Search

We define educational access as the component of a neighborhood's value that is determined by the set of schools available to its residents. This paper studies the extent to which educational access is determined by sorting based on heterogeneous preferences over school attributes, or local institutions that constrain residential location and school choice--such as school catchment areas and housing regulation. We develop a spatial equilibrium model of residential sorting and school choice, estimated using data from a large school district in the United States. The model replicates the responses of house prices and school enrollment to quasi-experimental variation in school peer composition and school transportation provision. We find that low-income families prioritize proximity to schools while high-income families and families with high-skilled children place more value on school peer composition. We use the model to evaluate how the geography of neighborhood sorting influences the aggregate and distributional outcomes of a school-choice expansion (place-based) and a housing voucher (people-based) policy. We find that both policies result in net welfare losses, with only marginal improvements in school peer composition for the average low-income family. Although eligible families benefit from these policies, the negative impact falls on families who currently invest in their children's education by residing in expensive neighborhoods. Under both policies, higher-income families are less exposed to the inflow of low-income children into their schools, either because of their longer distance from target neighborhoods or because of the cost imposed by residential zoning regulation on voucher recipients.

This report, commissioned by the Bay Area Geographic Leads Consortium, explores how five county offices of education and local school districts pivoted to reach, teach, and support the holistic needs of students experiencing homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report documents the rising number of students experiencing homelessness as well as the causes and consequences of childhood homelessness. It also describes how educators faced unique challenges and creatively found solutions to educating students without a stable home or an appropriate place to attend school remotely. Each county offers promising examples of ways to provide instruction and learning supports to students without homes and meaningful ways to deliver urgently needed social-emotional, mental health, and well-being assistance to students and families, including meeting basic needs such as food and shelter. The report also describes innovative ways that the counties addressed technology and connectivity gaps that resulted from the shift to distance learning and collaborated with community-based partners.

Despite the recent dramatic rise in student homelessness in the U.S., little research evidence exists on the effects of homelessness programs and interventions on students and young people. This paper examines the effects of a homelessness prevention and rapid rehousing program--which combines temporary rental subsidies with light-touch case management--on homeless and highly mobile students in a large urban school district. By linking detailed district administrative data with programmatic data, I create a novel dataset that allows me to estimate impacts to students in the immediate weeks and months following exposure to the rehousing intervention. Specifically, I use generalized and event study difference-in-differences models to estimate within-student differences in district and school mobility, attendance, and behavioral outcomes before and after beginning participation in the program. I find that the treatment improves student behavior, significantly reducing the likelihood of students having multiple behavioral incidents in a month, but increases students' absence rates and chronic absenteeism, particularly for students who are rehoused outside the city proper but remain enrolled in the central district. These results highlight both the positive impacts of this type of intervention, as well as unintended consequences, raising questions around the priorities and inherent tradeoffs of rehousing programs.

As education systems around the world begin to emerge from COVID-19-related lockdown, governments are facing the difficult decision of when and how to reopen schools, balancing the risks of widespread learning loss -- and the impact this will have on a generation of learners -- with the risks of virus transmission, which are more significant in low-income settings. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Education Development Trust has sought to be highly responsive to the changing needs of educators, system leaders and partners around the world. In doing so, Education Development Trust has developed an evidence base from which new thinking has been developed, called 'Learning Renewed', which reimagines what more effective, equitable and resilient education systems might look like, and how they might better withstand future shocks. This programme of work will be continuing in the coming months, but this report is the first major think piece in this series. In it, a vision for 'flexible reopening' of schools is outlined, supplemented by community-based learning. A 'middle way' is proposed between full closure and full reopening, featuring smaller, tutorial-style classes attending school on a part-time basis, supplemented by community-based learning. The flexible opening model is not without challenges, but it offers the real potential to ensure higher quality education provision for some of the world's most vulnerable children. [For "Maintaining Learning Continuity during School Closure: Community Health Volunteer Support for Marginalised Girls in Kenya. Paper 2 of the Learning Renewed Series," see ED614319.]

The efficiency-equity trade-offs in public service delivery may be influenced by the dependency of local governments on their own resources rather than inter-governmental grants. School districts in the United States are expected both to produce human capital efficiently and to provide educational opportunity equally. To ascertain school district trade-offs, we estimate effects of revenue source on student performances in math and reading. Achievement is estimated from 225,000 observations weighted to be district representative. Estimates are made with OLS [ordinary least squares], geographic discontinuity models exploiting differences at state borders, and 2SLS [two-stage least squares] models that use changes in housing prices as an instrument. For every 10 percent increase in local revenue share, achievement increases by a sizeable 0.02 to 0.06 standard deviations. Gains for students from low socio-economic backgrounds are about half those from higher ones. Both voice and exit channels moderate the efficiency-equity trade-off. Implications for federalism and state policy are discussed.

This paper identifies which investments in school facilities help students and are valued by homeowners. Using novel data on school district bonds, test scores, and house prices for 29 U.S. states and a research design that exploits close elections with staggered timing, we show that increased school capital spending raises test scores and house prices on average. However, impacts differ vastly across types of funded projects. Spending on basic infrastructure (such as HVAC) or on the removal of pollutants raises test scores but not house prices; conversely, spending on athletic facilities raises house prices but not test scores. Socio-economically disadvantaged districts benefit more from capital outlays, even conditioning on project type and the existing capital stock. Our estimates suggest that closing the spending gap between high- and low-SES districts and targeting spending towards high-impact projects may close as much as 25% of the observed achievement gap between these districts. [Additional support from The Broad Center at the Yale School of Management.]

During the 2015-2016 school year, 1.3 million students nationwide experienced homelessness. Yet hardships like homelessness represent dynamic rather than static states, and so annual figures understate the cumulative risk that students face over time. Moreover, despite recent efforts to understand eviction and foreclosure as exploitative and racialized processes, there have been few efforts to connect homelessness to these and other structural conditions. Using administrative data on the population of public school students in Michigan, we found that close to one in ten students experienced homelessness while in school. Moreover, black students were over three times more likely to experience literal homelessness than white students. County-year fixed effects models indicate that rental costs, forced housing moves, and the opioid epidemic were associated with greater student homelessness. These findings have implications for our understanding of racial inequalities and the ways in which disadvantage and inequality are products of exploitative relationships.

Tiebout theorizes that local public services are provided more efficiently if costs are paid out of local revenues rather than by inter-governmental grants. But if local politics is not as pluralistic as Dahl has argued, citizens of higher socio-economic status will exercise greater influence, resulting in higher inequalities in service provision. We use administrative data to estimate the impacts of local revenue shares on individual performance of a nationally representative sample of over 140,000 U.S. eighth graders in math and reading. Causal effects are estimated with geographic discontinuity models and 2SLS models that use change in housing prices as an instrument. For every 10 percent increase in local revenue share, students perform about 0.05 standard deviations higher. Gains from local funding are less for disadvantaged students. Local financing affords better education for all but widens achievement gaps.

This paper was written in 2018 by NCWD/Youth [National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability for Youth] to inform the development of the Guideposts for Success 2.0, an update to the original Guideposts for Success published in 2005. Since it was created in 2005, the Guideposts for Success has become nationally recognized as a valuable research-based framework to inform policies and practices designed to prepare and support youth in transition to adulthood. In 2012, NCWD/Youth began an in-depth process aimed at updating the Guideposts for Success to reflect the latest research studies and current professional standards of practice for supporting youth in transition to adulthood across multiple service systems and sectors. The process included reviewing literature related to youth transition from multiple disciplines.

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but we know little about how Asian immigration has affected cities, neighborhoods and schools. This paper studies white flight from Asian arrivals in high-socioeconomic-status Californian school districts from 2000-2016 using initial settlement patterns and national immigrant flows to instrument for entry. We find that, as Asian students arrive, white student enrollment declines in higher-income suburbs. These patterns cannot be fully explained by racial animus, housing prices, or correlations with Black/Hispanic arrivals. Parental fears of academic competition may play a role.

This paper examines the U.S. social insurance system, which we define broadly to include both programs supported by dedicated taxes and other federal programs that provide income support, assistance in meeting basic needs, or services to improve economic opportunity. The paper considers the social insurance system as a whole as well as its component parts, providing an overview of major federal programs in the areas of education and workforce development, health, income support, nutrition, and housing. The paper covers how the social insurance system is organized, how eligibility is determined and who benefits, how the benefits and services are delivered, and how the system affects poverty and inequality. We focus primarily on the system as it operated prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also look at how various programs respond to economic downturns. Coming at a time when policymakers will start shifting their focus from using the social insurance system to provide relief from the pandemic and recession to considering what changes should be made in the system on an ongoing basis, the paper also reprises an array of proposals to strengthen the system in various ways that The Hamilton Project has commissioned in recent years.

This paper examines whether a rise in house prices that occurs immediately prior to children entering college has an impact on their earnings as adults. Higher house prices provide homeowners with additional funds to invest in their children's human capital. The results show that a 1 percentage point increase in house prices, when children are 17 years-old, results in roughly 0.9 percent "higher" annual income for the children of homeowners, and a 1.5 percent "lower" annual income for the children of renters. House price appreciation at age 17 also leads to higher college enrollment rates at age 19 and an increased likelihood of attendance at higher-ranked post-secondary institutions for the children of homeowners, as well as lower college enrollment rates for the children of renters. This Working Paper also includes the following appendices: (1) Data Construction and Summary Statistics; (2) House Prices and Rents; (3) Controlling for Selection into Homeownership; and (4) Intergenerational Mobility.

Value-added data have become an increasingly common evaluation tool for schools and teachers. Many school districts have begun to adopt these methods and have released results publicly. In this paper, we use the unique public release of value-added data in Los Angeles to identify how this measure of school quality is capitalized into housing prices. Via difference-in-differences, we find no evidence of a response to either school or teacher value-added rank, even though school-zone boundary fixed-effects estimates indicate that test score levels are capitalized into home prices. Given ample evidence that this information was new to residents, widely dispersed, and easily available, our results suggest that people did not significantly value it on the margin. This has implications for the effectiveness of providing value-added information as a tool to help parents choose schools. Supplemental tables and a figure are appended.

While prior research has found clear impacts of schools and school quality on property values, little is known about whether charter schools have similar effects. Using sale price data for residential properties in Los Angeles County from 2008 to 2011 we estimate the neighborhood level impact of charter schools on housing prices. Using an identification strategy that relies on census block fixed-effects and variation in charter penetration over time, we find little evidence that the availability of charter schools affect housing prices on average. However, we do find that when restricting to charter schools located in the same school district as the household, housing prices outside Los Angeles Unified School District fall in response to an increase in nearby charter penetration. Supplemental tables are appended.

This report focuses on pathways to postsecondary education (PSE), including high school completion, for pregnant and parenting teens. Although birth rates among teens have declined in the United States over the last 20 years, one in seven adolescent females (14.4 percent) is expected to give birth before age 20 with females of color (24 percent of Hispanics and 21 percent of African Americans) more than twice as likely to have a child when compared with white females (10 percent) (OAH 2014). For too many of these adolescents, parenthood marks the end of their high school careers and aspirations for attending college. This is unfortunate because completing high school and earning a postsecondary degree or credential are critical for the economic well-being of both teen parents and their children. Very little is known about pathways to PSE for pregnant and parenting teens. Although some studies have focused on programs to prevent subsequent pregnancies among teen parents (Klerman 2004), research is lacking on effective approaches for preparing these students for college. This report represents a first step towards filling that gap. Drawing on a literature and program review, analysis of a small online survey conducted with Health Teen Network (HTN), and consultations with experts in the field, "Pathways to Postsecondary Education," examines barriers and promising approaches to support educational success for pregnant and parenting teens. Among the findings are: (1) More than two out of three young single mothers aged 18 to 24 are poor, and almost half of their children are poor; (2) Only about half of teen mothers receive a high school diploma by the age of 22, compared with about nine in ten women who do not have a child during their teen years; and (3) A survey supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found that a third of the young women surveyed reported that becoming a parent played a major role in their decision to leave school. This report features eight programs that provide a range of academic and other supports and services to support pathways to PSE, including high school completion, among pregnant and parenting teens: (1) Florence Crittenton High School (FCHS) in Denver, Colorado; (2) Cal-SAFE in California; (3) New Heights in Washington, DC; (4) The Care Center in Holyoke, Massachusetts; (5) Keys to Degrees at Endicott College in Massachusetts; (6) Student Parent HELP Center (SPHC) at the University of Minnesota; (7) Generation Hope, a program started by a former teen mother in Washington, DC; and (8) The Jeremiah Program, a residential program in the twin cities of Minnesota. A list of experts consulted is appended. [This report is a product of IWPR's Student Parent Success Initiative.]

In this paper, we show that the election of a new school board member causes home values in their neighborhood to rise. This increase is identified using narrowly-decided contests and is driven by non-Democratic members, whose neighborhoods appreciate about 4% on average relative to those of losing candidates. We find that student test scores in the neighborhood public schools of non-Democratic winners also relatively increase, but this effect is driven by changing student composition, including via the manipulation of attendance zones, rather than improvements in school quality (as measured by test score value-added). Notably, we detect no differential changes when comparing neighborhood or scholastic outcomes between winning and losing Democratic school board candidates. These results suggest that partisan affiliation is correlated with private motivations for seeking public office.

Housing and education share strong ties in the United States. This relationship is shaped, in large part, by mobility. Students move to new schools, homes and neighborhoods as a result of planned and unplanned family relocations. Taxpayers move from one school district to another in a nation where school quality is closely tied to the district in which a family resides. Teachers weigh factors such as location, pay, and long-term career opportunities as they decide where to work and when to move within or between school districts. Despite the strong relationship between housing and education, policies that recognize and support this relationship are relatively rare. In this paper, we explore the mechanisms by which housing and education are related. We focus particular attention on disadvantaged students in urban areas, as these students often face a unique set of challenges that set them apart from their more advantaged and/or non-urban counterparts. First, we explore the ways in which a child's housing unit, his neighborhood, and the political economy of public schools might shape his educational outcome. We then turn to a discussion of the implications of these mechanisms for education and housing policy. Herein, we highlight recent efforts to strengthen the ties between education and housing policy and discuss how the lessons learned from these efforts might be brought to bear as policymakers consider new education and housing initiatives.

Teacher training or teacher recruitment alone cannot ensure the availability of a teacher at school. The teacher deployment is a larger issue in most of the developing countries and Malawi is having acute problem of teacher shortage in certain areas and in certain schools. This discussion papers addresses the teacher deployment issues. (Contains 1 figure.)

This report introduces, analyzes, and summarizes for policymakers an extensive and diverse economics literature on the effects of public K-12 education spending on local, regional, and state economies. The effects of education spending appear in indicators ranging from economic development to employment rates, small business starts, personal income, and housing values. The report offers real-world evidence that providing a quality K-12 public education for all is one of the best investments that governments can make. Therefore, policymakers should engage in serious thought and analysis before taking cost-saving steps that reduce the quality of public education to solve a local, state, or even federal budget shortfall. The paper looks at the effects of education spending and educational quality--as distinct from education spending--on economic indicators such as an individual's lifetime earnings, residential property values, manufacturing activity in a state, and small business start-ups in a state. (Contains 15 tables.)

Through a historical picture of school allocation and residential change, and a detailed comparison of residential and school-based social segregation over time, this paper examines the relationship between residential differentiation and school segregation in the United Kingdom, describing the extent to which introduction of market principles, and the way schools and local education authorities (LEAs) have responded, have changed pre-existing between-school socioeconomic segregation. It also discusses whether school segregation is greater in areas with greater residential differentiation and notes how resulting disparities between school segregation levels and residential differentiation can be explained. Researchers used a segregation index, which computed the strict exchange proportion of disadvantaged students who would have to move between schools or districts in order for there to be no segregation by disadvantage. Data came from the number of children qualifying for free school meals for every secondary school in England in the years 1989-99. Overall, the relationship between levels of residential differentiation and school segregation was relatively strong. There was great variation in the significance of this relationship across LEAs. Schools were becoming more socially divided, mainly because of the socially divided nature of housing. (Contains 49 references, 13 figures, and 4 tables.) (SM)

This working paper is one of eleven individual research reports in which researchers with expertise in older adult populations gathered the most current available data, examined policies, regulations, and programs relevant to population aging and older Californians, and presented findings and recommendations. The issues examined-- economic well-being, work and retirement, housing, transportation, health status, mental health status, long-term care, residential care, family caregiving, and successful aging-- encompass most of the key issues concerning an aging population and Californias principal responses to its senior citizens. The report notes that the states efforts toward meeting the needs of older adults with mental illnesses must be improved. Programs must be expanded so that more older adults can be served. Further, the report features pertinent efforts made by universities and private organizations, and argues that these organizations assume a critical role in providing for the well being of the older population. Finally, three emerging issues that warrant further attention are highlighted: the increasing diversity of the aging population; the expansion of managed mental health care; and the development of a statewide system of mental health care for older adults. (Contains 60 references and 2 tables.) (GCP)

This study examines the effects of negative equity on children's academic performance, using data on children attending Florida public schools and housing transactions from the State of Florida. Our empirical strategy exploits variation over time in the timing of family moves to Florida in order to account for household sorting into neighborhoods and schools and selection into initial mortgage terms. In contrast to the existing literature on foreclosure and children's outcomes, we find that Florida students with the highest risk of negative equity exhibit significantly higher test score growth. These effects are largest among Black students and students who qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. We find evidence supporting two underlying mechanisms: (1) consumption patterns suggest that families in negative equity may reduce the impact of income losses on consumption by forgoing mortgage payments, and (2) mobility patterns suggest that families exposed to high levels of negative equity may move to schools that are of higher quality on average. While negative equity and foreclosure are undesirable, the changing incentives in terms of mortgage delinquency may have helped families manage the economic shocks caused by the great recession, as well as temporarily reduced the housing market barriers faced by low income households when attempting to access educational opportunities.

After a century of fairly steady decline, the official poverty rate among American children increased from 14.0% in 1969 to 19.6% in 1989, suggesting that the United States is losing the war on poverty. However, once various defects in the official poverty measure are corrected, it appears that the proportion of children in households with income below the poverty line probably fell between 1969 and 1989 or between 1967 and 1991. Data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey support this claim, and direct measures of material hardship also indicate that things have not been worsening for the low income family, although housing and neighborhood crimes remain serious concerns. The findings suggest that the official poverty statistics are not a reliable guide to poverty in America as most Americans understand the term. Five possible explanations are advanced: (1) official price indices somewhat overstate inflation; (2) children's households include more nonrelatives, whose income is not counted when the Census Bureau decides whether a child is poor; (3) the growth of Food Stamps and rent subsidies during the 1970s raised poor children's material standard of living without raising their income; (4) affluent families' flight from central cities to suburbs made a lot of relatively modern central-city housing available to low-income parents who would not otherwise have been able to afford it; and (5) households with low reported incomes may have had more unreported income in 1989 than in 1969. Despite the spread of single-parent families and the decline in the earning power of unskilled workers, child poverty, as defined by low income, low consumption, and material deprivation, has probably remained constant or fallen slightly since 1969. (Contains 8 tables, 1 figure, and 25 references.) (SLD)

Growing reliance on student loans and repayment difficulties have raised concerns of a student debt crisis in the United States. However, little is known about the effects of student borrowing on human capital and long-run financial well-being. We use variation induced by recent expansions in federal loan limits, together with administrative schooling, earnings, and credit records, to identify the effects of increased student borrowing on credit-constrained students' educational attainment, earnings, debt, and loan repayment. Increased student loan availability raises student debt and improves degree completion, later-life earnings, and student loan repayment while having no effect on homeownership or other types of debt.

This document provides an analysis of key themes, as they relate to the U.S. Latino population, included in the President's 2016 State of the Union Address. Addressing these issues is critical to extend opportunity to more people to help ensure national prosperity and security for generations to come.

The Children's Headline Indicators are a set of measures designed to focus policy attention and to help guide and evaluate policy development on key issues for children's health, development and wellbeing in 19 priority areas. They were endorsed by health, community and disability services ministers and education systems officials in 2006. Headline Indicators were defined for 16 of these priority areas. However, more work was needed on the remaining three--"family social network, social and emotional wellbeing" and "shelter"--to conceptualise and identify the most important aspects of these areas for children's health, development and wellbeing. This information paper outlines the process of developing a Headline Indicator for the "social and emotional wellbeing" priority area. Appended are: (1) Process to identify a Headline Indicator; (2) Headline Indicator Data Development Expert Working Group; (3) Social and Emotional Wellbeing Workshop participants; (4) Headline Indicators for children's health, development and wellbeing; and (5) Additional information on selected surveys and screening tools. (Contains 8 tables, 4 figures and 3 footnotes.)

The Chilean authorities plan to raise budgetary allocations over the medium term for a variety of social programmes, including education, health care and housing. This incremental spending will need to be carried out in a cost-efficient manner to make sure that it yields commensurate improvements in social outcomes. Chile's health indicators show that it fares relatively well in relation to comparator countries in the OECD area and in Latin America. But this is less so in the case of education, where secondary and tertiary educational attainment remain low, despite a significant increase over the years, and performance is poor on the basis of standardised test scores, such as PISA. Even though comparison with countries in the OECD area is difficult, a sizeable housing deficit has yet to be closed in Chile. To meet these various challenges, efforts will need to be stepped up to: i) narrow the disparities in performance that currently exist among schools with students from varying backgrounds through use of the "differentiated" voucher scheme and additional measures to improve the quality of teaching and management; ii) improve risk sharing among private and public health insurers, while increasing the coverage of health insurance to a broader variety of pathologies under AUGE; and iii) continue to tackle the shortage of housing, while enhancing the quality of subsidised housing units and their surrounding neighbourhoods for the poorest segments of society. This paper relates to the "2007 Economic Survey of Chile" (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/chile). (Contains 9 footnotes, 10 figures, and 6 tables.)

While employment growth has accelerated, allowing unemployment to fall significantly since 2005, many low-skilled workers are still unemployed and the duration of unemployment spells is still long. The introduction of an in-work benefit for workers in low-income households, subject to a minimum of hours worked, could lower barriers to higher employment which result from a relatively high tax wedge on low-skill workers, as would the elimination of poverty traps in the pension system. Measures to improve mobility of workers across regions, notably housing policy reform, would lower long unemployment durations, as would the provision of more training to the unemployed. Impediments to higher labour market participation of young women and older workers need to be removed. A bibliography is included. (Contains 34 footnotes, 5 figures, and 2 boxes.) [This paper is based largely on material from the "OECD Economic Survey of the Slovak Republic" published in April 2007 under the authority of the Economic and Development Review Committee (EDRC).]

Reducing poverty and social exclusion is an important objective for all French governments. Even though conventionally measured poverty is in fact lower than in most other countries, it is still higher than can be easily accepted. The current policy approach involves a large number of measures tailored to different circumstances. Some policies have unwanted side effects on labour market performance, and their cost-effectiveness could be improved to obtain better outcomes with the same resources. Concentrations of poverty and social exclusion in certain geographic areas and among certain groups of the population provide one of the most difficult challenges, for which contributions from education, labour market, housing, urban planning and anti-discrimination policies, as well as from the social services, are necessary. This Working Paper relates to the 2007 OECD Economic Survey of France (www.oecd.org/eco/survey/france), and is also available in French under the title "Lutter contre la pauvrete et l'exclusion sociale en France". (A bibliography is included. A discussion of Main Measures for the Disadvantaged in the French Social Protection System is annexed. Contains 9 footnotes, 14 figures, 5 boxes and 5 tables.)

This chapter is a draft of Chapter 7 of a planned book, "Preschool and Jobs: Human Development as Economic Development, and Vice Versa." This book analyzes early childhood programs' effects on regional economic development. Four early childhood programs are considered: (1) universally accessible preschool for four-year-olds of similar quality to the Chicago Child Parent Center program; (2) the Abecedarian program, which provides disadvantaged children with high-quality child care and preschool from infancy to age five; (3) the Nurse Family Partnership, which provides low-income first-time mothers with nurse home visitors from the prenatal period until the child is age two; and (4) the Parent Child-Home program, which provides home visits and educational toys and books to disadvantaged families when the child is between the ages of 2 and 3. The book considers the main benefit of state economic development to be the resulting increase in earnings of the original residents who stay in that state. Early childhood programs increase residents' earnings largely by increasing the quantity and quality of local labor supply. These programs will increase the employability and wages of former child participants in these programs. The book compares the effects on local earnings of early childhood programs with the effects of business incentives (e.g., property tax abatements). Business incentives increase local residents' earnings by increasing the quantity and/or quality of local labor demand. This chapter considers a problem with early childhood programs: their effects on earnings are mostly long-delayed. The delay occurs because most earnings effects are on former child participants. The chapter considers appropriate discounting of benefits. The chapter considers how the upfront costs of early childhood programs can be delayed or reduced. The chapter considers how the long-run benefits of early childhood programs can be moved up or increased. More on Discounting is appended. (Contains 8 tables, 7 figures, and 24 notes.)

Families originally living in public housing were assigned housing vouchers by lottery, encouraging moves to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates. Although we had hypothesized that reading and math test scores would be higher among children in families offered vouchers (with larger effects among younger children), the results show no significant effects on test scores for any age group among over 5000 children ages 6 to 20 in 2002 who were assessed four to seven years after randomization. Program impacts on school environments were considerably smaller than impacts on neighborhoods, suggesting that achievement-related benefits from improved neighborhood environments are alone small.