The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life (15 page)

Once again, the Griffin Foundation revealed its generosity, this time with a whopping $10 million initiative to work with young kids and their parents. So the Griffin Early Childhood Center (GECC) was born. GECC consists of two preschools in one of the poorest areas of Chicago, and it is the beating heart of one of the largest controlled field experiments in education ever conducted.

The GECC schools are a comprehensive, long-term field experiment to learn what works and why in very young children. By controlling the curricula and everything about the learning experience, we could also conduct several small-scale complementary experiments to better understand why the effects were taking the shape that we observed. The schools would be our learning labs, where we could discover how the “education production function” works for very young children.

The GECC Schools

Imagine two state-of-the-art private preschools. The entrance of each facility is bedecked with colorful signs, trimmed lawns, and flower boxes. The interior, sunshine-yellow walls sport cheerful paintings of houses and flowers. Children’s books fill the bookcases, and plastic trays and boxes overflow with toys, games, and art materials. Each school has five classrooms, five teachers, and five assistant teachers—one teacher for every seven or so students.

But this is where the similarities stop. When you dig beneath the surface, you see immediate and radical differences. In one of the two GECC schools, the so-called Tools of the Mind curriculum is based on social skills and structured play. Here preschool children learn to defer gratification. (Chances are that if you can wait for a reward, you will become more focused on the task and perform
better overall.) The kids in this school play different roles as they work and stroll through the school “town.” In the “bakery” section, a little girl is pretending to sell cupcakes to a little boy who has chosen to be a customer. Another little boy pretends to bake pies and cakes on the play stove. At the “school,” one child is a teacher and others are students. At the “doctor’s office,” a young nurse and doctor visit with another little patient. Later, the children practice playing games in which they see who can stand on one foot like a ballerina, or act like a quiet guard.

In this way, the children develop the noncognitive skills that are so important to successful functioning—learning to socialize, to be patient, to make decisions and follow directions, and to listen. How would learning these skills early on affect their futures? The study will follow them into adulthood to find out.

Nearby, in the other preschool—a partitioned-off area of a larger school—children and their parents enter a similarly colorful, warm atmosphere, but the curriculum is more traditional and academic. In this school, students work on learning their numbers and letters à la
Sesame Street
, and are introduced to basic reading. Small groups of children huddle around the table with their teacher and help each other identify shapes and colors on a big, colorful poster. Several children read to each other in the cozy reading corner, assisted by the teacher, who walks around and helps them. The theme one week comes from children’s author Eric Carle, and children’s colorful drawings of their own renditions of
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
line the walls.

The students in this particular arm of the experiment proceed through a curriculum called Literacy Express. The study promises to follow the children in both curricula on their paths through adulthood to see whether the preschool program makes a difference in their lives.

Then there is what we call the Parent Academy. In this arrangement, parents attend group meetings twice a month and learn one
of the two curricula taught in the preschool. They also receive financial incentives (up to $7,000 per year) based on their attendance and participation, as well as their child’s developmental progress. These financial incentives are either short-term or long-term. For example, parents in the “cash” treatment receive their money when the results of the regular assessments come in. Parents in the “college” treatment receive an injection to the child’s college account: if their child attends college, they can use their earnings toward tuition and fees. If the child skips college, they forfeit the money. We thought the longer-term incentive would spur parents not only to help their little ones now, but also to encourage them later on as the kids got older.

This ongoing experiment allowed us to test whether we can prompt behavioral change among parents and children. In too many cases, public education is a laissez-faire babysitter. Too many parents send their children off for the day, go to work, come home exhausted, microwave dinner, and eat it with the kids in front of the television. Effectively, many parents leave the navigation of the difficult waters of learning to teachers and the kids’ own devices. It’s as if they see their job as parents and the job of the schools as separate, like church and state.

We believe they should not be separate. But are we right? What difference would it make in children’s lives if education were really a joint process between teachers, parents, and students? To study this question, we needed to include parents and persuade them to take a more active role in their kids’ progress.

High Stakes

In the spring of 2010, we set out to accomplish several tasks in an extremely tight timeframe. We had to hire staff and teachers in the same manner in which an urban district would find personnel;
outfit the two preschools with the appropriate equipment, toys, and teaching materials; figure out ways to attract parents and students to the GECC program; and begin our field experiment. Tom Amadio helped us locate the perfect locations, principals, and faculty, and we “auditioned” candidates by watching them teach.

To attract students, we placed bilingual ads in Chicago Heights newspapers, hung flyers in grocery stores, sent out mass mailings, canvassed at student-teacher conferences, and put brochures in churches. In the summer of 2010, more than five hundred parents showed up to the initial meeting, and each received a lottery number. A lucky number would land the child in one of our programs (and possibly determine the trajectory of a child’s future), and an unlucky one would find the child in the control group, receiving nothing from our program except for invitations to a few holiday parties.

At the opening of the meeting, we told the assembled parents: “We are tired of sitting around watching our kids get left behind. The Griffin Early Childhood Center is all about receiving a free preschool education that could change your child’s life and your own. This is a huge opportunity for you and your children. Thanks very much for attending the lottery tonight. Good luck!”

As the bingo-ball cage began rolling, the parents stared at it anxiously.

“Number 52! Parent Academy!”

“We won!” two voices came from the back. Lolitha and Dwayne McKinney ran with their three boys to the front of the room to sign up their youngest son Gabriel, who was four years old. He was one of 120 lucky winners in the Parent Academy, and they were delighted.

Dwayne and Lolitha both came from rough Chicago neighborhoods. Lolitha was lucky enough to gain access to a strict Catholic school education, though Dwayne, like so many young black men, had few resources. He was raised by his working mother and grandmother in the rough neighborhood of Roseland, where he always felt like he might be a shooting victim. “I couldn’t go outside and play until I was ten or eleven,” he recalls. He never wanted much out of school; he just wanted to survive.

Today, Dwayne and Lolitha are passionately dedicated to improving the lives of their children. In exchange for attending the Parent Academy every other Saturday to discuss parenting techniques and learn to teach their children at home, they could earn up to $7,000 per year, depending on how well Gabriel did on his homework, attendance, and performance assessments. “We couldn’t have given it a shot unless there were the financial incentives,” says Dwayne. “The homework incentive motivated us a lot.” Many other parents in the above-mentioned college treatment also felt like they’d won the lottery.

The bingo-ball cage spun again, out dropped number 20, one of the all-day preschools.

“We hit the jackpot!” yelled Tamara, the twenty-year-old single parent of five-year-old Reggie. Tamara valued education, but because she became pregnant and dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen, her own dreams had been derailed. Reggie would join 149 other children in the preschool programs.

A third set of lottery numbers fell into the control group. These parents were disappointed. We tried to console them by saying that it was the luck of the draw, and that they would have another chance the following year. Still, they felt like they had missed out. Indeed, deep inside we believed that they had missed out as well. But we didn’t have the resources to intervene in every child’s life with our experiment.

The Dangers of Doing Field Experiments

What is precious to one parent is less precious to another, of course. If you are focused on sheer survival, worrying about your child’s education will be lower on the list. Getting Gabriel signed up for school was easy because his parents were so enthusiastic and committed. But despite all the enthusiasm we had managed to raise and the disappointments of many parents who missed out, getting all the lottery winners to participate turned out to be a huge challenge.

Of the 150 children who’d won the lottery for the preschools, twenty-two of them seemed to have disappeared three weeks before the programs were scheduled to begin, just as we were frantically putting the finishing touches on the new schools. All the other children’s parents had handed in the necessary paperwork. We were worried. Each missing child would lose what we truly believed was the opportunity of a lifetime. And it was likely that the kids who “disappeared” came from the families that most needed educational help. Combining this with the fact that our statistical tests would be more reliable if all these children attended our program, there was only one way to resolve the problem, and that was with boots on the ground.

We called an all-hands-on-deck meeting and told everyone involved in our nascent schools that we had to find these kids, no matter where they were, and get them registered for school no matter what. We had kids to help!

One of our key draftees was our wellness coordinator—the physical education teacher. Jeff, a tall, strapping, strong twenty-four-year-old, was the perfect guy to help us deal with what we knew could be threatening situations in tough neighborhoods. With Jeff, we figured we had the perfect person to reach these at-risk kids. No one in their right mind would mess with Jeff.

Now imagine you are Jeff, a middle-class white kid blessed with a loving family and with friends, interests, and a college education. Raised in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, a bucolic town near Madison, you have no idea how fortunate you are to have had the background you have. You haven’t spent a lot of time in dangerous neighborhoods.

It’s a sweltering summer afternoon in Chicago Heights, and you’ve signed up for this job at an experimental preschool. Your boss (John List, who also happens to be your uncle by marriage) drives you to the address of one of the twenty-two missing children, and hands you a packet of Spanish-language registration papers. “Go up to the door and knock,” John says. “When someone answers, tell them you want to sign up Gabriella for school.”

You’ve been warned that this part of Chicago Heights is not a particularly happy place. An awful lot of people who live here are armed and dangerous: you know that even the police sometimes avoid this neighborhood. The mostly minority population is transient: families move often if they can’t pay the rent. Many families don’t speak English, and children are often left alone, fending for themselves while their parent or parents are at work. Or they’re left with an overwhelmed relative or someone who may be strung out on alcohol or drugs. To you, this is a foreign country.