By Cassatt Boatwright, PPS/Child Policy Research Certificate student ‘28
The Duke Center for Child and Family Policy recently welcomed Dr. Chloe Gibbs, senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, for her talk “Making Smart Investments in Early Childhood Education," as part of the Center's Early Childhood Initiative series.
To begin, Gibbs presented her case for why early childhood is such a critical period for intervention. She emphasized that large gaps in children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development emerge well before kindergarten, often along income lines. These gaps have long-term consequences for educational attainment, workforce participation, and overall wellbeing, and schooling is not closing them. Since the brain is more malleable at younger ages, early childhood intervention is a “unicorn” in public policy making — investments made early are not only more effective but also more cost-efficient than later remediation and equity-enhancing, Gibbs explained.
The focus of the talk then pivoted to early childhood care and education. Gibbs presented data showing that, in the United States, 55 percent of children under age 6 — not yet enrolled in school — participate regularly in some form of non-parental care. She highlighted specifically the Head Start program, which originated in the 1960s as part of the War on Poverty. Initially focused on nutrition and parenting, Head Start expanded to serve more than 800,000 children from families below the poverty line, with a growing emphasis on academics. While studies have found that test score gains fade in the early grades, Gibbs emphasized that the program has demonstrated lasting impacts for some groups of children, such as Spanish-speaking students and those entering with particularly low skill levels. The program also displayed intergenerational benefits for families like higher educational attainment, improved home environment, and lower engagement in risky behaviors.
Gibbs also shared evidence from other large-scale programs. The UK’s Sure Start initiative has been shown to improve children’s health and human capital, while Boston Public Schools’ preschool program, despite showing limited test score effects, has produced meaningful long-term outcomes like higher rates of college attendance. She underscored that policymakers should not rely solely on short-term assessments like test scores, but rather focus on long-term measures of success.
Throughout her talk, Gibbs not only described interesting examples of ECE but raised difficult and important questions for policymakers: How do we best organize a fragmented system around ensuring quality? How do we optimally deploy demand-side and supply-side investments? What are the core mechanisms and aspects that make ECE programs effective? How should ECE programs be structured so that long-term effects are realized? Addressing these questions, she argued, is essential to building early education systems that are both equitable and sustainable.
The overall focus of this talk emphasized the importance of quality in early childhood education. Scaling up promising programs is challenging, Gibbs noted, as small pilot projects with highly trained staff often lose their effectiveness when implemented at a larger level.
Policymakers must therefore pay attention to program design, teacher support, and ongoing evaluation to ensure that investments are truly effective. However, if done correctly, ECE experiences can positively affect children’s short and long-term outcomes, parental employment, and societal outcomes through greater productivity and economic growth.
As a student interested in child policy, I found Gibbs’s talk very motivating. When I explain my interest in early childhood education, many people tend to think of preschool as simply a place where young children are cared for while parents are at work. But as Gibbs showed, early education is one of the most powerful policy tools we have for addressing inequality and creating opportunity. Her reminder that investing early is not only cost-effective but also equity-enhancing resonated with me deeply.
I left the lecture inspired by Gibbs’s vision of smart, targeted investments in young children. Her evidence-driven approach is a reminder that, when designed thoughtfully, early childhood investments can benefit not only the child and family, but society as a whole.
Cassatt Boatwright is a sophomore majoring in Public Policy with a minor in education and a Child Policy Research certificate. She is interested in improving child welfare and education systems through program evaluation and evidence-based implementation.