the University of Chicago, sees the study as evidence that early childhood education does not mean a year of preschool but early nurturing from infancy that enable children to develop as healthy and happy human beings, attending to their skills, capabilities, curiosity, and engagement with others.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is a true revelation of the horrors of “ed reform” at the same time! The author “sees the study as evidence that early childhood education does not mean a year of preschool but early nurturing from infancy that enable children to develop as healthy and happy human beings, attending to their skills, capabilities, curiosity, and engagement with others…” What “ed reform” is doing is ensuring that our nation’s neediest children feel incapable (constant barrage of tests that make them feel like failures), top-down learning policy that turns teachers into automatons and students into data-making machines who lose all autonomy and curiosity about “learning”, and destroys natural engagement with others as students spend all school time prepping for data and creating data by taking the top down assessments and no time playing in the school yard, being creative in the arts room or engaging in team buildng cooperative activity that often comes with PE and after school sports (that have been cut out of the day and after school to prep for testing)…
Moral of story.. what James Heckman found is vital but we cannot assume that happiness and health will continue if suddenly as children become school age, we once again ignore the important aspects of their continued development by following the highly PERVERSE “REFORMS” that are mandated for any schools needing RTTT money!
Some good news in Toledo:
“The early-childhood center is contingent on TPS winning Toledo’s Head Start grant funding. TPS Superintendent Romules Durant said administrators sharing space with a comprehensive early-childhood center was important, because the district has committed to boosting services to children before they reach school age.”
Briefly, the YMCA building was to be sold to a charter school, Horizon Science Academy.
Toledo Public Schools wanted the building for Head Start use. They lost one round when the mayor cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the charter school (I agree with him that he was legally obligated to do this) but the public school came back with a modified plan and now it looks like they’ll get their “early childhood center” which will be more comprehensive than a Head Start program.
IF they get Head Start funding 🙂
Read more at http://www.toledoblade.com/Education/2014/04/14/Toledo-Public-Schools-board-to-discuss-deal-for-YMCA-facility.html#rkRXIwRgU2rVG90B.99
The study did include randomization to treatment and control groups. I’m guessing it could not have been blinded, so effects could have been due to other things than just the treatments, even through the parents getting more involved. But that doesn’t take away from the findings.
What is bothersome is the ethics of what was done (or not done for) to the control kids. Would any of us have allowed our child to be in the control group? And we’re the parents informed of what was was going on? This is, after all, human experimentation.
I do not think that this kind of study could be done today. An alternative program with some selective differences in the kind or the duration of interaction and planned forms of “nurture” would be required to meet standards for human research.
IWhile I understand your point Peter Smyth.. we can also look at it as if the glass were “half full” and that some children who would have definitely been ignored were at least paid attention to and we CAN HOPE that this serves as a loud and clear warning as to what needs to be done for our nation’s poorest now and in the future! I do understand your thinking totally though! Unfortunately “ed reform” has treated our neediest children as one giant experiment on a national scale and Gate’s has even been quoted as saying as such – somethong t the effect of “we will see if these ideas work in about 10 years” as if it were “okay” to implement wide-scale unresearched reforms on an entire nation of needy children- ughh!
I think this study is timely and important. I just couldn’t overlook the ethical issue. I wonder what kind of information they gave to the parents and what permissions were signed.
I teach AP Stats and this will make for great discussion.
I’m with you Peter Smyth, the other children “got nothing”? These were children, not lab rats. Baby formula was a plus I’m sure for the parents but it sounds as if the parents were kept in the dark. It just seems wrong.
How many studies must be done before we figure out or accept that ages 0-5 are the most important in a child’s life. This includes all parts of their physical, social, and cognitive development.
Then you have the response by most budget cutters, that we should cut Pre-K programs to save money. We should be strengthening these programs.
Thank you to someone for pointing out the ethics issue. Seems to me the withholding of healthy meals, stimulation and such from children when we know- and knew back then- how critical those are to health and thriving is highly unethical.
Besides, most of the Western world has known this for decades which is why other nations have more humane democracies.
GASP!
What, they didn’t include a study on the benefits of standardized testing on a child’s early growth and health!
Since the billionaires, Obama and Duncan continue to sing the benefits of standardized testing to achieve a quality education leading to a better life, why not just start testing kids at a much earlier age—for instance, three—then they won’t need a more nutritious diet and a quality early childhood education (after all, that costs too much), because they will grow grow fat, curious and smart from a constant flow of multiple choice questions designed to enhance critical thinking and problem solving skills—sans dedicated teachers who might not go along with the agenda.
Testing is cheaper. That way more money would be available for the next generation of stealth bombers and smarter weapons designed to think for themselves.
After all, we can test hundreds of these three-year olds in the same room with just a few monitors paid poverty wages who would have whips and stun guns (Sold to them by Pearson) to keep the toddlers under control while forcing them to take days of testing that gathers data on how they think that government and marketers may use to sell consumer junk to them after they have money while keeping them pacified.
If a three year old won’t cooperate, they may be removed them from their parents and sent to a privately run prison where they will be taught to conform and do as they are told without complaint or they will never be set free.
Think of all the money saved if testing starting at age three and it achieved the same benefits as this study shows regarding healthier nutrition and early childhood education.
I’m sure that all of the think tanks the Koch brothers have launched would pour out a continues stream of studies—that are never peer reviewed—offering endless evidence of the benefits of testing from age three over a nutritious diet and early childhood education.
And after the state gained control of the children at age three, they could feed them fast food and sodas to help boost profits for the fast-food industry.
Imagine, the Koch brothers and their brethren—for instance, the Walton family—might then be nominated for a Noble Peace Prize for saving mankind and then their model of how a modern world should operate would be extended to the world with help from the most powerful military in the world.
We were students in North Carolina when our son was born in the late 1970s and visited and tried to put him in this very same university-run, very high-quality program (he would have been the only non-African American there). Unfortunately we could not do so because there were no more openings, but what we witnessed opened our eyes as to what good daycare could be — quiet, caring, respectful of the babies as individuals. One thing I will never forget was the sight of four 18-month-old babies pouring their own cereal and milk and sitting at a low table. All learned through imitation — since the power of imitation is so incredibly strong at that age. I think the care-taker ratio was one-to-four or even two-to-four, since these were very young toddlers. The youngest children need an intimate setting and stable relationships with peers as well as care-givers.
Commercially, what passed for daycare in NC at that time was a horror, as we discovered to our cost. There were legal child-to-caregiver ratios (I think one-to-eight), but the centers found ways to disregard these and to have many more kids than were allowed. Babies were brought in sick. Corporal punishment by all caregivers, who were considered in loco parentis, was legal (though not common) at that time – including hitting infants. I don’t know what training was required of caregivers, probably none. After what we saw we were very leery even of baby sitters. I shudder to think what could happen if the child-care of our youngest toddlers and infants were to be handed over to private entrepreneurs.
Harold, your last sentence becomes almost prophetic as we see the push to large-scale pre-K and below. As if the control group for the NC study becomes the new reality. Or worse.
With no oversight, no democratically elected school board to petition, no way for parents to protest, anything could happen to the children and then nothing would happen to those in charge. There would seldom if every be any accountability without going to court and court is out of reach of most Americans who don’t have the money for lawyers. The ACLU is not going to represent millions of American parents who will be mostly unorganized with no idea that the same thing may be happening to thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of children.
In addition, most immigrant Latino parents may never question the authority figures who may be terrorizing their children. And children who live in poverty often don’t have parents who are willing to stand up for them.
Thank you for sharing!
Corporate carpetbaggers and Widget Wonks want us to believe that to educate human beings as actual human beings is not “rigorous” and does not lend itself to “high expectations”.
Due to their ignorance of psychology, human development, the arts, and the humanities they EPICALLY FAIL at tapping into the greatest, most efficacious source of motivation for success and achievement: The Human Spirit.
The core of these little “gifts”, these precious children, must be nurtured. When this is neglected, it can take years to make up for that loss… If it ever can be completely reversed.
Thanks again for the wonderful post!