The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life (16 page)

What do you do? Do you cinch up your pants and get out of the car, or do you refuse to go? In this case, you look at John and say, “No way.”

After a couple of stare-down minutes, John opens the car door. “Wimp,” he snorts as he gets out of the car.

“You’re nuts, you know that?” you shout after him as he walks toward the house. You quickly lock the car doors behind him.

John strides up to the door and knocks. No one answers. Then he walks over to a nasty-looking neighbor, a grizzled character straight out of Clint Eastwood’s
High Plains Drifter
, peering out from the broken window. “I’m looking for Gabriella,” John says. “Can you tell me where she is?” The fellow just stares at him. Your fingers hover over your cell phone, ready to call 9-1-1 in case anything happens. And then a middle-aged woman shows up at the window. “He no speak Engleesh,” she says.

“I’m running a school, and Gabriella was chosen to go to it,” John says. “I need to get this information to her mother.”

“Look in back of house,” says the woman. “If a blue car is there, she is home. If not . . .” she shrugs.

Over the next couple of weeks, you and John pay ten visits to this house before you finally see the blue car. John knocks on the door and hands the packet to Gabriella’s mother.

One down. Twenty-one to go.

At another house, you also refuse to get out of the car, so John walks up to the door and knocks incessantly. From a distance, you can hear a television blaring the voices of
Dora the Explorer
. Someone must be home. John disappears out of sight as he walks around to the back of this house. Now you wish you’d at least gone with him. Before full-fledged panic sets in, John returns to the front where you watch as he knocks again. “Carmella, come to the door,” he says. “I am putting some papers under it. Give these to your mom.” He stands there for a long time, and then slowly, slowly, the sheets are pulled from underneath the door.

John tells you later he had to hoist himself up on a ledge to see inside the back window while the neighbors gathered to watch and laugh. “I know Carmella is in there,” he told them, “because my kids watch that show too. Why aren’t they answering the door?” One of the neighbors told him the girl was probably alone.

Twenty to go.

The next day you drive to where Liliana lives, in the red-brick projects where murders and beatings are not uncommon. As you drive around looking for the right building, you see some big dude following you in his car. You find the right building and park. The guy parks too. You’re afraid to leave the car, but even more afraid to stay behind this time. So when John opens the car door, you decide to join him. You both walk up to the apartment and knock. You glance back and see the guy who followed you is standing in the yard now, watching you and John with suspicious, catlike eyes.

The door opens, and dozens of kids answer it, tumbling over each other to see the visitor. Eventually, an old woman with jaundice-yellow eyes comes to the door.

“Is Liliana here?” you ask, feeling the gaze of the fellow who’s been following you knifing through your back.

“This is Liliana,” says a black girl in her early teens who is wearing a big, bloody bandage around her head. You wonder how this girl got hurt. Did she fall? Was she beaten? The sea of children parts, and a beautiful, wide-eyed three-year-old girl toddles toward the door. You look down at Liliana and then squat so you can look into her eyes. “Do you want to go to school?” you ask.

“Yes,” the little girl says definitively. “I want to go to school.”

“I signed her up,” the teenager with the bandage says proudly. “I’m her sister. She’s smart. I want to give her the chance that I never had. She can do it.”

You leave the papers with the teen sister, turn around, and walk down a few steps into the yard to find twenty threatening-looking black men staring hard at you and your uncle. “What are you doing here?” one of them asks.

“We’re here because Liliana is one of the lucky ones,” John says. “She got into a wonderful program. She gets to go to a free school before she goes to public school.”

“She don’t need nothin’. She got all she needs,” someone else says. But they let you and John pass unharmed.

Once you are safely in the car, you send a text to John’s wife. “Your husband is completely nuts. You know that?”

How Far Have We Come?

Both of the GECC schools and the parent academy are now up and running; as we noted earlier, our hope is to figure out which key skills children should acquire in early childhood in order to prepare them for later success. The Griffins’ ongoing funding also lets us track the educational and career trajectory of the students until the very ends of their lives. Not since the golden era of social experiments of the 1960s and 1970s have economists embarked on a project of this scale.

To see how everyone is doing, we have all the children in the various treatments undergo a series of comprehensive assessments three times a year—once before the start of the program, once mid-year (January), and once at the end of the year—in which the kids are tested on academic or cognitive skills (such as vocabulary, basic writing and spelling, basic problem solving, counting, and pattern matching) and executive function skills (or noncognitive skills, such as testing for impulsivity).

We also want to see how well we can prepare very young children from Chicago Heights for kindergarten. As a group, these children have tended to underperform in cognitive development relative to the national average: at pre-assessment, they were, on average, in the thirtieth to thirty-fourth percentile. Would they catch up and close the gap if they completed our experimental program? This question is important, because starting kindergarten as a lower-than-average performer can hinder achievement in grades K-12.

The GECC experiment is still in the early stages, but the results so far have been very promising, despite the unstable and even horrific environments in which many of the children spend their before- and after-school time.
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By the time Liliana had spent a few months in the program, says her sister, she could look at a book and make up a story; she was mastering verbal skills. Gabriella, Carmella, and Gabriel are all doing well, too.

Overall, the preschool curricula are both working beautifully. Over the first ten months of the program, students in the Literacy Express program have leapt ahead by more than nineteen academic months on their cognitive scores, effectively doubling that of the average preschool-aged child. That is, for every month that has passed, the students have learned almost two months of material. We’re proud of these results. Students’ cognitive scores have also increased considerably in the Tools of the Mind program. Those children are now testing roughly at the national average for cognitive test scores, and are doing quite well on noncognitive skills such as self-control. Students in the two preschool programs are now doing better than the average child nationwide when tested on both cognitive and noncognitive skills.

In summary: when the right kinds of incentives are applied via the scientific method, poor kids can do just as well as rich kids within ten months.

What about the Parent Academy? Children like Gabriel whose parents are enrolled in this program have shown improvements too, and they are catching up to the national average. But they are not doing as well as the kids enrolled in either of the preschools. Still, the short-term incentives seem to be quite strong: kids who have parents in the cash treatment perform much better than those whose parents are in the college treatment.

One delightful result is that kids with parents in the Parent Academy stayed on track after the program ended. That is, they weren’t as susceptible to falling back in the summertime when they weren’t in school. So even though the kids in the Parent Academy have not increased their performance by the same margin as those in our preschools, it looks like they could outperform those kids in the long run. This is because adults enrolled in the Parent Academy now have the tools to work with their children, and to continue to work with them long after we have directly touched them. In fact, those parents who were given the long-term, college scholarship incentive invested the most in their kids during the summer.

One unanticipated data pattern showed that the lion’s share of gains across all of our programs occurred in the first few months of the program—between September and January of the first year. This result is tantalizing, because it might mean that pre-K education is most beneficial over much shorter time periods than previously believed. Importantly, it opens up the possibility of “kinder-prep” programs that can be completed in the summer months directly before kindergarten—when teachers and school space are readily available. (We are now in the first year of testing this proposition.)

The Griffins’ investment in a few years of early education has allowed children who were once consistently at the bottom of the rankings to leapfrog their way past the average. Will these effects persist? Will the impact of parental involvement eventually overtake an investment in early childhood education? Will a kinder-prep program give our kids the extra lift they need to compete in today’s global economy? Time will tell and, thanks to the Griffins, we’ll be there to find out.

Saving Public Schools

What do the following people have in common—Albert Einstein, Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg,
Steven Spielberg, Shaquille O’Neal, Michael Jordan, and Oprah Winfrey?

They all went to public schools.

Until the 1840s, only children from wealthy families could receive an education. If that were the case today, most of the US population would probably be illiterate; and most, if not all of the people we just named might have had no work options beyond manual labor. But in the nineteenth century, something wonderful happened: public education in the United States became freely available to all children. Today, 85 percent are literate. If you think about public education in this context, you realize it has really been an amazing success.

But when you discover that kids in poor neighborhoods are graduating at the same low rate as people long ago, you know we can and should do much, much better. Public education is the only way for them to climb out of poverty and up the economic ladder. If it weren’t for public schools, many urban kids wouldn’t stand a chance. But the unfortunate fact is that such schools barely scratch the surface of what is possible, and they leave millions of children behind to endure wasted lives of grinding poverty.

What have we learned?

For decades, public education has been a source of political platitudes and mired in status-quo thinking. Despite the fact that every presidential candidate coughs up a host of ideas and surrounds himself with dozens of smart advisors who have innovative suggestions for fixing public education, nothing to date has worked. The past few decades of educational reform have shown that innovation for the sake of innovation isn’t likely to change America’s gap in educational achievement.

But down-at-the-heel Chicago Heights provides hope that there is a way out of this morass. When parents, teachers, and students from preschool to ninth grade are motivated to perform better, they do.
We found that the right incentives, combined with a better behavioral framing of the context, can make a huge difference.

We now understand better how simple incentives work in education, and how, for example, framing incentives in terms of losses boosts performance. Kids respond to bribes, but they respond better to behavioral manipulations; if you give them $20 to perform well on a test and threaten to take it away if their performance isn’t up to par, students do much better.

Likewise, when teachers both (a) worked in teams and (b) were threatened with losing a large bonus they had already received, student achievement soared—effectively closing the education gap. Understanding how to reward students, parents, and teachers can raise test scores between 50 and 100 percent—putting the underprivileged kids on the same level as those from rich white neighborhoods.