Research

In California, as the ratio of parents to the adult population shrank, and the kids in school less and less resembled middle class youngsters, schools stopped being something for “our” kids and started being something for “their” kids. And when schools became something for “their” kids, then taxpayers became less willing to pay the bills.

The old saw gets it right — kids don’t matter politically because they don’t buy and they don’t vote. They have to speak through their parents. And their parents aren’t politically organized because they have their hands full raising kids. Their grandparents, who do have the time to get engaged, have been organized, but only through AARP, which has a different set of interests in mind. It’s a classic political science maxim that a small concentrated minority beats a large diffuse majority — that’s what’s happening today. 

I’ve been involved with children’s issues from my days in college, when I wrote a senior thesis on the literature of adolescence; through law school, when I looked into constitutional issues surrounding school finance inequities; to my days as founding director of the Harvard Center for Law and Education. But my passion for the concerns of young kids began in 2003, when I took a walk on the beach in Point Reyes with a pediatrician turned academic. He told me about a 40-year-long research study on the lifetime effects of preschool. I read it, and I thought, “This is incredible, there is no research in social science that looks as good as this.”

It was an opportunity to hear from scores of groups that had felt shut out during the Bush Administration. They all had good intentions, but they were all dealing with a particular aspect of a child’s life, not with the whole child. I wondered whether I could develop a policy structure that would be about the needs of children from cradle to college. I traveled around the country on the lookout for good, sustainable, durable systems, not just hothouse programs that could never be replicated.

Until recently, America had the notion that kids were entirely parents’ responsibility until they showed up in first grade. There are still places in our country where kindergarten is not provided, and more places where it is not required. As I wrote in “The Sandbox Investment,” it should be something all children experience.

The classic academic approach would be to say, let’s take some program that has been proven to work in one place and replicate it in, say, 10 other places. But I’m looking for ideas that you can bring to scale in a serious way, especially when you realize the size of the population you’re talking about. We need ideas that are based in evidence and that are affordable, simple in structure and adaptable to local needs.

And we need to be able to build a bigger structure around them, like connecting preschools to public schools, and schools to communities, and parents to schools. We need ideas that can go viral, both among practitioners and among parents. So in researching how to do right by kids, I was quite clear about not focusing on ideas that were inherently not scalable. 

When I’ve looked back, people have described my work as exploring the tension between “community values” on one side, some other value — often the market — on the other side. In the case of universities, it’s the norms and forms of the market, the pressure of dollars on academic decisions. In case of preschool, it’s political powerlessness. In the case of the school system I’m studying, where poor Latino kids are doing so well, it’s community versus a market-driven view of what education should look like.  

My recent focus on young children really stems from my personal experience — if you spend time with preschool kids, as I have, you start loving them and their teachers in a way you do not love college administrators or AIDS bureaucrats. It’s very personally affecting — that’s why I’ve moved away from writing about kids as objects of policy in the abstract to writing about kids in the concrete, the here and now. 

Lots of them! The first one that comes to mind has to do with one preschool teacher, whose amazing lesson on bugs under a microscope is described in “The Sandbox Investment.” A year later, around the time of Hanukkah, I saw her teaching a class on how to make latkes, or potato pancakes. These kids had been reading a great story about an old woman who made the best latkes for her village. Then they did it themselves — they learned all about the potato, the onions, the chopping, the difference between teaspoons and tablespoons, how to grate, what happens when you’re cooking.

I remember walking into an eighth-grade classroom where the students were discussing the “Odyssey.” They’d done great dioramas, scenes from the story. Their teacher, who teaches language and history and literature to these youngsters, was always pushing the students to “prove it.’” He always wanted to know what they were drawing from, and how they knew something. I walked next door and saw some equally brilliant teaching of probability theory. The teacher was using an example these kids could relate to — defects in an auto manufacturing line. What really startled me is that these were special ed classes. It’s not just that those teachers are good special ed or preschool teachers — they’re great teachers.

As I’ve been learning, there are teachers who actually hate kids. They ought to be fired and so should those who aren’t really up to the job. The ratio for firing incompetent teachers ought to be at least as high as it is for doctors who are fired for malpractice. Teachers do need to be held accountable for what happens in their classrooms, and there has to be some measures of progress. But it’s not just test scores that show progress. You need to look at portfolios of the work students produce, you want to talk to their students to see what they know, you want to watch those students working in teams.

And you really want to know something about the kids’ emotional lives and connectedness to others in the class and the community around the school. This is all not just fluff — these are important life skills. Research shows the socio-emotional skills, in particular, make a big difference down the road. A Nobel Prize-winning economist named James Heckman has shown that the kids who wind up in juvie, or wind up on drugs, or wind up pregnant, are the kids who, as 3- and 4-year-olds, had social and emotional problems. 

The main emphasis in policy needs to be helping the teachers we have to do a better job. The vast majority aren’t teachers because there’s a great pension down the road or they work 180 days a year; they’re teachers because it’s an honorable profession, one that makes a difference in the lives of others. They want to do well by kids and they need help to be the best they can become.

I think that my generation has a lot to be accountable for, in terms of what we did not do. Ours is the generation that has vastly widened the wealth gap, which makes a huge difference in terms of the opportunities that youngsters today will have. We also systematically underinvested in education.

My purpose of writing a book like “Kids First” is to suggest that there are things we can do to help sustain smart healthy kids so they can do well economically, have the social skills necessary to succeed, participate in society and live happier lives. I tell my public policy students that they almost need to be schizophrenic — they have to understand that the odds are long that their great new idea is going to make it, but they need to behave as if that’s not the case and carry on with the expectation that they can make a difference.