Lunches and literacy: America’s stubborn insistence on paying to fix problems rather than prevent them

A story in today’s Washington Post revolves around the cost of providing healthier, tastier lunches to children in school. According to the story, a number of funding proposals will be on the table when Congress  budgets for childhood nutrition programs in the coming months:

The nonprofit School Nutrition Association is asking for a 35-cent-per-lunch increase in the federal reimbursement rate, which now stands at $2.68. Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) wants a 70-cent raise. Berkeley, Calif., chef and local-food pioneer Alice Waters is lobbying to bring the total to $5 per student. The administration, too, supports improving school food, at least rhetorically: President Obama has proposed an additional $1 billion for child nutrition programs, including school lunch, in his 2010 budget…. But with a projected $1.6 trillion federal deficit in 2009, even the strongest supporters of school lunch reform privately concede a substantial increase is unlikely to pass.

One reason funding for school lunches probably will not increase is that healthy eating is a preventative measure. Although higher-quality meals likely would (1) help students focus in the classroom, leading to increased academic performance, (2) keep students healthy and more likely to be in attendance, and (3) encourage healthier eating habits later in life–all of which are beneficial to society as a whole–it is hard to convince the general public that the long-term payoff is worth the expense now. After all, the failure to fund school lunches will not result in an imminent crisis, and imminent crisis seems to be the thing to which people respond best.

The coming cost-benefit debate over nutrition funding is similar to the current conversation about the efficacy of early-childhood education that is happening in universities and state legislatures across the country.

In his 2008 paper, “Schools, Skills, and Synapses,” University of Chicago economist James Heckman explains that when it comes to funding programs for children, “If the base is weak, the return to later investment is low” (p. 21). For example, if a student does not have solid social, emotional, and academic skills as a 6-year-old, she will get less out of the money that is spent on her first grade education when compared with another student who has that base. Heckman’s graph on page 91 shows the diminishing returns for money invested as children grow older. In other words, money spent on children at a younger age makes much more of a difference than money spent on them later in life, and when children are invested in at an early age it results in later investments having more of an impact.

The recently-deceased Myles Brand, former president of Indiana University (he’s perhaps most famous for firing IU basketball coach Bob Knight), and later president of the NCAA, succinctly explained the importance of early-childhood learning in a Detroit Free Press op-ed this past April:

It is estimated that 90% of brain development occurs in the first three years of a child’s life. Children that are unprepared for kindergarten have a 10% chance of being able to read in the first grade. If you cannot read at grade level in the first grade, you have a 12% chance of reading at grade level in the fourth grade. And if you can’t read at grade level in the fourth grade, you have only a 2% chance of graduating from college.”

What Brand fails to mention is the high number of students who drop out of high school because they cannot read well and eventually become  too frustrated to continue their education. This obviously does not bode well for their life chances. U.S. taxpayers spend $60 billion per year (see the section on recidivism funding) on state and federal corrections. The most common characteristic of inmates: a low level of literacy. Seventy percent read below the eighth-grade level, and many are functionally illiterate. In fact, at least two states have used the number of children not reading on grade level in early elementary school to project how many new prison beds would be needed in future years!

So the question is, can American citizens be convinced to pay now for things like more early-childhood programs and healthier school lunches rather than pay later for more prison beds and a continued obesity epidemic? Will they see that it is in their best interest to use lots of tax dollars to provide a solid foundation for all children, specifically those who are born into poverty and may not receive such a foundation without state/federal assistance? Perhaps more importantly, who can convince citizens that this is the right strategy to follow?