Spending billions will add $2 TRILLION!
Daycare lobby economists, often from the corporate sector, come to this fantastical “costs/benefit” conclusion largely based on the 1962 Perry Preschool Project.
That’s the study that found every $1 “invested” saves $7. It involved 58 intellectually challenged, underprivileged African-American 3- to 4-year-olds with young at-home mums on welfare…but they didn’t even count the costs of welfare, and they did count large hypothetical payouts to victims of crime (Heckman’s “new economics”?). Unlike real daycare/preschools, there were weekly home-visits, parent group meetings, and 3 hours per day of classes with a 1:5 teacher:child ratio.
Then this so-called “data” is regurgitated by the OECD and in Canada by daycare lobbyists such as Fraser Mustard, Charles Pascal, Clyde Hertzman, Hillel Goelman, Michael Krashinsky, Gordon Cleveland…
- April 2006. Brookings Institute – (PDF): “The Effects of Investing in Early Education on Economic Growth” – “This policy brief analyzes the impact of a high-quality universal preschool policy on economic growth, concluding that such a policy could add $2 trillion to annual U.S. GDP by 2080.”
- WestEd: “Early Childhood Investment Yields Big Pay-Off” by Robert G. Lynch
- World Bank “ECD Program Evaluations in the US” (broken link)
- January 5, 2007. James Heckman. Milton Freidman’s Chicago School of Economics – (PDF): “The New Economics of Child Quality“
- 1998. RAND Corporation – web: “Early Childhood Interventions: Benefits, Costs, and Savings“
- June 16, 2006. OECD “Remarks for the OECD Job Strategy Forum”