The 74 Million – Kevin Mahnken
“Two of the oldest and most-cited early childhood education programs have yielded enormous social benefits, research from Nobel laureate James Heckman suggests. Although the costs of administering the 1970s-era programs — the Carolina Abecedarian Project and the Carolina Approach to Responsive Education (ABC/CARE) — were high, their results were more impressive: low-income families saw roughly $7.30 worth of benefit for every dollar spent, according to a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Heckman, a University of Chicago economist whose credentials include both a Nobel Prize and the John Bates Clark Medal, has spent much of his career researching the economics of human development. That analysis has included a focus on ABC/CARE, two identical childhood intervention studies that were conducted in the 1970s and have provided extremely rare longitudinal data on their subjects long into adulthood.”(more)