Tuesday Open Thread

I am desperately trying to catch up on a number of stories. (This one is long but I found it fascinating so get something cool to drink.) One that caught my eye was this one from the NY Times about a study that found was asking this question:

How much do your kindergarten teacher and classmates affect the rest of your life?

The effect was thought to be short-term even for students who had great teachers.

By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not — which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.

There has always been one major caveat, however, to the research on the fade-out effect. It was based mainly on test scores, not on a broader set of measures, like a child’s health or eventual earnings. As Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, says: “We don’t really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes.”

Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.

On Tuesday, Mr. Chetty presented the findings — not yet peer-reviewed — at an academic conference in Cambridge, Mass. They’re fairly explosive.

The study found that yes, some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers and yes, that the effect largely disappeared by junior high (based on test scores). However, there was a kindergarten "legacy".

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.

So why is that? Some guesses include learning skills that follow you in life such as patience, manners, discipline and perseverance.

The crucial problem the study had to solve was the old causation-correlation problem. Are children who do well on kindergarten tests destined to do better in life, based on who they are? Or are their teacher and classmates changing them?

So this study randomly assigned students to a kindergarten class (with a similar mix of socioeconomic) and so would be expected to do about the same. Nope, it didn't happen. Class size apparently did play a small role (hey, big surprise! the classes with 13-17 did better than those with 22-25). And, if there were slightly more kids from a higher than average socioeconomic status, all students tended to do better. But those weren't enough to explain the variance in test scores. So there was one thing left: the teacher.

Mr. Chetty and his colleagues — one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 — estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.

Now happens to be a particularly good time for a study like this. With the economy still terribly weak, many people are understandably unsure about the value of education. They see that even college graduates have lost their jobs in the recession.

So this is a pretty important study and points to the effects of early childhood education (and probably even before kindergarten).

The corollary argument to this one can be found in Time magazine's article entitled, "The Case Against Summer Vacation".

Deprived of healthy stimulation, millions of low-income kids lose a significant amount of what they learn during the school year. Call it "summer learning loss," as the academics do, or "the summer slide," but by any name summer vacation is among the most pernicious, if least acknowledged causes of achievement gaps in America's schools. Children with access to high-quality experiences keep exercising their minds and bodies at sleepaway camp, on family vacations, in museums and libraries and enrichment classes. Meanwhile, children without resources languish on street corners or in front of glowing screens. By the time the bell rings on a new school year, the poorer kids have fallen weeks, if not months, behind.

Another major study, by a team at Johns Hopkins University, examined more than 20 years of data meticulously tracking the progress of students from kindergarten through high school. The conclusion: while students made similar progress during the school year, regardless of economic status, the better-off kids held steady or continued to make progress during the summer, but disadvantaged students fell back. By the end of grammar school, low-income students had fallen nearly three grade levels behind, and summer was the biggest culprit. By ninth grade, summer learning loss could be blamed for roughly two-thirds of the achievement gap separating income groups.

The article goes on to talk about different summer programs for low-income kids. They are NOT summer school but activities that provide enrichment (and sneak in some teaching). It's interesting that several of the comments to this story were that kids "need a break". I think the article certainly doesn't say outright "no summer for kids" but less down time and more time having fun but keeping skills sharp or encouraging new interests.