If we spent more on early education, we could save a fortune on policing

MY heart has gone out this week to all those thousands of young people doing their Leaving and Junior Certs in some of the most glorious weather we’ve had for years.

Here’s a statistic that ought to have a significant effect on the exams they are doing. It might not be immediately obvious, but if you bear with me all will become clear.

Every police officer appointed in a large US city costs $80,000 a year. But he or she saves about $200,000 in the cost of crime. So they must be good value for money.

But look at this. For every $15,000 of direct input into education, you get ultimately the same result — a $200,000 reduction in the cost of crime. It is cheaper and more effective to invest in young people through education than it is to train policemen in fighting crime.

These were the results of two contrasting studies quoted by Prof Jim Heckman, an American economist, in a lecture he gave in Dublin the other night.

In 2000 he shared the Nobel Prize for Economics. The citation attached to his prize back then said that it had been awarded to him “for his development of theory and methods for analysing selective samples”, and the Nobel lecture he gave was entitled Microdata, Heterogeneity and the Evaluation of Public Policy.

I’m kind of glad I wasn’t there the night he delivered his Nobel lecture because when I tried to read it on the web, I found it difficult to understand a word.

But when he spoke in UCD last Thursday night, he used plain, simple English to establish a powerful point.

Why should society invest in disadvantaged young children, he asked. The traditional argument for doing so is based on grounds of fairness and social justice, an argument based on considerations of equality and equity.

But he said (and remember this is an economist speaking), there is another argument. It’s an economically efficient thing to do. The gains from investing in young people to help them break down the barriers caused by disadvantage are huge, and they can be measured.

He went on to say it is a rare enough public policy that promotes fairness and greater equality while at the same time promoting productivity in the economy and in society as a whole. But that’s what investing in young people does. He said that early interventions for children who live with disadvantage promote schooling and education, raise the quality of the workforce, enhance the productivity of schools and reduce crime, teenage pregnancy and welfare dependency. The same early interventions raise earnings throughout life and promote social attachment — and therefore stable and more peaceful communities.

These are fairly startling claims. If we were to take them seriously, one of the things we’d be tempted to do is turn our entire educational system upside down.

For generations in Ireland we have invested more in third-level education than in second-level, more in second-level than in primary, and almost nothing at all in early, pre-school education.

And yet Prof Heckman makes the point, and does so convincingly, that in economic terms the greatest rate of return is from every penny invested in the youngest people of all. In fact, his work demonstrates that the most useful investment we can make is in pre-school education.

And it’s not just about teaching children to start learning things off by heart at a younger age. Look at the results of one study, well-known among educationalists. This was carried out in US in the early 1960s, and is known as the Perry Pre-school Programme.

It was an intensive pre-school programme offered to a group of disadvantaged black kids in Michigan. Every day the kids got two-and-a-half hours of teaching they wouldn’t have got otherwise, and a teacher visited their home once a week for 90 minutes. The length of each pre-school year was 30 weeks. On that basis, these kids got around 420 hours of pre-school education. For almost the next 40 years, they were compared with a group from the same background who hadn’t had any pre-school education. A number of remarkable findings emerged.

Between the ages of three and five, the Perry kids experienced a major jump in intellectual development, to the point where they were far ahead of the other kids. That development balanced out, though, around the age of 10.

THE Perry kids and the control group kids by then were scoring pretty much the same on IQ tests. But by the time both groups reached the age of 40, there were other major differences between them The Perry kids were far more likely to be in work, to be earning a decent wage and to own their own homes. They were far less likely to have spent any time on welfare as adults, and significantly less likely to have spent time in jail.

So, even though the impact of the Perry programme on IQ wasn’t particularly dramatic, its impact on a wide range of other skills — perhaps qualities would be a better word — had major long-term and positive effects. The experts call these “non-cognitive skills” — determination and persistence, imagination, the ability to analyse and criticise, a sense of belonging. They make a difference to a child, and it’s a difference that lasts forever.

Of course, in our education system, just as in education systems around the world, a higher premium is still placed on the cognitive skills — the very skills that, by and large, the Leaving Cert was designed to promote and test.

Little or no value, in an educational sense, is placed on the non-cognitive skills. And yet they are the skills that produce entrepreneurs, that allow creativity to flourish, and that enable people to break down the barriers that disadvantage and poverty can produce.

No-one would argue, of course, that we should ignore the value of learning, and do away with the Leaving and Junior Cert (well, perhaps a few students who are suffering right now would argue with that). But there is an unanswerable case for investing in early years’ education, especially in communities that have suffered generations of disadvantage. Not just a case based on justice, but a hard-nosed economic argument. It’s the best way to break the cycle of poverty and build real opportunity.

Prof Heckman talked about another cycle the other night: skill leads to more skill and learning to more learning. And it is the case that children from advantaged backgrounds usually receive a lot of early investment in their futures, while children from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t.

The gap that is created then is impossible to bridge. On the other hand, if we could equalise the investment more, we would narrow the gap forever. It’s in our own interests to do it because the elimination of disadvantage now is repaid many times in all sorts of ways in the future.

Why pay a policeman when education achieves the same results for much less cost?