[AAACE-NLA] [aaace-nla] Heckman and Adult Education

[Hal Beder]

If you educate an adult, the payoff is immediate.  For early 
childhood, it takes 15-20 years for an investment to accrue.



At 02:08 PM 3/1/2006, you wrote:
>Kenny Tamarkin said, "Any discussion of which is more effective, Early
>Childhood Education or Adult Education, misses the point. We need both. If
>our current administration had its way, we would have neither."
>
>But I don't think this addresses the issue: Heckman is saying that Early
>Childhood Education is more cost-beneficial than adult education and/or job
>training for solving important education or other problems in the nation. So
>the first question is: what important education/other problem(s) is/are
>Early Childhood Education programs supposed to be solving and which ones
>are Adult Education/job training supposed to be solving?
>
>Now, suppose we can identify these education/other (e.g, crime, poverty,
>etc) problems that need to be solved, we can ask, can we solve them better
>with Early Childhood Education or with Adult Education/job training. For
>instance, take preparation for primary education. Is it better to do this
>through taking childen from their parents and teaching them something in a
>preschool, or is it better to teach adults good parenting and other skills
>so they can prepare all their children themselves for primary school (and
>continuing up the K-12 system, too).
>
>Right now the major movement in this country is toward ever more preschool
>education. Universal preschool is being proposed in California and is
>already in place or in progress in some states. Further, we already have a
>large federal program of Head Start which some thought was too late, and so
>now we have Early Head Start.
>
>So is it more cost-beneficial to focus on children in institutional settings
>and then send them home to the same family and community contexts that may
>be disfunctional, or is it better to work with the parents and other adults
>in the community to raise the social benefits available to all children in
>the community.
>
>These either/or questions get more important in times of huge budget
>deficits. Unfortunately, despite 15 years of two national research centers
>(NCAL; NCSALL) for adult literacy and learning, we have little research to
>address these important questions of return on investments to adult
>literacy education (or anything else, for that matter).
>
>I have tried to bring these two educational efforts together through a Life
>Cycles policy. But it is next to impossible to get any serious discussion
>of this type of policy need or set of issues. So the policy void is filled
>by economists like Heckman who take existing reports and do secondary
>analyses and make their recommendations. The Adult Education field has no
>investment in research and analyses to counter the data of economists and
>other policy oriented groups.
>
>The adult literacy education field needs to do something about this soon or
>face dissolution.
>
>Tom Sticht
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>Kenny Tamarkin
>Executive Director
>Massachusetts Coalition for Adult Education
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