Head Start Saves Lives

My wife is doing some contract work for Head Start. Sometimes she comes home discouraged because the kids need so much, and she's doing so little. I tell her that she has to trust God is going to put the people in these kids' lives that they need. Then we talk about Head Start, and whether it's a good or bad program. She gets, again, discouraged because when she goes to Head Start, it's like a train wreck in slow motion. I tell her - which I think is encouraging - that she can't observe the counterfactual. Who knows how much worse off they'd be if they weren't in Head Start - if the program didn't even exist. Well, apparently if the program didn't exist, a lot of the kids who were in Head Start would be dead. This is from a relatively new paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics by Doug Miller (UC-Davis) and Jens Ludwig (Georgetown). Here's the abstract.

We find evidence of a large negative discontinuity ... in mortality rates for children ages 5-9 from causes that could be affected by Head Start, but not for other mortality causes or birth cohorts that should not be affected by the program. We also find suggestive evidence for a positive effect of Head Start on educational attainment in both the 1990 Census, concentrated among those cohorts born late enough to have been exposed to the program, and among respondents in the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988.

Ignore the first part (though believe me, it's very cool) about regression discontinuity. Here's the takeaway. The authors have pretty reliable evidence that Head Start caused some of these kids to survive past their 9th birthday, and also to accumulate more schooling. Next time you wonder about Head Start, think of this result.