228. Does “Early Education” Come Way Too Late?

In our collective zeal to reform schools and close the achievement gap, we may have lost sight of where most learning really happens -- at home.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:11Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, Levitt.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Dubner, how are you doing?

• 2:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Great, welcome to New York.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's good to be here.

• 2:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  We don't often get to do this, sit down face to face.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, because the traffic in New York is so terrible that I stay away.

• 2:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why are you here? Are you meeting with the Pope today?

• 3:00Speaker 01

  No, the Pope, the Pope passed on.

• 3:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, you're meeting with the UN today?

• 3:03Speaker 01

  UN passed on me as well.

• 3:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just me?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, just you.

• 3:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so Levitt, I understand you've gotten into the early education business?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we regret it a little bit. Roland Fryer, John List and I went out and really John more than us, started a preschool with the idea that if we were really smart and really thoughtful, we could do things for three, four and five year olds that would change their lives and maybe could be used by other people to change a whole lot of lives all across the world.

• 3:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. John List is a colleague there.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Stephen Dubner, how are you doing, my friend?

• 3:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm doing great, John. So why don't you tell us a bit about your work?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  My primary research goes to the field and runs field experiments on issues like, why do people give to charitable causes? Why do people discriminate against one another? Why do women earn less money than men?

• 4:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  List grew up in Wisconsin, went to college there and in Wyoming, then taught in Florida and a few other places.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  When I moved to Chicago, I became very interested in public education largely because I saw the problems of public education all around me. I live just south of Chicago in a city called Flossmore, and right next to that is a city called Chicago Heights. And in Chicago Heights, you have things like high schools with less than 50% graduation rates. You have ninth graders who are reading at a fourth grade level and doing math at a third grade level. You have poor kids who just aren't experiencing the value added that children of the affluent experience. So combining that with the fact that that's sort of how I was raised myself.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  I was raised in public education and not in a wealthy family at all. My father's a truck driver and my mother's a secretary. So this was a sort of setting that I had been raised in, and I could see the problems in that setting, but they really came to fruition for me when I moved to the University of Chicago.

• 5:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  So List, Levitt, and the Harvard economist Roland Fryer set up an experimental preschool in Chicago Heights.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  The demographics are about 1/3 white, 1/3 Hispanic, 1/3 African American. It's a relatively poor community. And the idea there was to look at state-of-the-art techniques for teaching kids reading, writing, and arithmetic, cognitive skills, and compare the outcomes of kids with another curriculum in which that emphasized non-cognitive skills like sitting still and expanding working memory and executive function and things like that.

• 6:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Even though the school was a school, it was also very much an experiment.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  So our overarching theme is let's go into schools and use them not only to teach our kids, but to teach ourselves what works and why.

• 6:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  But the school wasn't the only part of their experiment.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  The more interesting Piece of what we did was to get away from the idea of the school and say, well, really, schools only have kids for a handful of hours per day, but who really will mold the kids through their life are the parents. And so if we could take the parents of preschool kids and have an academy where we actually teach the parents how to teach their kids, then maybe we could have a bigger and a longer term impact on the kids.

• 6:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you set up also then a parent academy, yeah?

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we set up a parent academy.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  And this is in a large basement room in a K through 12 school in Chicago Heights. We have two teachers in there. The parents arrive for a session, which is once every two weeks for 90 minutes, and it's over a nine-month-long period. And we then incented the parents for things like their attendance at our early childhood sessions. They were incented based on the homework assignments that their kids handed in. They were incented based on the interim assessments that we actually conducted with their kids.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  So over the course of the school, your parents could earn up to $7,000.

• 7:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow. So you're trying to help kids do better at school by essentially paying their parents to teach them to do better at school, yes?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. To take parents who care enough about their kids that they're willing to show up to these classes and equip them with a better set of skills so that they could be better teachers to their kids, not just, say, the kid that was in our program, but all the siblings, and to do that over a lifetime as opposed to just one year.

• 7:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  And why go to the parents? Why not just pay the kids directly?

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Well, for one thing, the kids were three, four, and five years old, so they wouldn't understand the value of money. Maybe Trinket's could have done it. But I think we really believed that the power of success lies in the parents.

• 8:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levitt and List were pretty enthusiastic about their experiment and undaunted. How hard could it be to set up a preschool and a parent academy?

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Okay, so now is where the real problem starts.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  It was one of the most difficult things I think we could have tried to do.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  So we have to make sure that the superintendent, of course, is on board.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  And as economists, I think maybe we weren't fully equipped to make it. It seemed like it would be easy.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  We needed to secure state licenses to run a pre-K program.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  The logistics are hard.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  We need to develop a partnership with the community so the community trusts us and they will actually send their kids to our parent academy.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  It's just plain complicated.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  We need funding. Funding for the teachers, funding for development of the curriculum, and we needed funding for the incentives.

• 9:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow. Okay, a couple of quick questions before we get on to longer questions. What's all this going to cost and where's the money coming from?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  So this particular experiment cost nearly $1 million and the money came from Ann and Ken Griffin.

• 9:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Who have a foundation in Chicago, yes?

• 9:31Speaker 02

  This was a foundation in Chicago. It is no longer a foundation in Chicago.

• 9:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  You put them out of business with your parent academy?

• 9:39Speaker 02

  We put them out of business. We spent all of their money on these interventions and they've gone broke. So now Ken's trying to make more money and so is Ann. And maybe, maybe they'll send us some more in the future.

• 9:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  The truth is, the foundation shut down when the Griffins divorced, but the economists did get their money to run the preschool and parent academy. So what did the Griffins Foundation get for all that money? How did the experiment work out?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  It worked out okay.

• 10:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just okay? Hmm. Today on Freakonomics Radio, we'll hear about their results. We'll also hear about other early education ideas, some of which are really cheap.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  This costs $5 a year per kid to produce.

• 10:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  And some early education ideas suggest that even preschool may be too late.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  By the end of the age of three, children born into poverty will have heard 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers.

• 10:41Speaker 05

  From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 10:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  So three economists, led by John List, decide to set up a preschool in Chicago with an experimental curriculum.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  So these are three, four, and five-year-olds. And our goal, of course, was to set up a program so we could measure how the children's cognitive and noncognitive or executive function skills changed because of our program.

• 11:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  None of the economists knew much about this field.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  So essentially, what we did is we started out doing a series of interviews with experts in early childhood and development psychology. And we ended up hosting a two-day conference at the University of Chicago where we had the leading experts come in. And we talked about exactly what should the tools be that we use to measure COG and executive function skills. And in the end, we settled on these assessment tools called Woodcock-Johnson on the cognitive side and on the noncognitive side, things that measured operation span, spatial conflict, and self-control.

• 12:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  The economists also set up a school for the parents of the preschoolers.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  And here, we gave them a curriculum that was composed of both a cognitive component, which is called Literacy Express, and a noncognitive component, which is called Tools of the Mind. So we combined these two curriculum to try to push these two types of skills.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Into the parents', let's say, minds and then show them how they could teach their children how to have these skills of self-control and to finish your homework.

• 12:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  And the parents, you will recall, were incentivized to do their work. A parent could earn up to $7,000 based on their own attendance and how well their kids did on homework and assessment tests. So what were the results of all this educational experimentation? What do the data have to say? Well, the data are still being crunched on the preschool curriculum, what worked and what didn't work for teaching the kids. But as for the Parent Academy, John List, Steve Levitt, and Roland Frye recently published a working paper on that project. The verdict?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Let's jump right into the results.

• 13:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, these are huge, huge gains. That is to say, incentivizing and teaching parents how to teach their kids really worked.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  So a first thing to note is, we have huge differences across kids. Now, what I mean by that is that our program really, really helps Hispanic and white students, and it doesn't help blacks at all.

• 13:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  How disappointing was it to see that Hispanic and whites moved a lot and blacks didn't?

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's a mixed bag. I think that when we started down this research agenda, part of our mission was, first of all, to learn about the racial achievement gap and learn about how we can lower that gap. Most of the time, we lump Hispanic and African-American kids together and we say, what is the solution for minorities in public education? And I think this particular result teaches us that the education production function across these two groups is very different, and the solution will not be the same across African-American and Hispanic families.

• 14:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you have any ideas for African-American families?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  We have a few things boiling, but nothing that has popped up that moves African-American families.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  And to be honest, we have no real theory for why that is. The two sets of parents were equally engaged in the program, and we can control for all sorts of background characteristics, and nothing really explains it. So to me, that's really a puzzle, and a puzzle that I don't have an answer for.

• 14:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  But again, the Parent Academy did work really well for some students.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  In just a nine-month program, we can move an Hispanic student from around the 30th percentile in test scores to above the 50th percentile in test scores.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  These are bigger effects than almost any educational policy that is put into place.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  So we're getting results that swamp a result that you would get from a year-long program in a charter school. Now, that's on both the cognitive assessments and the non-cognitive assessments.

• 15:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  But in looking carefully at cognitive skills versus non-cognitive skills, the researchers discovered something, something that was both a key to their success, but also a warning sign.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Upon entry into the program, we tested kids to see where they stood in terms of their cognitive skills, how well they could do the alphabet, math, and whatnot, and also their non-cognitive skills, about how they could sit still and keep things in memory. And what was incredibly interesting to me in our findings is that for the kids who were below average on these non-cognitive skills, so the ability to concentrate, to remember things, to kind of think their way through problems, the below-average kids made no progress in our program. So if you started behind in terms of how ready you were to learn in some sense, then you got nothing out of our program. And that was true whether you scored high on the cognitive scores or not.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  So kids could be really high achievers in terms of math and reading, but gain nothing from our program if they didn't have these sort of sit still skills. But on the other hand, if you were above average on these non-cognitive skills, you got huge benefits from our program. So what does this mean? Well, for one thing, I think it intuitively makes sense that there's a threshold for being able to learn. If the kids can't concentrate, it's hard for them to learn. And no matter how hard the parents try, it's going to be hard to make gains. On the other hand, what it's really valuable for from the perspective of public policy is that it really tells you where to target your resources.

• 17:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what does the Parent Academy research suggest? Well, at least a couple of things. One, the fact that it worked, that at least some kids did better after their parents got tutoring, seems to confirm what Steve Levitt said earlier, that schools themselves may not have as much influence as we think.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Well, really, schools only have kids for a handful of hours per day, but who really will mold the kids through their life are the parents.

• 17:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Two, if a child's ability to learn is so heavily influenced by what happens at home, and if the kids who came in with low non-cognitive scores at age three or four didn't make cognitive gains, well, maybe the key here isn't just what happens at home for a kid, but what happens at home well before a kid is even old enough to go to preschool. In other words, what happens starting at age zero?

• 18:08Speaker 04

  The brain, unlike any other organ that we have, it comes out relatively underdeveloped.

• 18:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Dana Suskind.

• 18:15Speaker 04

  Unlike your kidneys, they function from day one as they will for their entire lives. The brain is underdeveloped, and it's absolutely dependent on what it encounters on its ride to full development. And it's really in those first three years of life when a huge amount of the physical brain is built, literally 80 to 85% of it. And what is building those connections, those 700 to 1,000 new neural connections, is language.

• 18:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Suskind is one of those multi-hyphenates.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  I am the director of the 30 Million Words Initiative and author of the recently published book, 30 Million Words: Building a Child's Brain. And I'm at the University of Chicago and a scientist, a surgeon, social activist.

• 19:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Exhausted already.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  And mother, and mother of three wonderful children.

• 19:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Suskind is head of the Pediatric Cochlear Implantation Program at the University of Chicago, which means she sees a lot of families whose babies don't hear well, if at all.

• 19:19Speaker 04

  So when they come to me, they're often shocked because most children born with profound hearing loss actually have no family history of it, even though it's genetic. So, you know, first you sort of wrap your arms around this overwhelmed family because the baby has no clue and start sort of explaining what we can do.

• 19:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  What they can do has changed a lot in recent decades.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  You know, it's really a golden age for children with hearing loss. What they can expect out of life is what any child with typical hearing can.

• 19:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's because of what people like Suskind now routinely do.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  What I do each and every week is I implant this technology into the baby's cochlea, which is sort of a snail-like shaped structure where the nerve part of hearing begins. Then about two weeks later is really when their hearing birthday happens because you think it's when you, when I do the surgery, I have to tell parents, "Look, they're not going to hear you right after surgery." But, you know, two to three weeks later, the audiologist, with usually a whole gaggle of family members, are there to turn it on. And that's when...

• 20:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  So they really flip a switch at some point, yes?

• 20:30Speaker 04

  They, they literally flip a switch.

• 20:33Speaker 06

  Now, again, keep your eyes on her and within a few seconds it'll go on. You'll see her reaction.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  Natalie, Natalie, honey. Hi. Hi, baby. Hi.

• 20:51Speaker 04

  You hear mommy?

• 20:54Speaker 04

  You hear mommy?

• 20:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Suskin learned that giving kids the physiological ability to hear didn't mean they'd automatically be successful in learning language.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  You know, how do we learn language? It's not like all of a sudden, when a baby's born, they come out speaking in sentences and understand what you're saying. Hearing is not the ear, it's the brain. And it takes time for the brain to understand what those sounds mean.

• 21:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's what Suskin came to understand during follow-up visits with her patients.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  If I do a cochlear implant on a child at 18 months versus five years of age, it's a huge world of difference.

• 21:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is, the older ones had a much harder time learning language. And that's because the brain's neuroplasticity, its ability to develop with new stimuli, is most acute when children are under the age of three. Suskin found that age wasn't the only factor working against some kids. Poverty was also a big issue.

• 21:54Speaker 04

  When you take the Hippocratic oath, your responsibility doesn't end when the surgery ends, right? It ends when your patients do well. And for me, that meant understanding that there were so many, you know, what we call social determinants of health outside the operating room, which were impeding how my patients did.

• 22:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Suskin started a program called Project Aspire.

• 22:16Speaker 04

  Project Aspire is for children with hearing loss from low-income backgrounds. And as I was working on Project Aspire and learning, I realized, oh, my gosh, what's going on in my deaf population really just mirrors what's going on in the typically developing population at large.

• 22:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that led to Suskin founding another organization called the 30 Million Words Initiative, which gets its name from a remarkable study from the 1960s.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  Researchers Betty Hart and Todd Rizley started off during the War on Poverty in Kansas City, working with preschool students, trying to sort of improve their vocabulary, trying to impact the achievement gap.

• 22:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hart and Rizley, who were psychologists, studied the language environments of young children in 42 families.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  And they followed them for about two and a half years, till the age of three, going into the homes every month, recording, trying to understand what the language environment looked like. And what they found in a nutshell was that by the end of the age of three, children born into poverty will have heard 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers.

• 23:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow. By the age of three?

• 23:30Speaker 04

  By the end of the age of three, so right before they're turning four.

• 23:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  The deficit in words is indeed huge.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  But frankly, quality is even more important. And Hart and Riesley demonstrated differences in the quality of input, as well as many others. You know, with children from poor language homes, having, hearing more prohibitions and less affirmations, the "don't do that," "get down," less verbal back and forth, less complex vocabulary.

• 23:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  That combination, less vocabulary and less complex vocabulary, creates a major detriment.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  By 18 months, the children from language-poor homes are processing language at six months behind those from language-rich homes. So what I always like to say, and it's quite tragic, is that it's not just about language being, you know, vocabulary being poured into a baby's brain. It's really building a fundamentally different machine.

• 24:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if a language-rich environment is really helpful in building kids' brains, what's to be done about it? That is what Suskind and TMW, the 30 Million Words Initiative, are trying to figure out.

• 24:38Speaker 04

  We're developing programs, evidence-based programs, that reach parents where they are to get this message out. So we have something in the maternity wards, pediatrician's offices. Our best-developed program is this home visiting program where, over a six-month period of time, we, one-on-one with a home visitor, we go in and explain the science.

• 25:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we tag along as the 30 Million Words Project visits kids and parents in the home.

• 25:07Speaker 07

  So even if Sincere can count and say his ABCs, he won't be ready to learn if he can't sit still or follow directions.

• 25:15Speaker 08

  That's the problem I have right now, getting up so stiff.

• 25:19Speaker 07

  Pretty busy at this age, right?

• 25:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  And if you need to boost your word intake, well, there are more than 250 Freakonomics Radio podcasts you can download at Freakonomics.com, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 25:42Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 26:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 27:09Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 27:50Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 28:23Speaker 09

  See ya. Family. Food. Deep down. Mommy. I'm doggy, holdy. Daddy. Open it. It's hot. It's juicy, juicy. Peanut butter. Peanut butter. Apple. Peanut butter. Ball. Suppy, suppy, suppy, suppy. Happy, funny, world. Car. Yes, so nice. A puppy. First to basketball. I'm so... Go there.

• 28:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  The main goal of the 30 Million Words Home Visiting Program is to teach parents to effectively communicate with their kids during the critical years of brain development.

• 29:06Speaker 07

  We're going to be visiting Taquilla today, and her son is Sincere, so he's about like 17 months or so.

• 29:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Michelle Sines, the TMW home visitor. She's outside a seven-story brick apartment building on Chicago's west side.

• 29:22Speaker 07

  Hi, Taquilla. It's Michelle with the TMW study. We're down here.

• 29:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  The mom she's visiting is 22 years old.

• 29:30Speaker 08

  My name is Taquilla Williams, and my baby's name is Sincere Person. And we're sitting in the living room of my apartment.

• 29:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  The TMW Home Visit Program is being run as an RCT, a randomized controlled trial, to test its efficacy. It'll take a few years. Each family will get 12 visits during a six-month period. And then the researchers will do follow-up assessments for another three and a half years. They're hoping to enroll 200 families and have all the data by 2019. One tool the researchers use is a little device called a LINA, or Language Environment Analysis System. It's basically a pedometer for language. It counts words.

• 30:14Speaker 07

  OK. And so now we're going to look at your LINA report.

• 30:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  A parent is supposed to put the LINA in the kid's t-shirt pocket so it can record how many words are spoken by both child and parent.

• 30:27Speaker 07

  And so, on the day of your recording, Sincere heard an average of 963 words per hour. And I know for this one, you had set a goal for 1,100. You're really close to it, right? Just like right at there.

• 30:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's not the only kind of data the TMW initiative is gathering. For instance, they also measure the brain processing speed of the kids they're visiting.

• 30:53Speaker 10

  So it's a measure we do on two different home visits and three of our follow-up visits, and it gives us insight into the children's cognitive processing speed.

• 31:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Kristin Leffel. She's the Director of Operations for TMW. She was also visiting Toquilla and Sincere.

• 31:08Speaker 10

  So we set up a camera over the back of the laptop and asked the child to sit in the parent's lap and watch a little stimulus on the computer screen. So the stimulus basically puts up two images simultaneously. And so it might be a fish and a puppy. And then it'll say, "Look at the puppy. Do you see the puppy?"

• 31:29Speaker 11

  Where's the book? Can you find it? See the kitty? Can you find it?

• 31:37Speaker 10

  And so then we'll code it frame by frame to watch the child's eye movements. And it gives us insight into the processing speed in their brain.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  If you're slower, that means that you're taking a longer period of time to process a word that you already know, and you have less time to learn new words.

• 31:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Dana Suskind again.

• 31:59Speaker 04

  So you imagine at 24 months, children who have been exposed to less language are slower processors, so they're taking longer to understand what they already know. As a result, they can't pick up the newer words. So it's sort of like, you're not just behind in the race of life, you're a slower runner. So that's why you don't catch up.

• 32:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, it's like, compound interest. I mean, it's funny, as much as we hear the talk about how for every dollar you put away at age 20, it's the equivalent of, you know, whatever, $50 at age 50, what you're talking about is actually much, much more frightening to think about, the deficits at those early ages, because they start compounding at such a young age, yeah?

• 32:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's the reason that we need to start thinking in a preventative, rather than a remedial fashion. And it's not to say that we have all the answers, or that it's going to be easy, but it's about the only way that we can prevent this from occurring, because these children have potentials that we will never know. So that even when people are doing these different studies when they're older, which are great, you never want to stop. I mean, it's never too late. But you've built a different machine at that point.

• 33:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  The TMW program teaches parents a simple mantra to remember how to best communicate with their kids.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  How you explain to families and to this country what a rich language environment is, is complex. And what we've done in our research program is, we've culled it down to what we call the three Ts: tune in, talk more, and take turns.

• 33:36Speaker 07

  And so just as a review to Quilla, how did you guys use the three Ts this week?

• 33:41Speaker 08

  So, Saturday when we did the Lena recording, we went on the bus downtown.

• 33:47Speaker 08

  To see my dad.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Tune in is sort of the most nuanced of the Ts. It's really seeing what your child's interested in, following your child's lead, using that child-directed speech, that sing-songy voice. Talk more is as it sounds, talking more, using, you know, rich vocabulary, narrating while you're changing your baby's diaper. And take turns, which I think is the most powerful, is really viewing your child as a conversational partner. Even before they have a word or a babble, knowing that just by responding to any glances or gestures, you're getting them ready to have a conversation and to do it from day one. And those three Ts are the foundation and the behavioral measuring stick that we should all use in interacting with our children.

• 34:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  A behavioral measuring stick, a reminder that even though a program like 30 Million Words is all about the words, about the cognitive skills, there's also a lot to be gained in the non-cognitive realm, as John List and Steve Levitt saw in their Parent Academy experiment. The TMW randomized trial is now in its second round, and it's incorporating one of the key findings from the first.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  One of the biggest things we found is that parents, after the first trial, said, you know, this is great. Now I know how to build my baby's brain and make him smart, but how do I use my language to help him behave better? And so we actually have a week where we explain children's, you know, executive function and prefrontal cortex development, and how their language and how their modeling can help their children's behavior.

• 35:17Speaker 07

  Today, we're going to talk about another way to build Sincere's brain and help him do well in school. And so it takes more than being smart to be successful. So a child's behavior is just as important as his intelligence. So even if Sincere can count and say his ABCs, he won't be ready to learn if he can't sit still or follow directions.

• 35:38Speaker 08

  That's the problem I have right now, getting him to sit.

• 35:42Speaker 04

  He's pretty busy at this age, right?

• 35:44Speaker 08

  He's green light on all the time.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Green light on all the time, you said.

• 35:48Speaker 07

  And so the stronger Sincere's red light becomes, the better he will get at self-regulating. And so a big part of helping Sincere learn to self-regulate is watching you do it.

• 36:01Speaker 07

  And so use your three Ts to show him how you use your red light to self-regulate in challenging situations. And so when you notice yourself feeling frustrated or upset, talk more and explain how you're feeling to Sincere. And so tune into your tone of voice. If your tone is angry and loud, Sincere will think that it's an appropriate way to respond. And so if you stay calm, he will learn how to stay in control in tough situations.

• 36:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is there any evidence that two parents are better than one when it comes to learning language? I would think that one vigilant parent is certainly better than two crappy ones.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  I mean, obviously, when you're a single parent, there's a lot more stress and a lot more on your shoulders. And that's why I always say, you know, when you advocate for the power of parent talk, you also have to advocate for the parent.

• 36:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  It sounds like parent-child conversation is maybe the highest form of, you know, language acquisition. But where does TV fall into that? And is educational TV, you know, any better than the average TV?

• 37:08Speaker 04

  I mean, the studies are pretty compelling in the zero-to-three space that screen time is not necessarily a good thing. But in the book, I talked to several studies really showing how the screen of a human being saying exactly the same thing as somebody face-to-face will have absolutely no effect on sort of the language learning. Now with that, it's not so much that there's something wrong with the screen, it's that it's not responsively contingent. It's not responding to the child. And so I mentioned this cool study where it was a Skype with a responsively contingent adult who was responding to the child, and they were able to learn vocabulary, meaning that there's nothing wrong with the screen.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  It's more that we're social beings, and especially in those early, early years, you want something... Responding to the cues of that actual child's for language to stick.

• 38:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  But presumably, that could be a great use of artificial intelligence, right?

• 38:09Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 38:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right, if I can program, whether it's an iPad or a robot, to have a conversation that is contingent upon what the kid said.

• 38:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, technology right now is more on the distracting side of things, but certainly, as it evolves, you could imagine, you know, it becoming smart enough that, you know, maybe us parents aren't going to be necessary in the end, but it's got to evolve some more.

• 38:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Until that evolution is a bit further along, we wanted to find out more about TB's impact on early learning.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  There's this television program that's been entering the homes of millions of children for decades now.

• 38:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Melissa Carney.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  I'm a professor of economics at the University of Maryland.

• 39:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  She used to be a big fan of Sesame Street.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  My father says that my sisters and I learned everything we knew from Sesame Street.

• 39:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Her favorite character?

• 39:12Speaker 12

  Greetings, it is I, the Count, and it's time to answer that fascinating question, what is the Sesame Street number of the day?

• 39:22Speaker 03

  You know, I loved the Count, and I would get very excited when the Count came on, and recently, it's been pointed out to me that, as an economist, perhaps that's not a surprise that I would like the guy who came on and talked about numbers.

• 39:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Carney and her colleague, Phil Levine, were curious about whether a show like Sesame Street really helps young kids get ready for school. Many, many researchers had already concluded that it does. There have been more than 1,000 studies on the Sesame Street effect. But to an economist like Carney, studies like these are potentially problematic. They often rely on self-reported data, which, as we often preach around here, can be the lowest form of data. They may have identification and selection problems. That is, if you find that kids who watch Sesame Street do better in school than kids who don't, how do you know that it's not just that Sesame Street appeals to smarter kids or to the parents of smarter kids?

• 40:18Speaker 03

  So... Economists are really keen on finding what we call causal impacts. So we don't just want to say, oh, kids who watched Sesame Street when they were little did better when they got to school. So what we need to do is figure out a way to identify kids who watched Sesame Street that had nothing to do with them or their family's situation.

• 40:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK, how do you do that without running a giant randomized trial where you force some kids to watch Sesame Street and forbid others to watch?

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Sesame Street just came on the air in 1969. So the first thing we can do is say, hey, relative to the kids who were just born before them, did they do better when they got to school?

• 41:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  They found that, yes, the generation of kids born after Sesame Street did do better in school. But that alone couldn't prove the Sesame Street effect. Maybe schools were improving. Maybe the next generation was just smarter.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  And so just comparing those two generations could be misleading. It wouldn't be due to Sesame Street.

• 41:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Carney and Levine did find a way to make sense of the data.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Good for us as researchers, but bad for the kids. It turns out that a third of the kids in the country couldn't watch Sesame Street even when it came on, just because of limitations in television technology at the time.

• 41:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  In many areas, the show was broadcast on channels with a weak signal, which meant access was limited.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  So kids who, for example, in 1969 or '70 were living in Los Angeles or Southern California more generally, or Ohio, where they lived, Sesame Street was broadcast on a weaker station, and they couldn't get that signal. So there's this great variation for us as researchers. Two-thirds of the kids in the country could watch Sesame Street, a third couldn't, not because of anything their parents were doing, just because of where they happened to live and the station that was broadcasting Sesame Street in their county. So using that sort of two layers of differences, the kids who were younger versus older, and the kids who lived in places where Sesame Street was on a stronger broadcast signal

• 42:21Speaker 03

  or weaker signal, we can identify the effect that Sesame Street had on their school readiness.

• 42:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, then. What was the effect?

• 42:32Speaker 03

  We find that kids who were preschool age in places where they could watch Sesame Street were 14% less likely to fall behind when they got to elementary school. If we try and make a comparison of that number to what we see in the literature studying, for example, the Head Start program, our nation's publicly funded preschool program, the estimated effects on school performance are very similar.

• 43:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Head Start is estimated to cost about $7,600 a year per kid. How about Sesame Street?

• 43:06Speaker 03

  This costs $5 a year per kid to produce.

• 43:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, there's a big difference between a kid spending the day in preschool and just watching a TV show. Still, the Sesame Street effect is impressive.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  And in fact, that effect is entirely driven by kids who grew up in counties with higher levels of economic disadvantage. So I mean, places that had higher levels of high school dropout, had a higher rate of single parent households, had lower household income on average. These were the kids that really saw a relative improvement in their school performance. The effect is largest for boys and African Americans.

• 43:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And this, you will remember, is opposite what John List and Steve Levitt found with their parent academy interventions.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Our program really, really helps Hispanic and white students, and it doesn't help blacks at all.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  We were surprised by the results because if you look at just a lot of studies of interventions designed to help kids, you tend to see the largest results for girls and for whites. And here, we are finding the largest results are for boys and for African Americans. So we were pretty excited about that. You know, we could speculate, this gets a little bit outside of our expertise as economists, but Sesame Street was explicitly designed to help urban kids and minority kids. So if you remember- The set from when you were a kid and watched this, it's set on an urban stoop. And there are, you know, African-American characters feature prominently.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  So it's possible that Sesame Street did this well. And urban kids and minority kids related to the characters and related to the content and maybe took more away from it than they would have if the program were designed differently.

• 45:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's some good news, right? Sesame Street seems to have been successful in getting kids, especially low-income African-American boys, ready for school. But here's the bad news. Carney found that, long-term, the benefit wore off.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  We don't find a persistent effect on ultimate educational completion. Or, looking further down the road, we don't see that large of an effect on wages or employment. So you could think of, you know, our finding of a strong academic elementary school outcome, but not much in the long run as being consistent with this idea that Sesame Street wasn't impactful on those non-cognitive skills that will show up later in employment outcomes, for example.

• 46:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  So the evidence we've looked at today, from Sesame Street, from the 30 Million Words Initiative, from the Parent Academy, as inchoate as it is, seems to suggest, at the very least, that when we talk about learning...

• 46:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  We don't really know what we're talking about. Most of us, at least. Most of us probably think too much about cognitive skills and not enough about noncognitive. Most of us probably put way too much faith in the formal education system, when in fact, the path to learning begins way before then, at home.

• 46:52Speaker 04

  As sort of I've evolved in my thinking along this journey, it's really about early childhood.

• 46:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dana Suskind again.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  We need to reimagine what education looks like, because we needed to follow the science. Education doesn't start on the first day of school. It starts on the first day of life. And in this world, we have made little progress on what we call the achievement gap. And I truly believe that until we address education as it should be, in a scientific and biological way, right, because learning begins at day one, that we're never going to move the needle. We're remedial rather than preventative. And that's the larger issue.

• 47:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  A larger issue, of course, requires a larger effort. It requires that, rather than simply worrying about the success of your kids or my kids, we might do better to think about a new collective effort, to change our expectations of what it means to be a society that truly values learning. This would require a lot of work, perhaps even a lot of sacrifice. Dana Suskind has three kids of her own, 16, 13, and 10 years old. Her new book, 30 Million Words, ends with a terrible story, something that happened four years ago at Lake Michigan. "Our three children," she writes, "were playing in the sand, watched over by my husband,

• 48:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  their father, Don Liu. As he stood at the shoreline, he suddenly noticed, in the turbulent, chaotic distance, two young boys struggling in the raging waters. He started running into the lake, as our younger daughter cried out, 'Dad, don't go.'" They were the last words she ever said to her father. The two boys got back alive. My husband, always fearless when it came to helping others, died, overwhelmed by the torrential pounding of the waves and the gripping undertow.

• 48:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, your husband was a pediatrician as well, correct?

• 48:56Speaker 04

  He was a pediatric surgeon. So he did, actually mostly minimally invasive surgery. So with little portholes. He was a spectacular surgeon. And he said it's because he was really great at video games. So I would be-

• 49:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're making an argument against yourself now, you understand.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  I know. Well, it was terrible. I would be, we'd be next to each other at night and he'd be playing video games and I'd be writing a paper. But then he always made everything look easy. So, you know, he'd be the one who got the grants and, you know. So, yeah, no, he was just awesome. I don't know if you actually got to the end of the book, but he is-

• 49:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  I did, yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  -the epilogue. And for me, I included him both, you know, so he could continue on this journey as well as to really, you know, he's sort of a metaphor for what we need to be thinking about in this country, that every child in this country is our own and we should want for them what we want for our own children.

• 50:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Today's episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky. Our staff also includes Irvic Gunja, Jay Cowett, Merritt Jacob, Christopher Wirth, Caroline English, Alison Hockenberry, and Kasia Mohilevich. And thanks to our colleagues at New York Public Radio for recording their very vocal children for this episode. These kids might be in the 40 million word club. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find our entire podcast archive, the books, the blog, and more.

• 50:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  And on the next Freakonomics Radio, we start with a big question. Why do people have children?

• 50:51Speaker 03

  I think this is probably an open question for debate.

• 50:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then a smaller question. What happens to fertility after a big tragedy? The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, for instance.

• 51:02Speaker 13

  Women who had lost a child in the tsunami were about 10 percentage points more likely to have another birth after the tsunami than women whose children had survived.

• 51:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mortality and fertility. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 51:23Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 51:54Stephen J. Dubner?

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