Pondering Checker 3: Is Parent-Change “Beyond Reach” of Policy?
Posted: January 9th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 7 Comments »
In his essay examining 8 barriers to kids getting a much better education, Checker describes parenting concerns as “plenty real, but largely beyond the reach of public policy.”
I wonder.
(Note: Checker enthusiastically supports parents choosing schools, as do I. This is about somehow changing the day-to-day behaviors of parents).
Fascinating $10 million experiment that’s underway:
John List, a University of Chicago economics professor, strides through the Griffin Early Childhood Center chatting with teachers, complimenting girls on their braids and hollering out the window.
He acts like it’s his school, and in many ways, it is. The preschool in the low-income suburb of Chicago Heights is the centerpiece of one of the largest field experiments ever conducted in economics, and it’s List’s brainchild.
With $10 million from hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin, List will track the results of more than 600 students– including 150 at this school. His goal is to find out whether investing in teachers or, alternatively, in parents, leads to more gains in kids’ educational performance…
The design:
Local families with kids 3 to 5 years old were encouraged to enter a lottery and were randomly sorted into three groups.
Students selected to attend the Griffin school are enrolled in the free, all-day preschool. Children in another group aren’t enrolled in the school, while their guardians take courses at a “parenting academy” and receive cash or scholarships valued at up to $7,000 annually as a reward.
List makes this argument:
List says. “We have too many eggs in the kid basket,” says List, himself a father of five. “We need to spend much more time and many more resources on helping parents.”
Another 300 kids are a control group, get nothing.
What do you predict?
The thing is, what we’re testing here is List’s particular intervention on parents, the parent academy executed by certain individuals, etc. I.e., his particular Chicago effort may fail, and yet interventions that help people parent better may still be within reach.
Back in the early part of the 20th century, cancer was treated by surgery and radiation. Giving people poisons called “chemotherapy” was not something that anyone considered. Then once we decided that was a good idea, we tried (and still try) lots of chemo trials.
So I agree with List. We have $700 billion a year in the “kids basket,” and a tiny amount — depending on how you classify it — in the “parent basket.” That’s just not a good allocation of eggs.
We need many experiments in helping people to change their parent behavior, entirely on a voluntary basis (and perhaps never delivered by gov’t — too coercive — but by nonprofits, forprofits, churches, etc).
Exactly how is delivery by the goverment more coercive than by private groups — particularly churches? Especially if funding is public.
Fair question Tom. I’m just thinking the same approach to what I’d like to see in education (gov’t funded, but with many options) and what we already see in Medicare (gov’t funded, with many options).
I just added that as afterthought….my main musing is wondering about whether some public monies we spend on kids might be shifted to parents.
Isn’t Harlem Children’s Zone doing some of this work? Is anyone studying the impacts?
What changes in parents would help their students in schools? How would one help make those changes?
I can think of a couple that might have a big impact, but that policy might not be capable of changing:
1) Economics – so many of the families we work with struggle to make ends meet even with multiple earners or multiple jobs. Economic struggles impact parents’ ability to give more time, energy, attention to their kids.
2) Mistrust of schools and/or lack of positive view of schools – often because of their own experiences when they were kids.
I think one of the biggest challenges in this arena is that parents WANT to do best by their kids, and often will agree with the prescription (though, of course there is much pushback in this arena as well, and often of good reason), but there are barriers in place that make those changes difficult to make.
Here’s an example. The American Pediatrics Association says that kids should get no TV or screen time before the age of two. However, I saw a number recently that said that half (or some other crazy proportion) of low income kids under 2 have a TV in their rooms. Do you think those families would willingly try to remove the TVs from their home (when they are, in many homes, likely on the in background a lot of the time and/or are used for babysitting?) And that seems like an easy thing to study.
HCZ, good question.
They found no gain associated with the “wraparound services” which include Parent Academy.
HCZ kids who went to the charter school made some nice gains. It didn’t matter if they got the parent services or not. The HCZ charter gains were smaller than those of, say, Uncommon.
Yep, MathTeacher, agreed. You and I know, as dads of young kids, how much “help” we get.
Just the notion of solo parenting exhausts me. I’d totally park my kids in front of the TV to survive.
But there are barriers to other “hard” changes too, and sometimes they change.
Put it this way. Which is easier. Getting a 10 year old who never did an iota of work in school to suddenly stick with it and be focused for 6 or 7 good hours? Or getting a 20-year-old mom to find two 20-minute sessions per day to read to Junior on top of everything else going on?
Both are hard. You and I have seen a lot of the first one. It doesn’t strike me as implausible to imagine lots of the second one.
Mike,
Re HCZ, I’m not so sure about the wraparound services having no effect. I think Fryer and others have interpreted the finding that both HCZ residents and non-HCZ residents who attend the Promise Academy had similar achievement games to mean that the wraparound services must not be the driver of the improvement. The assumption is that the non-HCZ residing students did not receive any of the wraparound services, but I believe Geoffrey Canada has said this isn’t true. Non-HCZ students were eligible for and did receive some of the services–maybe not the prenatal and early childhood stuff, but the services available for school age children.
Mike,
Do you know Jimmy Kim who is on the faculty Harvard. We were classmates. He’s doing a large scale I3-funded randomized experiment of Project Reads. From GSE press release “For the project, third to fifth graders from the selected schools will be given books that match their interests and reading level, which is determined through computer algorithms. Parents and teachers will be trained to provide support, such as reading aloud with the children and teaching good comprehension techniques. In previous experiments with Project READS in California, Kim and his team found that comprehension strategies played a key role in enhancing children’s reading ability.” Sound like an example of a economical intervention that engages parents and helps battle summer learning loss.