2022 Rohit and Harvanit Kumar Conference on the Economics of Early Childhood Education

This conference was invitation only, and both in-person and virtual options for attendance were available. All times below are listed in Central Time.

Researchers in economics, developmental psychology and many other fields have spent considerable effort in the past 50 years aiming to account for the factors that give rise to inequality in young children’s skill development, determined whether these factors are malleable, and test the cost-effectiveness of interventions to manipulate these factors in the service of raising skills and closing gaps across groups of children. Results from these efforts have generally been disappointing. Evidence from the US National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP, “The Nation’s Report Card”) shows that the reading skills of 13-year-olds have not changed appreciably since 1971. Reading scores for 9-year-olds have barely changed since 2004 when the assessment was revised. More importantly for both 9- and 13-year-olds the gap between the highest scoring and lowest scoring students has increased because the scores for children in the lowest 10% declined. US children fare no better in international perspective: Scores from the PISA show that among 15-year-olds between 2000-2018 there has been no change in math scores and that US students score below the OECD average. There has also been no change in reading scores or in comparison with the OECD average. With few exceptions, interventions have had relatively weak treatment impacts and among those that show short term success few impacts are sustained in the long run. The translation from promising small-scale researcher-designed and implemented interventions to success at scale has proved elusive.

This frustrating state of scientific knowledge inspired us to pose new questions and look in new directions for answers. Conference speakers presented work that presents new theoretical arguments as well as new empirical findings that informed these arguments. The work focused on improving skill development among economically disadvantaged children and drew from research in the US and in international contexts. The questions this conference aimed to answer include:

• What is the relative influence of parents, schools, and other factors in early childhood human capital development?
• What skills matter for children’s long-run success? How can children learn these skills?
• What can we learn from historical data to inform contemporary theories of children’s human capital development?
• How malleable are the inputs to skill development in early childhood and what does it cost to change these inputs?
• “Tools” versus “programs”: How should interventions be designed?