Investing in early childhood education really pays off.

If you put money in the stock market, you can expect an average return on your investment of 10 percent a year. That’s pretty good but, as we know, risky. What if there was a lower-risk, higher-reward way to spend money that paid dividends for not just individuals, but society at large? This is not snake oil. I am talking about a basic concept: early childhood education for children from age 0 to 5. Investing in quality early childhood programs offers a whopping 13-percent return on investment. For every dollar spent, you get back $6 to $9.

“It’s a pretty fantastic return,” says Jorge Luis García, a professor of economics at Clemson University.

García has teamed up with Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, who has spent so long immersed in this topic that there’s even an equation named after him: the Heckman Equation. Broadly, the argument is that investing in education for children ages 0 to 5 will pay for itself many times over.

The work of these economists is on my mind because Heckman is returning to Monterey County this week, hosted by First 5 Monterey County, to talk about the value of early childhood development. A lot of it we already know, but the research just gets more and more compelling. In 2021, Heckman and García published a paper revisiting the original cohort of kids that Heckman studied back in the ’60s. The Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, Michigan enrolled children, all of whom were at a disadvantage due to family income, single-parent households and other factors. They attended 2.5-hour preschool sessions for two years, and teachers visited their families at home, educating parents.

Heckman and crew reported metrics on income (higher) incarceration rate (lower) and more. Health is hard to measure because early participants are still in their 50s, but the forecasted savings to the health system looks like they would also more than cover the cost of the preschool, which was about $21,000 per kid.

Then there’s intelligence. Critics saw that whatever gains Perry Program participants had made academically leveled out by third grade with their peers in a control group. But in the 2021 study, Heckman and García found that the cohort, now 54 years old, sustained cognitive gains.

It’s a lot of benefits, over a very long time. “It’s a very, very large impact,” García says.

When economists talk about all of these benefits to kids, they’re actually thinking of this as a second-generation benefit. The first generation to benefit is the parents of these kids, many of them single parents who are enabled to reenter the workforce thanks to quality childcare. The economic benefits to parents also more than paid for the program before we even factor in these benefits to the kids – and their kids, too.

Writing together, García and Heckman say: “Policymakers would be wise to coordinate these early childhood resources into a scaffolding of developmental support for disadvantaged children and provide access to all in need. The gains are significant because quality programs pay for themselves many times over. The cost of inaction is a tragic loss of human and economic potential that we cannot afford.”

This is the message that Heckman is likely to deliver when he speaks in Monterey on Oct. 7, following up on a talk he gave here a decade ago. That talk inspired Hartnell College to keep its Child Development Center Laboratory off the chopping block, and to bolster it – offering kids a preschool option and students a real-life training and learning setting.

Unlike some policy ideas, early childhood education is an intervention that we already know how to do. “Head Start is already serving a million children, so there is a way to do this at a large scale,” García says. “This is not a pipe dream that we came up with by analyzing 100 children.”

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel to offer early childhood education. We just need to pay for it.

To that end, Monterey County voters will decide on Measure Q this Nov. 8, a $49 per parcel tax that would generate an estimated $5.5 million a year to fund more childcare, doubling the number of spots currently available to kids.

JAMES HECKMAN presents at 8:30-10:30am on Friday, Oct. 7. Monterey Conference Center, 1 Portola Plaza, Monterey. $30 (includes breakfast). 444-8549, first5monterey.org. Sara Rubin is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com