The usual mumbo jumbo, and a cause  

Yesterday I went to a symposium downtown, the inaugural symposium for a new Consortium on Early Childhood Development. The symposium was about all the returns to investing in early education, which have been getting a lot more play lately in the past couple years as states start implementing voluntary universal pre-K programs. Some of the attention has come because James Heckman (U of C prof and Nobel Laureate) has taken up the cause; you can see some of the argument here. To sum up even further: as a public investment, quality pre-K borders on the miraculous, and therefore we should be realigning all of our policy and educational priorities.

I don't know if the consortium is designed to be mainly a research exchange or a mechanism for extending policy influence, but the symposium was one of those back-slapping feel-good affairs where almost nothing of substance was said. The symposium panel was kind of a mismatch of people from different backgrounds (one of them was my former boss, which is partly why I was in attendance) who seemed to be passing each other in the night. Specifically, there seemed to be widespread confusion about 1) what constitutes good practice in pre-K education, 2) how much it will cost, and 3) how to begin effecting change. I can't decide if it's a good thing for a consortium to experience this kind of identity crisis during its inaugural symposium or not, but for me it really drove home the point that people (even professionals) are not used to taking early education as seriously, as, say, high school or college education -- even though current research plainly demonstrates that that's where we should be stacking all our chips. Changing those perceptions is a big job. I'm starting with this post, but I intend to write more about this issue, and I'd like to encourage others to do the same.