The Sandbox Investment | David Kirp | Talks at Google

So it's my pleasure today to introduce David Kirk, joining us here at Authors at Google. David is a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and before coming to Berkeley, he founded the center for Law and Education at Harvard and taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He's the author of Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line. And he's here today to talk about his recent book, the Sandbox Investment, the Preschool Movement and Kids for First Politics. So I'm up here.

So let me just say it's great to be here. I may be the only person in history to write a book whose acknowledgments include two sentences dedicated to Google. And I was thinking as I was coming here, if I had to swap all my RAs for Google, would I do it? Yeah, sort of. Didn't want to go there. Good to be at the source.

Are you here? Why'd you write this book?

Well, well, two reasons. One of them researchy, one of them personal, which is, I think what happens whenever I work on a project. I have one of those don't try this at home kids, sort of academic career where I've never worked on anything twice. It's kind of intellectual attention deficit disorder like that. So I was taking a walk on the beach with a friend of mine who was a pediatrician who'd gone back to school and he said, there's this study that shows the long term effects of preschool on kids. And I, thinking I knew it all about this, said no, I mean there's all this, it just fades out, this fades away. And then he says, uh, they followed these kids now into their 40s and they found all sorts of things. They stayed in school, they didn't get assigned to special ed, they graduated from high school. All of these for the wonks among us, statistically significant findings. They went to college, they stayed out of jail, they got married, they had families and they're earning about a quarter more than the same population, otherwise identical, that didn't go to school. This is the, as I later found out, this is an iconic study called Perry Preschool. And I was so amazed at this because if you're in the social science business, you can make an entire living with three words, no significant difference, nothing matters. And here was something that mattered. And it didn't just matter about education, it mattered about a whole lot of things. So find out more about that. And at the same time, my then sister in law was trying to find a preschool for her kids and I was out there helping. And it was amazing. I mean she lives about an hour and a half north of Sacramento and the choice was a really bad out of the box canned preschool for profit school or the neighbor down the street who had a hard time spelling two syllable words on the board. I thought there's such a gap between what could happen for kids and what is happening for kids. I thought let's find out about this universe and outcomes eventually. Spending a lot of time crouching in classrooms, spending a lot of time talking to smart people across the sciences and politicians and the like.

Outcomes sandbox investment so I'm curious what the reception was to the study, this longitudinal study. It seems like a no brainer given what you've just said that we should be supporting universal pre K. And yet there are people who responded that well, it hasn't been replicated. For example, I think that was one person that you cited in the book.

Well, you know, and it's interesting because this is not the only piece of research. As you know, I talk about a bunch of studies which do the same kind of following kids for 15, 20, 25 years. And then there's the neuroscience research which I talk about and there's some really fascinating stuff in genetics, both behavioral genetics and molecular genetics. All of it points in the same direction. All of it talks about early brain development in one way, shape or form. Developmental psychologists have known this for a long time. So it's a kind of perfect storm of research that existed. And I don't think the resistance has so much to do with the research, although people sometimes, always arguments about quality of research. But it has to do with the ambivalence that many Americans still feel about who's responsible for the lives of little kids, what role the community has, how much it should be just parents that are responsible in this domain.

Well, in your book you talk about several instances. There's the situation in Oklahoma, which was quite successful, as opposed to California, where or Florida. In Florida, didn't the populace essentially have a constitutional mandate for Pre K? And yet it didn't happen. So what happens when it's successful and when it isn't?

What are the so one of the things that got me interested in this book at a kind of different level is between 2002 and 2006, across the country, state taxpayers pony up some 2 billion new dollars for pre K. 30 governors mentioned pre K in their state of the State addresses. Last year, 35 legislatures increased funds for pre K. It's the only program that I can think of since the Lyndon Johnson Great Society days when people have been willing to spend their money to provide something that's supposed to be good mostly for somebody else's kids. So that's the good part of the story. And the hero states, as you were suggesting, Oklahoma has the best publicly financed preschool program in the country. Quality and numbers. And the other states in that galaxy are not the usual pantheon of progressive states. They're Arkansas. Thank you, Governor Huckabee. Tennessee, Georgia, West Virginia. Not places. Illinois is maybe the one exception to the sort of generally progressive, not progressive rule. But these are places that for one reason or another, figured out that it made sense. These are states, many of them, that were behind the eight ball in terms of finding who's going to come work at Google, who's going to do the next generation jobs. They're not by and large people in West Virginia. And so they got it and they invested heavily in it. What's happened in Florida? Florida is scary because it's the textbook story of how not to do it. As you said, the Florida voters passed a constitutional amendment. It's 70 some words. It says high quality preschool twice among those 70 words. But it doesn't provide any money. And the state legislators in Florida weren't in the least bit interested in preschool. And the then governor Jeb Bush wasn't interested. And so what you got is a program that provides less than $2,500 per child for preschool. Those of you who have kids, if you added up your babysitting bills, you'd be up in the $2,500 range and with no requirements. I mean, basically, if you could breathe and talk, you could get a preschool. And I think in some cases they waived one of those two requirements. And you could see it going to these preschools. I mean, some of them are great, some of them are horrible. And some of the worst are run by fundamentalist churches that really wind up using the preschool money literally to subsidize church activities. They have three year olds writing cursive. And given how bad my handwriting is, I suppose I have a particularly vested interest in thinking this is a terrible idea. But it is a terrible idea and it is the case of how not to do it. California.

Yeah, that was my response. What went wrong in California?

What went wrong in California? One of the real heroes of the preschool movement is Rob Reiner. Without Rob Reiner, the issue would not be on the national agenda. He got the brain research early and he has a huge Rolodex and he used it. So you get five days on the Today show, five days on Good Morning America, cover stories in Time cover stories in Newsweek, best selling issues of those magazines. And that, you know, Tipper Gore gets interested. And out of that there comes a White House conference. Hillary Clinton is interested in this set of issues and you begin to get momentum building up. So Reiner, who got clobbered in the campaign unfairly, I think is really an important figure in this tale. But what happened in California is that the folks who wrote the initiative reached too far. It was a Cadillac model when a Kia would have done just fine. It was very expensive and it was a soak the rich tax finance model. And a lot of good government types, all good government types, hate that targeted taxes on rich folks as a way to pay for particular programs. So you had every newspaper in the state opposing the program on those grounds. And the opponents also made the claim wrong but persuasive in California that this is big government swallowing up these wonderful little private schools. So they trot out someone from something called the California Montessori association to say, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna be shut down. And what nobody seemed to know is that particular association represented something like 10% the Montessori schools in the state, and the Montessori schools are overwhelmingly supportive of this measure.

So essentially they were appealing to people's fear that it would be a one size fits all kind of curriculum.

Big state, big, you know, big brother state is going to take over your kids fear. You know, all the kind of let a thousand flowers bloom approaches are going to go. As I say, not true, but really hard to combat. And it's a just a badly run campaign. They lost Rob Reiner. He gets demonized very early on, he's pushed to the sidelines and they never really recover. So partly it's a story about bad politics, partly it's a story about in hindsight, this isn't the plan you'd want. You don't need to spend that much money on relatively few kids. It probably makes sense given our limited resources to start with poor communities where the schools are really failing the kids and there aren't many preschools around and work your way upward and outward from that. It's not the way the initiative was necessarily perceived. So I don't think the idea is dead. Although as you surely know, California is trying to dig itself out of a multi billion dollar hole that it created for itself by not taxing itself.

Well, I had a question about Prop 82. When it failed, didn't Schwarzenegger come back in?

He didn't.

So what happened with that?

Well, I mean, this is, you know, in the book I talk about, you know, this is Fortenbras Come to Denmark at the end of Hamlet to clean up the mess. The day after Prop 82, the preschool initiative goes down to an unbelievably humiliating 61, 62% of the vote against Schwarzenegger stands up at a preschool and says, now it's not as though Californians don't favor preschool. Californians love preschool. It didn't like this initiative, and I'm going to support preschool and I'm going to pledge 50 million bucks a year in new dollars over the next three years to expand preschool. Well, the money was there the first year. It's not been there since because no money is there since. But what he did was to keep preschool on the California political agenda. It's still possible to have that conversation as opposed to having this kind of all the liberals form a circle and shoot at each other basically about, you know, who screwed up Prop 82. That conversation never happened. And the other thing that's going on now is that counties have taken on the lead. I mean, Santa Clara county, best county in the state in terms of universal preschool, San Francisco, universal preschool Los Angeles, a program called LA up, which is a big preschool program targeted at the neediest kids and growing over the next five or six years to be citywide. So the action is really now at the county level much more than the.

State level, because the school you mentioned in la, that program, they had mentioned that they would live or die by Prop 82, but you're saying they're still managing to survive and grow.

Well, if you look at, if you look at a map of the state and you look at the number of kids in publicly supported preschools, the numbers keep gradually going up, but they're going up not because really of what the state is doing, because of what the county is doing. The other thing that's happening is that Jack o' Connell in the Education Department has said, we're going to take all the little kid money and we're going to dump it in one pot and we're going to spend it that way, which is a really sensible idea because we have so much turf war fighting in this issue. So note, by the way, what's happened in this conversation. We haven't gone from the preschool conversation used to be, will it happen? And in a sense, where we're going here is, yeah, it's going to happen. What does it look like? And that's where Florida and Oklahoma and California play into the story. Is it going to be any good, is it going to be at all like that first preschool that I described or is it going to be like the places that my ex sister in law was struggling with?

Now, was it in Oklahoma where the money, the funding went to the public schools and at first some of the public schools didn't want to have the pre K and then when they realized that people were moving out of their district. Is this the sort of thing that could be happening in California as well?

Well, I think there certainly a lot of parents voted with their feet. I mean they, whatever parents views are when it comes to the world, they are very conservative when it comes to their own kids and they're going to fight fiercely for those kids. And if they figure out that preschool is a good thing and preschool is not available in their district, but is in the neighboring district, just like people move for good public school systems, people were moving because this was a program for their three and four year olds that they'd benefit from. And the other thing that happened in Oklahoma is that they're the southeast corner of the state down by Louisiana. And by the way, the liberal social policy motto in Oklahoma used to be thank God for Mississippi. I mean, so that's where they saw themselves on this totem pole. Southeast Oklahoma, poorest part of the state, invested its own money in addition to the state money to have a full day program for three and four year olds. And lo and behold, when you start looking at the test scores for third graders, those kids were doing at least as well as the kids in the rich suburbs around Tulsa and Oklahoma City. And you can bet, right, if you're a parent living in Palo Alto and you hear that the East Palo Alto kids are doing at least as well as your kids in third grade, I don't care what your politics are, you're going to wonder what's going on. What are they doing right that we're not doing right? And so that's the kind of dynamic that's set in this.

So in a sense this is the success comes from the grassroots.

A lot of the success comes from parents. A lot of the success comes from mobilization. The other thing that makes this an interesting political story is that foundations got involved in ways they don't usually get involved. You think about foundations as giving away money to good causes or giving away money to something nice. But the Pew Charitable Trust in Philadelphia and Packard right down the road here, really got involved in an effort to make preschool happen. And Pew in particular, because of the way it's structured legally, could invest Some of its money in direct advocacy. So it built a network of smart folks. And I'll tell you, having talked to politicians, by and large, the worst lobbyists in the world are the lobbyists for kids. They haven't got any training. They don't sort of know how to find their. They don't know that there are corridors of power, let alone where they are. They kind of think that they stand up and say, you know, it's for kids. You know, it's like what I call teddy bear politics in the book. Then I'm going to say, okay, let's just give money to the kids. Well, you know, kids are great when it comes to election campaigns. They're wonderful opportunities for politicians who are engaged in, you know, the baby kissing pictures. But the politicians I talked to, some of them said, frankly, in the political world, the view is kids don't vote, kids don't consume, kids don't matter politically. And what these organizations, some of them focusing on the grassroots, some of them focusing on some really unlikely allies, Police chiefs, district attorneys, economists, Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve, pretty impressive array of supporters. What they were able to do is to get the politicians attention at the state level. And meanwhile, you get parents pushing from below. So you get grassroots and you get what in the trade is called grass tops as well.

I have a question about. In the Perry school study, one of the quite powerful points it's made has to do with who ended up being incarcerated and who ended up not being incarcerated. And that there was a clear, well, one could say cause and effect preschool, less likely to end up in prison. You would think that that would matter to politicians or not. I mean, you would think.

And by the way, there's some interesting new research on desegregation. School desegregation. Significantly fewer kids in desegregated districts wound up incarcerated for murder than kids in na. Very statistically elegant piece of as yet unpublished work. You would think politicians would care about crime rates. But if I'm a politician and I stand and I care about this issue, I'm going to stand up and say during the time I've been governor, 50,000 more kids have enrolled in state finance preschools. But it's harder for me to say during the time I've been in preschool, teacher certification standards have gotten tougher, class sizes have gotten smaller. There's now a TA and a teacher for every 20 kids. They're using a real curriculum, Parents are involved. I mean, those are not sentences to play politically. Numbers play. So politicians, I mean, it's the nature of the beast that politicians want to get reelected. And the way you get reelected is to look at the numbers. And so it's really been the continuing challenge to get people to pay attention to quality. Because Perry preschool costs something over $12,000 in today's dollars. It's a lot of money, but depending on how you calculate the returns, you get as much as a 17 to 1 return on investment over 40 years. Warren Buffett would be very happy with that kind of return. I think even Google would be happy with that kind of a return. But it's a lot of upfront money. And if you're a politician, what you see is the present costs. And you've got to be a really special character. I spent a lot of time in the book talking about my political heroes. A guy named Jim Hunt, the. The former governor of North Carolina, served for eight years, got killed in a really ugly campaign for Senate against Jesse Helms. Just psychologically destroyed. Out of government for eight years, comes back governor for eight more years, leaves in 2000 approval rating above 70%. And he made kids his issue from the day he showed up in the state legislature. And he was a smart politician and he figured out a really smart way to do it that got everybody enlisted, not just in preschool, but in zero to five issues more generally. And I think that's really where the focus belongs. Preschool is a prelude to a whole bunch of broader issues. I mean, Hunt was amazing. He would have been a great Secretary of education. He would have been in 2000, would have been in 2004. He would have been a great presidential candidate. There aren't that many Jim Hunts in the world, unfortunately. And so I also tell a story about how you get politicians attention by punishing them for being bad on kids. Now, a lot of you will recall what was going on this fall with the argument about the Children's Health Insurance program in Congress. Congress proposes an expansion of the program to make it effectively universal. The president vetoes it. Congress proposes a large program. President's about to veto it again. And I thought, I just hope that the liberals, Democrats and Republicans are smart enough to keep passing the same program month after month after month. Let the president keep vetoing it, let the trogonites keep voting against it, and in the 2008 election use it against them. And I tell a story in the book about a campaign in a district in Texas. It's one of these string bean districts carved out by Tom delay to make sure there would be another Republican in Congress. Stretches from Waco in the north to College Station, Texas in the south. And with a buddy, I got into a pickup truck and drove down that little dirt road. I mean, I felt like I was in Last Picture Show Country. Remember that? Yes, that wonderful old movie. Yeah. And 70% Republican. They handpicked this candidate, this woman, to run great career in the state legislature. George Bush wins that district 70% of the vote. The Democrat wins 52, 48. And the reason is the Republican boast. And she had more money to spend in the last two weeks of the campaign, more Karl Rove money, more Club for Growth money than her opponent had in the entire campaign. She loses because she said, my proudest boast is that I save the taxpayers of Texas a billion dollars. And chet Edwards points 150,000 kids removed from the rolls. And he has this great black and white photograph TV ad. It's kind of like a Walker Evans photograph come to life. And there's this woman, this mom with a kid on her lap. She talks straight at the camera and she says, I love my daughter and I'm working full time and I'm a widow and now I don't have health insurance because I've been taken off the rolls and if she gets sick, I don't know what I'm going to do. And then I think the only line in the ad was children were never my highest priority, which is what the Republican candidate said. And it was clear from the exit polls, from talking to voters from focus groups that that issue just changed the dynamic. And particularly women and often grandmothers as well as moms who'd never voted for a pretty liberal Democrat in their lives voted against her on that one measure and that was the reason they voted against her. So if you think about this as a political story and not just as a it's a science story, it's how do you build a good program nationwide and statewide story. But it's, you know, a big chunk of it is a political story. You know, it's not just playing nice. It's showing politicians that you can win big if you're pro kids. Look at Jim hunt and that 70 plus percent approval rating after 16 years as governor and you can lose big. Look at Arlene Walgamuth, who lost that election to Chet Edwards. I have no doubt that she profoundly regrets ever saying children were not a high priority.

So what's your. Do you have a vision for K through 12 or pre K? Sorry, through 12. I mean, we haven't even talked about K through 12. I mean, I'm living That myself right now with a 15 year old. We could go there.

But in terms of let's start with 0 to 5.

Let's start with 0 to 5 because.

That'S really, that's really the empty terrain. I mean, k to 12. The issues in k to 12 are so familiar and so fought over. Are charter schools the answer? Magnet school is the answer.

We don't want to make the same mistakes. Right.

And yeah, one of the things that, in fact, one of the things that makes pre K interesting is how do you not look like K to 12 all over again? How do you not recreate some mammoth bureaucracy that really can't figure out had a serve?

Because there's an allergic reaction to that.

Yeah. Which I happen to have that very disease. But pre K has gotten a lot of attention because of all the research and because the push is that pre K is about getting kids ready for school. That's a mixed blessing, particularly if what you're talking about is getting kids ready to take the no Child Left behind test. And you're not talking about kids learning how to work and play well with others. Take your turn, sort of deal with your emotions, play, develop your creativity, all that stuff. By the way, Jim Hunt said, you know, my slogan used to be you got to get the basics. Now his slogan is, we're really short changing creativity in this school. So that's the direction you'd want to move. But by the time kids are four years old, a couple of social scientists who have this kind of compulsion complex counted the number of words that children had heard spoken to them by grown ups and siblings and anybody. Not TV words, not computer words, but live words, kids from professionals. Your kids had heard 30 million more words, not different words, just words than kids from homes where the moms are on welfare. 30 million more words. And the ratio of positive, supportive, encouraging words to negative, controlling, punishing words is very, very different. Another way to make that point is your 4 year olds or your 4 year olds to be or your grandkids have bigger vocabularies than those welfare moms have. So four is pretty late in the story. Just generally, I mean, if you've ever watched kids grow, you know, there's this image of the kid as a sponge, the kid as an empty vessel. Terrible, terrible image. Because it's not about pouring stuff into kids. I think of kids as little Magellans, little Lewis and Clarks. They're explorers. I mean, they do amazing, amazing things. And we all have a thousand. You know, I can't believe that that Kid just said that, stories to tell. They just got all this creativity and all this energy. There's that which we need to tap into. And it doesn't begin at age 4. And then there are all the health issues, spotting early on, developmental delay issues and just physical and mental issues. Can deal with them so much more effectively with infants and toddlers than you can if you wait till you get to school. And we're going to get to universal health insurance for kids, we're probably going to get to universal health insurance or some version down the road. But kids first. And the question there is exactly the same as the preschool question. How good is it going to be if you say you got universal health insurance but the nearest doc is 70 miles away or you can't see a specialist, or we don't have these drugs for you, or the copay is huge, or not very useful. So the push I would argue because In a sense 0 to 5 is a kind of natural grouping. The preschool zone. 0 to birth to going to school, age 3 to age 8 is another natural grouping because it's a developmental grouping sort of kids learn in sort of related ways. And you could think about reorganizing schools so they were pre K through grade three as an organization of schools. But that's where the energy needs to be. And pre K is a start to that process. And again, I don't care if where you begin, where your starting point is the science, the neuroscience, the genetics. I mean just a sentence about the genetics because I suspect many of you know about the bell curve and that kind of 700,000 copies of a book sold that basically is meant to establish once and for all that it's all about genetics. Well, it turns out that the problem with that research, all that research, is that it never looked at the social class of the family. And if you think about what I've just been talking about, that's a big failure. So it turns out when you do the statistics on a sample that includes a lot of poverty families for well to do families, genetics is almost all of it. Kids potential is essentially maxed out by the kinds of things you can do for those kids. When it comes to poor kids, it's almost all environment. And it turns out that the neuroscientists find the same thing. If you look, they looked at recently at a group of third graders who aren't doing well in school and if you look at the well off third graders, the neural patterns are pretty well established. That's not the problem. The problem really is a Genetic problem. If you look at poor kids, the neural patterns haven't been established. They haven't had the opportunities to learn this stuff. So I don't, I find that fascinating and I, I mention it here because I try to sort of sneak that in. People don't often focus on that part of the book. But I think the genetics, both, as I say, both the quantitative genetics about heredity, it's not heredity versus environment, it's heredity through environment. Genes change form depending upon the environment in which you expose child. Literally change form. And that's just to me as a non scientist, amazing stuff. You start there, you start with Perry Preschool 40 years on. Look at those effects. If you're a business person or you're a politician, you look at those rates of return on investment. And I don't care if they're 17 to 1 or 12 to 1 or 8 to 1 or 3 to 1, which was the claim for what the California initiative would have produced for social programs. I'd take one and a half to one. That's a big, big return in terms of what we spend money on. And in this society, I don't care where you start. You know, this has got to be a place that we pay attention to.

So how do we address the issue of people being worried that it's just going to be the same as K through 12? Because that was one of the criticisms I noticed that came up and also in interviews that I listened with you and also going back through the Prop 82. But that's a real fear that people have. So how does one address that?

Well, my hope is if you look at California and you look at where people send kids to preschools, you know, there are church schools, there are neighbors programs, there's the Montessori school and the Reggio Emilio school may be wonderful, you know, arts based program. You know, they're a kind of skill and drill program. Some of them are public, some of them are church run, some of them are nonprofit, some of them are for profit. And what you want is to build on those systems. I mean, my dream would be you walk into a classroom and you say that's a really good classroom. And you don't know what the sign on the door of the school building says. Is it the primary, the pre K to grade 3 school? Is it the Catholic school? Is it the, you know, the local bide, a wee nonprofit, we love kids, school shouldn't matter and I hope that's where we're going.

So essentially just keep the options open.

Keep the options open. By the way, a quick people often ask me, in the role of parent and grandparents, how do I know a good preschool? And I spend a fair amount of time on TV shows that I call the Oprah light TV shows, the afternoon TV shows that none of us get to watch, but that moms and grandmothers do watch. And so the question is, so what are your five tips for good preschool? And the first time I was asked that question, I thought, I'm a policy guy and an old journalist and someone who watches and listens and whatever. And then I thought, I actually do have some thoughts about it. And that's the most important question of all. Because what really matters is parents pushing for good preschools and early education for their kids. So I'll give you guys a couple of tips. First of all, you got to spend some time in the classroom. And if you walk into a preschool classroom and all the kids stop what they're doing and rush over to talk to you, it's a bad, it's bad. It's a bad place because it means they're bored. You know, what they ought to do is look up and they've sort of learned about working and playing well with others and being polite, say hi, hello, come wandering over. But they go back to what they're. And the other thing you want to look at is whether or not kids and teachers are talking to each other. Are the teachers listening to the kids? Taking their cues from the kids, not letting the kids run the show? It's taking the kids ideas as their starting point. Or are the teachers talking at the kids, which happens all too often. Is there real conversation going on in those schools and that isn't about. At the end of the day, you can try as a policy person to mandate well trained teachers and small classes and parent involvement and a real curriculum. What I mean by a real curriculum basically is you just ask the teacher at the end of that hour or two you spent there. So when such and such was going on with Johnny and Susie, what were you trying to accomplish? What were you trying to do? And if they say, I don't know, that's not a good answer. They need to have some idea of what they're trying to do in all these moments of the day. But that's really. It's at that micro level that the biggest effects are going to be had. We can spend money, we need to spend more money. We can subsidize an array of schools, which I think is really important. We can get great information to parents which Is which is crucial. North Carolina, like many states, has a rating system. How good is the preschool? How good is the child center? One star out of four stars. It's like the Amazon.com book ratings. When they started, most of the centers were one and two stars. Every parent who got what amounts to a voucher also got an education in why quality matters. And the childcare centers and the preschools got rewarded with additional dollars as they moved up that ladder. That is they hired better trained, more experienced teachers, had smaller classes and the like. So you get demand push and you get supply pull, all both in the same direction. And I've never met a preschool teacher who didn't want to do a better job, didn't want to know more about kids. And I've never met a parent who didn't think that they wanted to do the very best they could for their kids. So there's a program, there's government creating a set of incentives and using information to change the world. And now if you go to North Carolina, the vast majority of those kids are in three and four star centers. They've moved up and the centers have gotten better. So that's the hope. That's the hope I have.

Shall we open this up for questions?

Yeah. Questions, thoughts, comments?

Is it on? It's good. All right. It wasn't a second ago, so I missed the first 10 minutes. So excuse me if you already talked about this, but my question is also you've talked a lot about how much better it is for the kids. Is there part of your book or some science or studies or even anecdotes about whether it's better for the parents to have the children basically out of the house and what effect that has on society. Like I can foresee, for example, people having more kids if they weren't still taking care of so many kids at home at the same time. And would that be good or bad?

Well, we've got demography pushing so hard in this area. The average mother, poor mother, middle class mother, well off mom is back working before her kid is six months old. So that's the reality. And then the question is, what do you do with that reality? And I know what a lot of moms do. They scurry and they patch together and dad gets involved in doing this. And if you're lucky, you've got grandma down the road who can help out or the kid gets sick and you gotta go home. And I mean it's just a mess. By and large. It clearly makes parents lives, and particularly mothers lives less Fraught if they've got a reliable place for their kids to be in. I don't know what the data on productivity look like, which is what would persuade company to have a kid center. This was the idea way back when that companies would have right on the premises places for kids from zero on. And there's a. I had a lot of time playing historian in this book writing about something called the Portland Shipyard Child Parent centers. Henry kaiser, World War II, got a contract to build a slew of battleships. No men around, they've all gone off to fight. This means you need Rosie the Riveter. But how do you get women to come to Portland, Oregon and become teachers and work? How do you get teachers to come and work in preschools? And what he does, he combs the country, he finds an incredibly able early educator, sets up a program for kids from 2 through 8, pays the teachers well. And he pays the teachers well because he figures if he doesn't, they're all going to get stolen away by the shipyards and they're going to take those jobs, small classes, everything really well thought out. The only thing, if you took that program and adopted it today, it would be state of the art. I mean, the only thing you would probably get rid of is the fact that cod liver oil was part of the regimen of this drill. And some of us remember the threat of cod liver oil as this sort of health measure. But aside from that, even the design of this place, little classrooms around a central play courtyard, furniture designed for these kids, we knew how to do it 60 some years ago, we know how to do it today. And there's never been a push to make it happen at the company level. I think what's increasingly happening and what may make better sense is that companies say, okay, employees, here's a menu of benefits. You can pick from these benefits and among them is support for childcare, early education. But there still isn't nearly enough of that.

There's something also in the question that.

You can't be heard.

I can't be heard and I'm supposed to, will this make a difference? Am I on now? Maybe you'll repeat my question that there would be an incentive to have more children. In other words, you've made life easier for the mother so she'll go ahead and have more kids. And maybe that would be a possible fear for people.

That or hope, depending on how you think about kids in the society. I think it was a hope question. I'm not, you know, I don't believe that families make decisions, make rational. Follow rational choice theory. You know, I don't believe that, you know, Gary Becker, Chicago economist, is the norm when he used to get divorced every December 31st and married every January 1st because it was rational from a tax point of view to do this. So I think there are lots of things that go into those decisions. But my hunch is that at the margin, you're right, that if you're thinking about, gosh, do I want, and it's usually in the case of professional parents, my sense is it's usually the third child. First child, you can go to work. Second child becomes an issue. Third child, by and large, you're going to stay home and raise those kids. That seems to be the data makes many mothers hesitant about third children. Means that mothers wind up with choices more constrained than they would like to be. So it's a great question. It's one I hadn't thought about. And my guess is at the margin you're right. The better the opportunities are for kids, and not just in, as we said, not just in preschool, but across the board, I think the more willing parents will be to say, I really can do both. I really can raise a family and work at a job that I care about. I care about both, and I can do it.

David, I want to thank you for your work and introduce myself. I'm Janice Kaiser. I'm the manager, family support manager at the Google Children's center at the Woods.

And this advertisement was brought to you.

By, and I wanted to speak a little bit to your question and also acknowledge the some of the points that you made that I think are so crucial. And I think, speaking to your question, what I'm hoping with really high quality childcare for families that's available, that's accessible, that's affordable, is that teachers will make families better parents and parents will make teachers better teachers. That when you talk about relationship, when you talk about going into a classroom and seeing that significant relationship between a teacher and a child, between children and other children, that those relationships also relate to the relationships between teachers and families, between families and other people's children, lovely kinds of things start to happen. One of the sort of quality care factors that we look at is continuity. Do teachers and children and children and children and families and families stay together over time? And we're trying to support those kinds of relationships as well. And I guess the other piece is really looking at a developmental preschool and in whatever form that comes in, and I really appreciate what you said about not wanting to make preschools little elementary schools, because we've been doing preschool for a long time and the national association for the Education of Young Children has standards for what developmental preschools look like, and we don't have to reinvent those. So when we're looking at preschool for all, we really need to look at what's already occurred in the profession and not just bring the elementary school standards down.

Yeah, absolutely. On both points. If you look at the criteria, what makes for a good preschool? Involvement of parents is always on the list. Every one of the exemplary preschool programs, the ones on which the research is based, get parents really involved. And the best one that I know about, still going on in Chicago in kind of weakened form, but now in operation for 40 years, had a room called the Chicago Child Parent Center. It was a room built in the school for parents. Now these are poor and working class parents. And the room was there to provide what the parents wanted. They wanted to learn English, they could learn English, they wanted to learn computer skills, they wanted job training skills, they wanted to learn how to cook. This school would figure out ways of bringing folks in to work with them. And the parents would get involved in turn in the, in the classrooms being AIDS to those kids. So you hear over and over again what's just true. Parents are the main educators of kids. I mean, you've got kids for a handful of hours a day for not every week of the year. And so the best decision the child can make is to be born into a really good family. But since the kid doesn't have that choice, the notion that the early educators and the parents in some sense are the same people, they certainly are partners in this process is important not only for preschool, but for education generally. And I do want to say a word about this. No child left behind, no preschooler left behind. Because it's scary. My friends, I see this in my friends and I watch how proud they are when their children learn yet more letters of the Alphabet. Right? My kid can now count to so and so in four languages. By the way. It turns out that until they're six months old, children are. The infants are the best linguists. They can distinguish every tonal language in the world. All the click versions of Vietnamese, all the Chinese tonal languages. They got it all in the brain. They shed what they don't need, what is not encouraged for them. But I talk to the experts and I look at the numbers, but stories really drive me. And I remember a tale in Chicago that happened to be in that very one of those child parent centers. Chicago mandated a Test of all preschoolers in November. So here's this boy, he was three years old in September. He's brand new to preschool and he's given this test, he's sitting there and the first thing he has to do is to take these shapes and identify what they are. Triangle, circle, square. Then he's got a board with the shapes cut out. He's got to take the shapes and put them in the area. And that's harder apparently. And then there are other tests and this child starts getting things. He knows he's making mistakes, can't do things. And so all of a sudden he's like this gnawing at his knuckles. I thought, great, we are creating test anxiety in 39 month old kids. So it doesn't matter. I say this to a group of folks who might be or will be in the not so distant term or have been parents of little kids. It doesn't matter whether your 2 year old knows or 3 year old or 4 year old for that matter knows all the letters of the Alphabet, she's going to learn them. You know, what matters is that, that creativity get encouraged and not squelched. So that's my sort of amen version to that comment. And it's a real, this is an issue not just poor parents think that school is about drill and order and respect. Middle class parents think that school is about doing really, really well on tests because test scores equal good grades equal better shot at going to good colleges equal, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the concern about narrowing what preschool is and turning it into little first grade, little second grade is an across the board concern. And if there's any place where people ought to know better, you know, it's a place like this one that prizes creativity among the grown ups. You ought to be prizing creativity among the kids as well. We have time for one more question. So this is sort of the token skeptic question, but I'm going to make it pretty easy for you. You talk a lot about. Go ahead, you talk a lot. Well, you talked a lot about, you know, alternatives between no preschool and preschool. And most of the studies that you're familiar with come, I imagine, come from an aggregate of parents who, you know, represent what's going on right now. I guess I'd like you to speak to me as somebody who's lucky enough to have a stay at home parent and be both parents, upper middle class educated, living in San Francisco with all the resources it provides. Explain to me why you believe that a preschool is significantly better than home provided education for a three and a four year old. Yeah, I'd never make that. I never would make that argument. I mean, this goes back to the comment about parents and the role that parents play. And you are, you are lucky, I will say that really rich parents who think they're doing great by their kids because they hire an au pair. I've been in parks in San Francisco where what you get is the au pair sitting around on the bench smoking cigarettes while the kids are off doing whatever they're doing. This is not an early education and I have no doubt that your child is going to get a great early education. I also think it makes sense, and you probably do this as well to have that kid with other children in some kind of program for some hours of the day, half day, a couple days a week, something where that wait your turn, be polite, be considerate to others, understand differences best. Preschool I went to one of them is a school where it turns out that half the kids are disabled. Now these kids got excited about the notion that they want to know why they couldn't screw off their leg when they went swimming. Like Johnny could take his leg off and go swimming. I want to be able to do that too. You're not going to get that at home. You're not going to get kids from other ethnicities and social class backgrounds at home. I think that's all of that's important stuff. But it's not to say if I educate, spend most of the time, kids can spend most of the time with parent or parents. That's great, but it oughtn't be an all or nothing proposition either way. So study wise. There, there really isn't anything you've seen that contrasts in preschool better than mom. There's some literature that says for the first year kids may be better off at home than in a childcare center. There is. But again, who has the choice? You do, but many folks unfortunately don't. There's somewhat more interesting because broader literature that says that ran an experiment. It compared no help for parents, parenting education alone, childcare center alone, good childcare center alone, and childcare center plus parenting education. And it turns out that that latter combination is more effective than any of the others. So that if we think about families generally who don't have that option, that combination of working with parents and working with kids is the right combination. Let me just close with a question that nobody asked me, but that I'll answer anyway, which is my dream and my nightmare in broad terms to go from the particular to the society. The dream, you know, the dream is Oklahoma becomes the nation. It's not the world's best preschool for everybody, but it's a pretty good preschool for everybody. And if people can afford better, that's fine. And the Oklahoma data are pretty impressive in terms of the benefits of that early education. But the nightmare is the Florida story that what you get is low quality, bad preschool, preschool on the cheap, preschool with untrained teachers, preschool without parents involved, preschool with no curricula. And what would happen if you studied those preschools 10 years later? You'd find no effect, maybe even a negative effect. I was in a school in Texas where the teacher had a certificate, but there was no class size limits. One teacher, 44 year olds, 40 of them in that classroom with one grown up. This is kind of like Lord of the Flies. Nobody wants to be piggy. Which is why, you know, it's not a great surprise that kids from that kind of program are going to emerge more aggressive than other kids. So my fear is that's what preschool will look like across the country. It'll be preschool on the cheap. It won't have any benefits. And social conservatives will say out loud, you see, it was just another one of those nanny state programs, a way of spending our money. And then they will say in a much softer voice, besides, what can you expect from those kids? And I've said this, that sentence many times in many groups and I've never found anybody that I've been talking to who didn't get what I meant. It's a hugely important policy issue. The stakes are really high. Focusing on your own kids needs has got to be the primary concern of any parent. But focusing on Kids First Politics, on pushing the next president of the United States, whoever he or she may be, to make kids a priority. That very wealthy investment banker turned policy guy who had lots of millions of dollars that he could raise but wasn't going to until he found a politician who endorsed the idea of Kids First Politics, which matter of a couple of months ago, Barack Obama did. Hillary Clinton has been with kids since forever. But you got to use some of that talent that you've got, you know, that creative talent, the engineering talent, the marketing talent, the childcare talent, the political talent on behalf of kids, that's my hope. Thank you.