Abstract
Bartik argues that local economic development strategies should include extensive investments in high-quality early childhood programs. These programs include pre-kindergarten education, child care, and parental assistance. More economic benefits accrue to a local area (e.g., higher earnings) if business incentives are complemented by these kinds of programs. Bartik provides a painstaking evidence-based investigation of the role of early childhood programs in achieving economic development goals. In so doing, he provides a compelling case for supplementing the early developmental environments of disadvantaged children. The book is a good forum for state and local economic development officials and business leaders who need new strategies in an era of tightening federal budgets.
Bartik provides an analysis of the benefits of public investment in early childhood learning. By focusing on two policy constituencies—the early childhood community and the economic development community—Bartik argues that a complementary set of strategies can be implemented to help local areas boost the quality and quantity of labor supply. Economic strategies that focus only on job creation miss important aspects of labor supply. By focusing on local strategies, Bartik notes that top-down federal programs are often less innovative, effective, and flexible. Moreover, well-run local programs serve not only local interests but also national interests.
In the first part of the book, Bartik considers the cost-effectiveness and economic benefits of pre-K education, high-quality child care and early education, and nurse home-visitation programs for disadvantaged first-time mothers. He estimates the economic benefits of these programs in state earnings. In the latter half of the book, Bartik considers larger political issues. For example, the benefits of these programs come to fruition mostly in the long term in an era when politicians have 2-year attention spans. Are there greater social benefits from, and political attractiveness for, universal programs or programs that target low-income families? His conclusion on this latter question is that universal programs offer the greatest economic and political benefits, which will not sit well with those who are deeply troubled by increasing social and spatial inequalities in the United States. Given that Bartik’s evidence-based approach is focused on long-term economic benefits, social and spatial inequalities are considered only in these terms.
There are other contexts of this book that may give geographers pause. In Chapter 9, for example, he considers scale only in terms of size and previous growth trends, and in Chapter 10 he considers space only in terms of interstate spillover effects.
Chapter 11 moves beyond economic issues (a little) to consider ethical issues, and Chapter 12 considers other improvements in human capital (e.g., decreased crime, better test scores, educational attainment, public health). In the final chapter, Bartik calls for a grassroots movement to improve early childhood programs. Discussion in these last couple of chapters may be of most interest to readers who are not fully immersed in economic epistemologies and their relations to policy. Bartik touches lightly on a number of issues, including relations of child care to family and family rights, as well as contexts of diversity and its relations to public and private support. Bartik takes on conservative pundits who argue for less government intrusion in family life and less support for public sponsored programs by showing how they set up childhood education as a straw dog. By so doing, his arguments for local-based child care support dovetail well with the more ethnographically and geographically defined work of England (1996), Holloway (1998), and Mitchell, Marston, and Katz (2004). England argues for the support of a diverse array of mothers, while Holloway has long advocated for locally based child care that is in the control of parents. Mitchell et al.’s work is focused more on the institutional contexts of early education programs and detracts hugely from the legacy of Bush policies and, in particular, the ravages of No Child Left Behind (a policy about which Bartik is curiously silent although he spends time with test score improvements in the penultimate chapter of the book).
Although most academics and practitioners trained in geography, education, child studies, and political science would laud Bartik’s focus on thinking and acting locally, there are issues in this book that might lose readers who are not fully immersed in economic theory and empiricism. This is a book written by an economist for other economists, and it is tightly focused on the power of economic estimates to convince policy makers of the need for change. Bartik makes a lot of good points, but they may come across as a series of economic sound bites for those readers who prefer a well-nourished series of arguments fed by narrative and social theory as well as data. This criticism does not detract from Bartik’s trenchant empiricism and his painstaking analysis. This is no doubt a solid contribution to the field.