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Jim Heckman, an advocate for Early Learning
Dr James Heckman, a Nobel Laureate in Economics came to speak to economists and future economists two weeks ago at Washington State University. Along the way, he found time to meet with nine early learning professionals.
Greetings
Two weeks ago I had the privilege of meeting with Dr. James Heckman when he was visiting at Washington State University. Dr Heckman is much admired by the early learning community because of the work he did on the return on investment society gets for investing in children birth through age five. His findings are based on research results from two longitudinal studies done on high quality preschool programs that were offered to low income, at risk children.
According to Heckman's findings, for every dollar society spends on children from birth to age five, it saves $17 later on. The study shows that school dropout rates, teen pregnancy, joblessness, incarceration and a host of other negative issues are decreased when a child has the opportunity to attend a high quality preschool.
Imagine how exciting it was for me to be with eight other early learning people and Dr Heckman for an hour. The surprizing thing was that he saw it as an opportunity to learn things from us! In fact when the person escorting him around came to get him for his next meeting Heckman asked if he could have a few more minutes with us.
Heckman told us that his research has led him to believe in the power of non cognitive skills or social emotional development as the deciding factor in the successful development of a child. He stated that although the children in the study had the same IQ ten years after their preschool experience, they were much more successful then the control group because of their social emotional maturity.
Later that day, Heckman spoke to a crowd of over 300 students and facility in Economics and again praised early learning as the best investment we can make as a society. You gotta love this guy.
Let me know what you think.
Jeanne