Colloque : Approches expérimentales en éducation – Learning Together for Children’s Learning: An Interdisciplinary Convening
Conférence du 20 juin 2024 : From Cradle to Kindergarten
Session 1 – Fundamental Learning
Intervenant : Hiro Yoshikawa, New York University
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Chaire Pauvreté et politiques publiques
Professeure : Esther Duflo
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https://www.college-de-france.fr/fr/chaire/esther-duflo-pauvrete-et-politiques-publiques-chaire-statutaire
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[Music] [Music] mer from to kindergarten to English right now uh we’re pleased to welcome Hiro shikwa for this presentation thank you [Applause] mer I’m going to now speak in English um I co-direct A Center um at New York University called Global ties for children and um we focus on programs and policies for Children and Youth in low and middle- income countries um as well as conflict affected countries um but I’ll be talking today about work that cuts across uh rich countries like the United States um uh and uh ties to issues of inequality uh which we just heard quite a bit about uh from the uh French context um but I’ll be speaking mainly um about the United States and then um contexts affected by conflict and uh the learning of refugee children I’ll also focus on a period of development um that includes uh the CP years of um 0 to 6 years old um and we all know that these years are very very important uh from the standpoints of brain development uh particular sensitivity to environmental influence and the influences of uh home and uh learn other learning opportunities in communities so uh and then the broad topic will be also when and under what C circumstances can research evidence make a difference in public policies for young children so I’m going to start with um a brief summary of what a foundation in the United States um has commissioned um which is about 15 years of research on when research makes a difference in public policy uh I think we may all have some opinions that are pretty skeptical about whether public policy makers pay attention to research whether in the field of Education or really any other field um but it turns out that this is now an active area of research in and of itself so I’ll tell you some of the brief lessons from that then I’m going to talk about the application of those lessons in um some large scale work one of which is a humanitarian initiative um to support uh Syrian refugee children Refugee children in Venezuela Refugee children in the Middle East South Asia um and Latin America and then the uh last example would be the example of um developing national uh multi-year policy proposals and what role could researchers Possibly play in actually contributing directly to legislation so starting with the first um topic what does research on the use of evidence in policy tell us um so the William T Grant foundation in the United States is the main Research Foundation focused on Youth Development um defined as uh uh Children and Youth between the ages of 6 and 25 um and about 15 years ago their um senior vice president Vivian Tang uh decided to start a program of research um uh that really hadn’t existed in any coherent way until then which is in what situations under what circumstances is research evidence actually used in policy so rather than kind of take you through a bunch of studies I going to tell you what seems to work and what seems to not work um in this relationship between research and policy um but the uh the lesson here is that policy gets made in human relationships and um this was a story told to me by a uh uh Vice Minister of Finance in Peru who was in that position three separate times um over the last 20 years uh he in his first time within the Ministry of Finance in a leadership position realized that all important decisions get made in small groups so he decided after he left to go to Argentina and be trained in group therapy um and learn how small groups of humans interact so that he could bring that back into the policy world and then he did he went back into the Ministry of Finance and Peru he was very instrumental in both the transparency the financial transparency um uh policies of Peru and he became a very strong advocate for early childhood development policies which is how I met him um so that story really struck with me he was a very unusual person on a lot of um fronts but that was uh that that kind of uh breadth of thinking and realizing that um policy does not happen in a purely kind of rational way but happens through the influence of small groups uh interactions of small groups of uh humans um of course this happens in contexts of larger sociopolitical and ideological change it can be influenced by social movements that may have nothing to do with research but everything to do with social justice um policym occurs in interactions that involve meaning making that is deeply influenced by cultural factors and assumptions as well as political processes um and again we we don’t often research these mechanisms so what does what do these 15 years of um grants and research projects tell us um what does not work uh we often as researchers write an article and the last two paragraphs we might say oh here are some implications for policy or program or practice um that is not in and of itself going to have any influence on policy um simply translating your findings into simpler language when communicating um by itself is not going to um uh influence policy policy briefs which some of us write which is we’ll take an article and then we’ll make a two or three-page version of it designed to communicate to policy makers in and of themselves again often don’t necessarily work single events or single um occasions um for example an oped opinion piece in a newspaper can have some influence but again all of these um look like they’re inadequate um because they don’t consider the notion of these relationships and uh things like what this Peruvian Minister of Finance uh learned and so uh the most um productive relationships of research to policy occur in sustained and reciprocal Partnerships with networks of policy makers um they come from a standpoint of knowing what policy makers questions are and starting by meeting them where they are in terms of their concerns and then bringing uh research and perhaps actually conducting research in response to their question rather than completing your own research and then hoping that it answers a policy Maker’s question so it’s through this reciprocal interaction often over years um because there’s another issue which is the the windows for policy action are often extremely limited and rare um and so the opportunities to actually influence programming in this case educational or early childhood development policies at scale come along very rarely um so what can work in this context um in our experience at our Center where we’ve worked with um something like 20 different countries um around the world um multi-year Partnerships with small groups of people who’ve had experience in policy leadership positions but might not right now be in them are what uh we understand is particularly useful because in many of the countries in which we work um but I think this is also true in France or in many rich countries you can work with a particular uh Vice Minister um uh in education or a particular uh a colleague um but they may be out of that position uh within 9 months 12 months 18 months um in Latin America the average tenure of a minister of uh of Education or social sector minister is about 18 months so uh so trying to keep in touch with the networks of individuals who move in and out of government they move might move from government to a civil society organization or to a university or to a policy Institute um and then go back into policy those kinds of folks really have the depth of understanding across years and staying in touch with them and waiting for those policy Windows when they might have influence uh when a particular kind of research evidence might be useful uh can be uh really important it does mean that you can just continue doing the research that you would do but it want to make sure that it does have some relevance to a enduring policy question um and then jump in when the policy window opens and be ready with summaries of your research and in that case then that’s when the briefs uh the uh meetings the uh uh single events can be very very important um and then uh later I’m going to talk about how how is it that we could actually get engaged in the language of legislation uh one interesting um study that was commissioned or funded by the William T Grant Foundation um was actually an experimental evaluation of an effort to influence policy makers with research uh evidence that actually used some of these principles of building relationships so um this involved um first of all getting A needs assessment to really start again where the policy makers are understand what their needs were um in Congress and they um invited all congressional offices to participate in this process and then have access to networks of researchers that would work with them in topic areas related to Children and Families um and then this effort also recruited the researchers to work in these small networks with Congressional offices to inform them around the particular child and family policy topics they were interested in um so 96 Congressional offices um of which 59% were on the Democratic side for any of you interested in that were randomized to this intervention or to a light touch control condition uh which was publicly available research briefs 226 researchers were randomized to the intervention or to a traditional kind of more static policy engagement curriculum um there were positive impacts after 6 months on Congressional office staff perceptions of the usefulness of conceptual use of research evidence which is this idea that um research can help me rethink policy but not necessarily instrumental use of research evidence which is that research that helps you make a particular policy decision between A and B right so something along those lines or tactical use of research evidence which is the use of research evidence to express one strongly held position um in opposition to another strongly held position right so that’s like engaging more directly in kind of politics um so the staff perceptions of the general use of okay this is useful conceptually to me to understand this area of policy was what was improved um there was no difference in how many bills were introduced around this area of child and family policy but of those bills introduced 23% more of the offices that were assigned to treatment cited actual research so they did a text analysis of all the bills that were proposed to see okay in the footnotes is there like a research you know are there research articles that are cited and so um this showed that there were some uh increases in the citation of research uh among the uh Congressional offices that had been assigned to treatment the second um example I wanted uh well the first actual example was that one the second one I want to talk about is is about partnering with Ministries in the humanitarian sector in a initiative called akan Simpson which is a very large initiative that has um uh was funded for the last six years by the MacArthur Foundation um so first want to note that there are at least um three kinds of policy or practice systems involved in humanitarian uh settings which is that the host government policies um the refugee communities social structures and then also the humanitarian sector systems which are often coming out of un agencies or NOS that are international NOS um usually coordinated by the UN High Commissioner um on refugees uh unhcr um most humanitarian NOS stepping into this area um are doing rapid response services in areas where governments call the UN and say we cannot serve this population with our existing resources so the UN steps in and coordinates a response in particular Geographic areas with um Refugee influx um what that means is that the humanitarian NOS are often kind of only in a country temporarily or to support that Refugee population and they’re not actually working with the national Ministries um but I’m going to argue that this initiative was able successfully to work with the host government Ministries in order to um have more of a sustained impact um that addresses all the needs of um students and children in those uh in the country not just the refugee population so um these are two very large initiatives um each funded at the level of $100 million um of which the first the MacArthur Foundation uh funded a large scale competition for a single solution on a critical social issue called the 100 and change initiative and the first um partnership that was funded through 100 and change was um a partnership between Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue committee to provide early childhood development services in the sector that really had virtually none up to that point um which is the humanitarian sector um so overall only 3% of humanitarian sector funding goes to education and that’s because um for a lot of very good reasons the emphasis in humanitarian Aid is on survival um so on health and nutrition and shelter and clothing and food um and education becomes an afterthought within that 3% of Education funding early childhood development um for programs like preschool education or um support of caregivers and parenting programs is much much smaller um so it’s really a a fraction of um humanitarian sector funding and so um these initiatives Were Meant to start to address that Gap by um providing um services to three Refugee um large Refugee flows the Syrian refugee crisis in the Middle East the rohinga refugee crisis in Bangladesh um and then secondarily the Venezuelan Refugee crisis in Latin America um so our role at myyu was to valuate um um some of the service models that were provided and so we we did run five uh experimental evaluations and I’m going to take you through one of them um just because we’re very excited by its results and then tell you a little bit about these Ministry Partnerships so um this one is about um a remote Early Learning Program um implemented with Rural and remote Syrian refugees uh families in Lebanon who had no access zero access to preschool education um both because of their Refugee status and because they were in unusually Rural and remote areas of Lebanon the International Rescue committee had already been providing in-person services in early childhood uh prior to the pandemic but these areas were too rural or remote even for the uh that um very experienced NGO to be providing on the ground services so when Co occurred of course there was this transition to remote learning and any of you who can imagine what a remote preschool uh classroom teaching might look like you can imagine a bunch of children on zoom and the teacher unmutes everybody and what do you think happens probably not a whole lot of learning right so uh the International Rescue committee’s uh Lebanon um program team actually created a very Innovative uh model to address this issue um which is um Preschool teachers with experience teaching preschool um education working with small groups of caregivers about five to six caregivers in each group on WhatsApp and uh engaged with them three times a week um for about 35 or 40 minutes um for 11 weeks and so the preschool curriculum was actually implemented by caregivers not by teachers but the teachers acted as coaches and so um the children and the parents would show up on WhatsApp they would turn the video on but for very short periods of time because in Lebanon there was actually at this point lots of Crisis going on right there’s an economic collapse um there are electricity shortages and so um so to conserve uh Wi-Fi um the uh videos were turned turned on briefly but that way the caregivers would recognize each other the children would recognize each other they would see the teacher and then the teachers would guide the caregivers through um learning activities what was sent home the only physical aspect of this program was a backpack full of learning materials which were sent home and um caregivers and children were literally jumping up and down with this this was like school to them and the caregivers really perceived this as their opportunity their only opportunity to actually access school um kind of regardless of the pandemic but especially during uh the pandemic um the teachers scheduled these calls at times that worked for the caregivers and if a caregiver missed because of the um let’s say electricity went out um the teachers would follow up with one-on-one calls um Sometimes Late into the evenings so these were some of the it’s a traditional um uh it’s a curriculum called preschool in a healing classroom that’s based on a traditional holistic way of supporting Lang early language early numeracy early social emotional learning um that the IRC had been implementing with um some pretty good success in Lebanon in person for about s years before they did this it also integrated materials developed by Sesame Workshop um from their akan Simpson television show which um this grant also supported which was a new production of Sesame uh street that focused um for the first time on a particular humanitarian uh context and that was a co-production with Jordan Pioneers a children’s media NGO in Jordan we also had a third arm which was test against a control group um which is testing the added impact of a um light touch once a week parenting uh parent and caregiver focused call that was not the preschool teacher but an early childhood development facilitator so we have um three arms to the study uh remote Early Learning Program again this is 11 weeks the remote Early Learning Program plus aquan Simpson families which is that parenting component and then the control group uh which received the remote learning program after the completion of the RCT uh end line so what did we find we found large improvements in all the domains of Child Development measured by a well validated measure called the Adela of save the children and these are um percentage correct on different um scales measuring specific domains on the idela with the largest effects being an emergent literacy emergent numeracy and social emotional development so improvements of 10 to 15 percentage points in the percentage correct uh uh in these domains and for those of you who speak effect sizes these are effect sizes that are quite large um between. 21 and 049 with again literacy numeracy and social emotional learning being the largest ones these are effect sizes we would normally expect from in-person preschool um in low and middle- income countries on these domains over a full preschool year and this was accomplished within 11 weeks um again with preschool teachers working with small groups of caregivers but actually the caregivers implementing these activities and of course there was a large effect on caregivers own report of engaging in kind of learning activities and play activities with their children children um and then I think because of these uh context of Partnerships with Ministries and in particular the Ministry of Education in Iraq the Ministry of Education in Iraq commissioned a pilot implementation of this after hearing about the results from this impact evaluation so um this included um areas that had been deeply affected by conflict um within the last 8 to 10 years in Iraq including mosul and we found that the gains in the idela the same measure were comparable in magnitude to gains in the treatment group of the Lebanon RCT um of uh you know quite large increases in each of these domains on the ellaa um children with different family displacement statuses showed similar improvements in idela scores um those who were internally displaced those who had returned um in this case Iraq most of the the War caused internal displacement and the kinds of conflicts that were going on um um but it helped everybody including the host community and the most interesting thing here is that um even though um parents with low levels of uh education or even non-literate parents um their children started with very low levels lower levels of um uh percent correct on these domains um the positive effects occurred regardless of the parents education or literacy level and this is also a pattern we saw in Lebanon which is that among the group of parents who were not literate the effects on early literacy numeracy and social emotional learning were just as large and some of the caregivers in fact told us that they were actually learning some of the Arabic words alongside their children um when the preschool teacher uh was working with them so this is uh one of the important lessons is that um caregivers with the lowest levels of literacy and education their children can still benefit from a program that relies on them to uh Implement preschool type playful activities at home um so this is the first impact evaluation of a remotely delivered short-term preschool program and so we think it’s has a lot of relevance for Ministries that might not have the resources to scale preschool education um fully across the country um with uh large potential for use in hard to access remote or rural contexts um and this uh replication effort in Iraq was not possible without the context of Partnerships with nine Ministries across the four countries in this initiative um which has uh meant that they have uh been able to sustain the reach um so that it will continue the program um aspects of the program which is a whole there’s not a single program but a lot of kind of curricular models and materials and training models for health workers teachers um child care workers for example uh can be used and are being used um even after the grant formally ends and there has been a report on how this scaling occurred with Ministries and the lesson and this uh means that at least a million children are projected to be uh uh continue to be served after the grant period uh in terms of services and there strategies um in that report some of the lessons they say are very much in line with what the williiam T Grant Foundation ation research shows which is if Ministries take ownership and are responsible for financing um the originating organization which in this case is the International Rescue committee plays a catalyzing role but not the dominant role um in terms of scaling a program that that there is this kind of notion of uh Handover um the models um that were developed by aan Simpson were also done in alignment with national standards set by the nine Ministries um and really importantly this was the first time the International Rescue Committee in a country or Regional context had hired a full-time person only for Partnerships and that full-time person woke up every day developing Partnerships with the Ministries in the region and those were successful with nine of them across ministries of health education um social welfare and others so the final example I want to make is um whether researchers can actually get involved in legislation um and kind of proposing um National policies um and I think uh I’m going to propose that this is kind of a neglected role for interdisciplinary teams of Scholars who have the right sets of skills um one of my mentors on in this kind of work is Emily Vargas Baron who’s worked with about 40 or 45 countries around participatory processes to develop national ecd early childhood development policies um but our example is an example that was initially written for the United States called Cradle to kindergarten which was an integrated costed Early Childhood care and education National policy proposal for the United States um and just to set some context the United States has no National early childhood development policy in this critical area of care and education it has fragmented pieces of policies um reaching really a fraction of those eligible but not um uh in any kind of universal way um as is uh true here in France um with the uh Preparatory um period of Education that starts at age three here so um we do set this um in the context of national data on inequality um these are data on kind of student achievement um uh across primary and secondary schooling showing that um the gaps between um the lowest income uh 10% of households and the top 10% of income earning households are large and growing and that over um the last 40 years those gaps grew particularly between the 50th percentile and the 90th percentile which is the middle of the income distribution and the wealthiest so that that Gap now is as large as the gap between between the poorest 10% and that 50th percentile um and these are in reading and math scores um integrating uh about eight or nine National data sets um that Sean Reen put together to show this kind of historical Trend in inequality in the United States um so um when we see these kinds of patterns of inequality we do think that there’s an opportunity to gain the political support of the middle class um who increasingly cannot afford um child care for example in the United States um so uh Child Care accessibility is not just an issue for the poor in the United States but actually is an issue that goes way up into the middle class so our four areas of policy were paid parental leave um a reliable guarantee of child care assistance um Universal Early Education that would start at age three like it does here in uh France and reimagining the the um current uh Federal preschool program called Head Start um to both begin much much earlier and to focus on the most vulnerable families and to shift to a family support and early learning model um so paid parental leave I’m not going to go into a lot of details here um though I realized that parental leave might be one of the areas that this is actually relevant in France because your your period of support is relatively short um but the details the point is that we worked out in each of these areas has a chapter and it works out all the details we would want to see from a particular policy area um and that’s because our team had expertise Taran morisy had particular expertise in Parental leave and child care AJ chre the first author had particular experience with child care policy Christina wiland had particular experience um and I um have particular experience with preschool uh policy um then in child care we did um provide uh it is a research-based book so when relevant we would provide new research evidence and in this case it was research evidence that um for child care an issue is not just inequality in Access but also inequality in the quality of that child care so these are actual observations of child care programs utilized um in large scale data sets National data sets of amilies uh with children at the age of two and um the reason these bars are all below zero is they are all comparisons to the level of quality experienced by by the top 20% um income quintile of households in the United States and we see that the level of quality um uh in uh homebased care of two types um relative care or non-relative care as well as center-based care is simply lower um the lower your uh income is as a household so we present some of this new evidence to um provide and do a comprehensive of course uh review of all the evaluation literature to show what might work in a particular policy area um with uh Child Care the most important Point here is that no family should um have to pay for child care more than 7% of their annual income and currently many families are spending between 20 upwards of even 25% of their household income on Child Care particularly for child care for children below the age of three uh which is much much more expensive because the groups have to be smaller um the ratio of um children to adults has to be smaller and children’s developmental needs um as I think Liz is going to talk about next um are just simply more um intensive during these uh uh First Years of life um and then a universal Early Education for three and four year olds um in the United States public schooling essentially starts at age five um so we have a slightly different structure but this would be about providing uh Universal Early Education for three and four year olds um and then finally um that covid-19 but even without covid-19 the need for intensive family support for the most disadvantaged families is extremely important and so this is is about kind of redirecting the federal preschool program if the federal government provides funding um to States for Universal preschool then they can use the current federal preschool program and move it down to start at Birth and then focus on the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the United States to provide those Services um but uh a really important point I wanted to make is that um AJ chodri had experience um running he’s an academic uh and a professor but he also um ran the Child Care Program for New York City he worked um in the Obama Administration and led the development of their preschool proposal um and when that proposal did not go through as planned he decided he wanted to put all of his kind of policy thoughts into this book and work with um the three of us because we had the technical expertise in these particular areas of child care parental leave and preschool um to then work together on a proposal that would make all of these very detailed decisions about incentives and um basic program costs and Workforce support and professional development and training costs and actually develop a 10year cost um proposal so um when we first um published uh the uh book it had actually a a less ambitious proposal um but in 2021 we had have a second addition under um uh the Biden Administration and the possibility um uh came true to actually have a policy that was actually even more ambitious than this one um because the covid and its stimulus um provoked um kind of unprecedented levels of government spending on uh in the social sector in the United States um these were developed as 10-year plans with plans per each of those 10 years to get to universality in um these big areas like child care and preschool where the coverage is much lower um to take into account that some states in the United States are further along and some states are further behind and to kind of structure the incentives for states to contribute their own funding federal government is not designed to pay for all of this but to kind of supplement States um in terms of for example their preschool uh funding and then um what happened was um uh well the uh 2017 first edition of the book was written for the Hillary Clinton administration um and then an event happened we didn’t have Hillary Clinton as president but the focus turned to Congress and to different states and so our team worked with States that had already been working on one or two areas of this policy but wanted to expand their Early Childhood policies and the same approach of developing um National costing proposal and a 10-year plan was done with States working with State um uh budget people in their legislatures or the governor’s office um and so we worked in quite a few States and there were advances in early childhood care and education policies as a as a result in several of these um States like Washington Oregon Colorado California um and West Virginia and Washington DC then um through a EST from the UNICEF office in El Salvador and the National Coalition there uh we were asked to um participate in creating a national early childhood development uh proposal for the country of El Salvador um so the same polic uh uh uh process was done which is kind of building on current uh programs and coverage in child care and Early Education and family support and parenting programs we developed a 10-year proposal for El Salvador that then became the basis for loans from the World Bank and the interamerican Development Bank um to uh become integrated uh and the head our our liazon at UNICEF did something very unusual which was to bring this proposals and and and we engaged in dialogue with all four presidential candidates um for uh the presidential election that happened um about uh 6 years ago um and all four of those presidential candidates publicly it was the only time they all got together at one meeting they publicly endorsed um the idea of a national ecd policy and this um uh became one of the inputs into what is currently CER hunos which means growing together which is the national ecd policy um currently being implemented in El Salvador so um we think um uh that this kind of team can be very productive in a particular technical area like early childhood development um to do some of the work um that actually um development Banks like the World Bank or the interamerican Development Bank do but where um often in Banks like that the technical expertise folks are not necessarily the people working directly on Country loans um but we think that in this case for example in the case of El Salvador we kind of did the homework um of uh country uh technical team leader uh and we’re a able to do this by bringing the combination of our content expertise in a particular um sector like Early Education or Child Care um together with some capacity that we had ourselves to do some national level costing and uh work with demogra demographers and the people uh who understand how policies uh would be actually utilized at what rates would uh families for example actually use um child care if they were offered make those assumptions and develop cost estimates so um I’m going to conclude now um by just talking about what are some of the conceptual Technical and partnership skills that may be um helpful if um we as applied researchers are to actually engage in more policy dialogue um first I think we do need to understand under theground implementation of programs through extensive Frontline program observation and knowledge we cannot give up this kind of micro knowledge that um as developmental researchers we have about the nutrition nutritious supports for learning that can occur in settings whether they are publicly funded Child Care settings or in a parenting program or in a public preschool or in primary schooling um the sustained multi-year partnership skills with key policy actors um that’s not something that is um rewarded in academic settings but we do think that academic priorities could potentially shift so that in institutions recognize the kind of policy impact that that kind of work can have um and that it is a long-term process but it does require some investment of time and energy um and this principle of listening to and answering policy makers questions um and to support um their work with systems that are already at scale um how do we make those systems better um not just scale small um scale Innovations to large scale and then finally um I think we want to if not learn these kinds of demographic and costing skills work with people who know those skills to be able to have um the kinds of interdisciplinary teams that can then engage in the policy process productively thanks so much [Applause] [Music]