July 30, 2008

Improving America's Schools and Reducing Economic Inequality With Adult
Education: Toward a Multiple Life Cycles Education Policy

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

In February of 2006 I wrote a note entitled Adult Education Makes Early
Childhood Education a Good Economic Development Strategy. In that note I
reported research by James Heckman, Nobel Prize winning economist, which I
argued supported the need for a greater commitment to adult literacy
education integrated with parenting education.

This idea has been revived by my reading of an article by David Brooks in
the New York Times (reprinted in the San Diego Union-Tribune on Wednesday,
July 30, 2008). In this article Brooks reports that in a book entitled
"Schools, Skills and Synapses," Heckman addresses issues of educational
inequality and "directs attention at family environments, which have
deteriorated over the past 40 years."

In my article of February 2006 I recounted an interview with Heckman in June
of 2005
by the Minneapolis branch of the Federal Reserve Bank. He was asked about
making the case for early childhood education (ECE) as an economic
development strategy.

In his response, Heckman downplayed the effects of ECE on cognitive skills,
and instead stated, " Enriched early intervention programs targeted to
disadvantaged children have had their biggest effect on noncognitive
skills: motivation, self-control and time preference. We know that there's
a scientific basis for this finding. The prefrontal cortex, which is a
center of these noncognitive skills, matures late. The executive function,
the very definition of ourselves as people, the way we motivate ourselves,
these things are malleable until quite late stages—into the 20s, according
to research by neuroscientists. This means that in principle we can modify
these behaviors. Noncognitive skills are powerfully predictive of a number
of socioeconomic measures (crime, teenage pregnancy, education and the
like
.Kids in the Perry Preschool Program, an early childhood intervention,
are much more successful than similar kids without intervention even though
their IQs are no higher. And the same is true of many such interventions.
There is a lot of research on such programs."

Heckman also considered that by starting early enough with ECE it may be
possible to actually raise the IQs of disadvantaged children. In this
regard he cited the Abcediarian program aimed at disadvantaged children and
which starts at 3 or 4 months after the children are born and intervenes up
to age 8 in some cases.

Interestingly, in other economic analyses, Lynch (2004) also cited the
research on the Perry Preschool and Abcediarian projects, along with other
ECE programs,  as supporting the importance of ECE preschool programs.
Lynch states that many of these early education childhood programs  " also
provide adult education and parenting classes for the parents of young
children." (p vii).  This suggests that perhaps a  significant percentage
of the benefits that early childhood education programs produce might
result from the effects of adult parenting and literacy education
activities that take place in these programs.

Indeed, research by Morrison, Bachman, & Connor (2005) has questioned the
effectiveness of both childcare and preschool programs that do not focus on
improving parenting skills.  Concerning childcare, they say, "Overall,
parenting appears to be a more important source of influence on children’s
development than is childcare. 
 the contribution of parenting was about
three to four times greater than that of early childcare. 
high-quality
childcare will not offset the negative effect of poor parenting, and
poor-quality childcare will not prevent success for children with effective
parents." (pp. 48,49).

The fact that Heckman points to the importance of noncognitive skills as
important outcomes of preschool, such as increasing children’s motivation
for and interest in education, is also suggestive of the importance of
adult education in contributing to the cost-benefits of ECE. Numerous
studies of adult basic education (ABE) have found that noncognitive skills
are the major outcomes of ABE. Almost universally, studies of ABE outcomes
report that adults feel better about themselves, they overcome learned
helplessness, they feel more motivated to succeed in life, and,
importantly, these positive noncognitive skills often modify adults’
behaviors with their children.

In research with Wider Opportunities for Women, Sandra Van Fossen and I
found that mothers enrolled in basic skills programs reported that they
spoke more with their children about school, they read to them more, they
took them to the library more and so forth (Van Fossen & Sticht, 1991). In
one visit to a single mother’s home, the mother’s second grader said, "I do
my homework just like Mommy"
 and thrust his homework into the researcher’s
hand. This type of noncognitive skill development in the child was obtained
for free as a spin-off of an adult basic skills program.

This type of intergenerational transfer of noncognitive skills from parents
to their children in adult basic education and early childhood education
programs means that more attention needs to be paid to the role of adult
education in contributing to the cost-benefits of both ABE and ECE.

Extensive research also shows that adult’s cognitive, language, and literacy
skills can be transferred intergenerationally to their children. Hart &
Risley (1995) present extensive data showing how the oral language skills
of parents in professional, working class, and welfare homes are used to
transfer thinking, language, and literacy skills to their children.

Because of the importance of adult basic education in promoting the
intergenerational transfer of both cognitive and noncognitive skills from
parents to their children, education policy needs to be focused not just on
one child’s life cycle, but on the life cycles of both adults and their
children.

A "Multiple Life Cycles" policy for education explicitly recognizes that
educational policies do not affect only one generation but through the
intergenerational transfer of motivation, language, and literacy they
affect many cycles of lives across generations (see also Sticht, 1983). For
this reason governments need to invest in adult literacy and lifelong
education with the understanding that this investment will not only provide
returns in terms of increased productivity, health, and civic participation
on the part of the adults, but also with the understanding that the
investment in the education of adults may also produce returns in the
increased educability of the adult’s children. Good adult literacy
education integrated into parenting education is the backbone of good
preschool education.


>From the Multiple Life Cycles education policy perspective, it can be

understood that investments in high quality adult literacy education can be
construed as high quality early childhood education. Importantly, adult
literacy education can actually affect the work of the schools even before
children are conceived, because better educated parents produce fewer
children, get better prenatal care and have fewer babies with various
disabilities, both physical and cognitive.

Today we have a better understanding that in large percentages, poorly
educated children are the source of adult functional illiteracy, and
functionally illiterate adults are the source of poorly educated children.
The hope is that through education based on a Multiple Life Cycles
education policy better educated parents will produce more educable
children, thus reducing inequalities in achievement in school, raising the
skills of the children most at risk,  and leading to greater growth in and
equality in the economy.

[Note: for an expanded argument for a Multiple Life Cycles education policy
see Toward a Multiple Life Cycles Education Policy: Investing in the
Education of Adults to Improve the Educability of Children. An extensive
review is presented of research on early childhood education, brain science
and children's and adult's development, relationships of parent's education
to children's literacy, parenting and preschool effectiveness, and other
issues.
http://www.nald.ca/library/research/sticht/06dec/06dec.pdf]

References

Hart, B. & Risley, T. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday
experiences of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes
Publishing Co.

Lynch, R. (2004). Exceptional Returns: Economic,Fiscal,and Social Benefits
of Investment in Early Childhood Development. Washington, DC:
Economic Policy Institute (http://www.epinet.org)

Minneapolis Federal Reserve (2005, June). Interview with James. J. Heckman.
(http://minneapolisfed.org/pubs/region/05-06/heckman.cfm)

Morrison, F., Bachman, H, & Connor, C. (2005). Improving Literacy in
America. New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

Sticht, T. G. (1983, February). Literacy and Human Resources Development at
Work: Investing in the Education of Adults to Improve the Educability of
Children. Alexandria, VA: Human Resources Research Organization.

Van Fossen, S. & Sticht, T. (1991, July). Teach the Mother and Reach the
Child: Results of the Intergenerational Literacy Action Research Project of
Wider Opportunities for Women. Washington, DC: Wider Opportunities for
Women.

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
2062 Valley View Blvd.
El Cajon, CA 92019-2059
Tel/Fax: (619) 444-9133
Email: tsticht at aznet.net