Click here for this overview in PDF format.

In 2007, we evaluated charities that aim to improve equality of opportunity in the United States, through a variety of programs ranging from early childhood care to K-12 education to employment assistance for adults. We found that:

Below are the highlights of what we learned. For more detail, see our reports on individual causes:

• Early childhood care report
• K-12 education report
• Employment assistance report

The achievement gap

U.S. children who grow up in low-income households are statistically less likely to succeed in school, more likely to have low earnings themselves, and more likely to be arrested and incarcerated compared to other children. Is it possible for a donor to help improve equality of opportunity?

(Data in the charts below comes from the from Panel Study of Income Dynamics as found in Duncan, Kalil and Ziol-Guest, 2008).

The achievement gap starts in early childhood

Different organizations have extremely different views of where these disparities come from, and of what a donor can do to help “close the opportunity gap.” For our part, we question how much can be accomplished by low-intensity and/or late-in-life interventions, because of consistent evidence that the achievement gap is generally significant before children enter kindergarten.

(The data below comes from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort as found in Rathbun, West and Hausken, 2004. Note that this source provides mean scale scores, not percentile ranks; we converted the scores to percentile ranks by assuming a normal distribution and using the data on standard deviations found in Murnane, Willett, Bub and McCartney, 2006. Our calculations are available in an Excel file, located here.)

Improving equality of opportunity: a donor’s options

Early childhood care: day care and other programs - Extremely promising, but organizations vary in approaches and effectiveness

Early childhood care has been rigorously shown to make a positive difference in later life outcomes. Early childhood care is superior – in terms of the quality of research and the impressiveness of the results – to any other intervention we’ve seen aimed at improving later life outcomes for disadvantaged people in the U.S. This superiority is particularly compelling in the context of the fact that many of the disparities charities seek to address appear to be present in and before kindergarten.

Select preschool programs have demonstrated impressive impacts on later life outcomes; in some studies, children who were randomly selected for intensive pre-K care had higher high school graduation rates at age 18 and superior academic performance as late as age 21. (For our full report on pre-school programs, click here.) However, results from less intensive preschool programs are more mixed, and we have been unable to find a preschool-centered charity that can demonstrate a consistent and lasting effect on its enrollees (either by tracking them directly or by demonstrating fidelity to an already-proven model).

Early childhood care, Nurse-Family Partnership - Effective

The Nurse-Family Partnership is a standout for its commitment to a truly proven program. The program consists of sending registered nurses to perform regular visits to low-income mothers, both during and immediately after pregnancy (up until the child’s second birthday), in order to counsel them on issues such as birth spacing, child nutrition, and maintaining a safe and supportive environment. Repeated studies of this program have shown lasting differences between those who did and didn’t participate in the program (even when participants were chosen by lottery). For our full report on the Nurse-Family Partnership, click here.

K-12 education, from public to private school - Not effective

One of the charities we evaluated – the Children’s Scholarship Fund – gives partial tuition scholarships to low-income families, helping them to send their children to the school of their choice. Yet the studies we’ve seen of such scholarships indicate little, if any, effect on academic performance. For full details on the studies we read, see our review of the Children’s Scholarship Fund here.

The charts below are taken from a study of the New York City Voucher experiment, in which students were offered partial-tuition scholarships by random lottery. A “treatment group” of those offered scholarships and a “control group” of those not offered scholarships were tracked and compared to each other on math and reading achievement; very little difference emerged over the three years of the evaluation.

(Data in the charts below comes from Myers, Peterson, Mayer, Chou and Howell 2000 for years 0-2 and Mayer, Myers, Tuttle, and Howell 2000 for year 3.)

Similar experiments in other cities have yielded similar results (see this for more detail). We find this result counterintuitive but plausible. We have two hypotheses for why a scholarship program may not work as well as hoped:

• Partial-tuition scholarships may primarily benefit the most motivated families – families that would find ways to improve their educational situation with or without scholarships. (Similar dynamics could apply to nearly any education-related intervention that relies on voluntary application and enrollment.)
• “Normal” private schools may not be the best setting for students who are already disadvantaged and struggling, and who may need extra help.

K-12 Education, Knowledge is Power Program - Appears effective

The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) takes the position that disadvantaged students are behind from the day they enter, and need schools that are focused on going above and beyond a “normal” education. Our analysis implies that KIPP is having a real effect on academic outcomes, showing significant gains throughout KIPP’s national network of schools.

(Data in the charts below comes from publicly available standardized test scores. Please see our report on KIPP for full information on data and sources.)

We do not have lottery-based data for KIPP, as we do for scholarship programs, and we’ve had to make certain assumptions in estimating its impact. But ultimately, we believe that KIPP is making a real difference where many others are not. (Our full analysis is available by clicking here.)

K-12 Education, Other Approaches - Not Proven

Other interventions, such as tutoring programs and summer school, have little evidence of any kind behind them; having seen how an intuitive and appealing solution like scholarships can fail to have the desired effects, we are not optimistic about such programs.

Employment assistance programs: Costly and unproven

Employment assistance programs cost up to $20,000 per person served (this is almost twice the cost of a year of grade-school education, or twice the entire per-person cost of the Nurse Family Partnership program), and often see a small minority of their enrollees get jobs that they hold for more than a year. We have yet to see a program in this area with clear evidence that it is helping people get better jobs, careers, or lives than they could get without charitable assistance. (For our full report on employment assistance, click here.)

Conclusion

• By the age of five, children from low-income families are substantially behind academically. Measures such as earnings and incarceration show analogous differences later in life.
• Research shows that early childhood care can have substantial effects on later life outcomes such as academic achievement, earnings, and criminal behavior. The Nurse-Family Partnership, which arranges home visits by nurses to low-income mothers, is an outstanding charity in this area, committed to replicating a proven program.
• Some evidence suggests that the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a charity that runs charter schools aimed at disadvantaged children, can significantly improve their academic performance.
• Many post-kindergarten interventions – from academic scholarships and vouchers to employment assistance programs – are costly, and evidence does not support the notion that they effectively change life outcomes.

References

• Duncan, G. J., Kalil, A. & Ziol-Guest, K. 2008. "The economic costs of early childhood poverty," Partnership for America’s Economic Success, Issue Paper #4. Available online.
• Murnane, R.J., Willett, J.B., Bub, K.L. & McCartney, K. 2006. "Understanding trends in the black-white achievement gaps during the first years of school," Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs.
• Rathbun, A., West, J. & Hausken, E. G. 2004. "From Kindergarten through the third grade: children’s beginning school experiences," National Center for Educational Statistics. Available online.
• Myers, D., Peterson, P., Mayer, D., Chou, J. & Howell, W. G. 2000, ‘School choice in New York City after two years: an evaluation of the School Choice Scholarships Program,’ Mathematica Policy Research. Available online.
• Mayer, D., Peterson, P., Myers, D., Tuttle, C. C. & Howell, W. G. 2000, ‘School choice in New York City after three years: an evaluation of the School Choice Scholarships Program,’ Mathematica Policy Research. Available online.