Must-Read: Ross Douthat’s citations here are to journalist Joe Klein’s 2011 unprofessional trashing of Head Start and Republican Tennessee political Kevin Huffman, plus Baker, Gruber, and Milligan (2008) and Lipsey, Farran, and Hofer (2015). These are not the four citations that anybody would choose who is not actively attempting to misrepresent the state of knowledge about early childhood education programs.
This is one of the many, many things that makes me think that the New York Times does not have a long-run future. Its only possible edge is to develop a reputation as a disinterested information intermediary as the legacy position it had gained as a result of its role as central place for upper-class New York print ads ebbs. Things like this make developing such a reputation materially harder.
Smart New York Times executives would kill the op-ed page and give its budget and its newshole to David Leonhardt to fill, and then back off and let him do his thing. But these are the executives who let Nate Silver walk at least in part because of the political staff. As Nate said:
This guy Jim Rutenberg…. Jim Rutenberg and I were colleagues at the New York Times in 2012 when 538 was part of the New York Times. They were incredibly hostile and incredibly unhelpful to 538, particularly when 538 tried to do things that blended reporting with kind of more classic techniques of data journalism…. When we went to New Hampshire… the New York Times political desk is literally giving us the cold shoulder like it’s some high school lunchroom…. We filed the story pointing out… that Rick Santorum had probably won the Iowa Caucus, a story that involved a combination of data work and reporting…. They were apoplectic because their Romney sources were upset…. A story that… got things totally right pissed them off because they didn’t get the scoop and it went against what their sources wanted…
But the executives aren’t that smart…
Heather Boushey protests about the lack of journalistic quality control here:
: Investing in Early Childhood Education Is Good for Children and Good for the Economy: “Ross Douthat used his New York Times column to express frustration that hoping for a “substantive debate about domestic policy” in this presidential election year is “delusional”…
…He imagines a scene from a future debate between… Hillary Clinton and… Donald Trump… over the benefits of early childhood education. Douthat even added several hyperlinks… links that alas fall short on revealing where the evidence actually stands today….
Randomized control trials that follow children from pre-school through adulthood… children who participate… do better in school, are more likely to attend and graduate college, and are less likely to smoke, use drugs, be on welfare, or become teenage mothers… the Carolina Abecedarian Study… the Milwaukee Project… Project STAR… Raj Chetty and his co-authors find that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes at age 27, such as college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. Like in the Perry Preschool/High Scope study, in Project STAR, researchers found that while the cognitive effects on test scores fade as a child ages, the non-cognitive effects did not. Of course, not every study found such results… the Early Training Project….
Overall, though, the evidence points to the conclusion that investing in early childhood is important for future outcomes both for the children themselves and our economy more generally. If columnists provide hyperlinks to real-life academic studies to buttress fantasy debates between the two presidential candidates, they should at least point to the best studies available. In this case, the preponderance of evidence shows that early childhood education works for the children, their families, and the broader U.S. economy.