Lottery-Based Evaluations of Early Education Programs: Opportunities and Challenges for Building the Next Generation of Evidence

Quantifying the effect of policies to promote educational performance on macroeconomic productivity

“…Heckman's research has been met with criticism on the grounds that it is predominantly based on the Abecedarian and the Perry Pre-school experiments carried out in the United States for disadvantaged children aged three to four over a period of two years, and so cannot be generalised because of the small scale of the experiments and because randomisation had not been carried out carefully enough. The curriculum in these experiments also differs from the education programmes in modern pre-schools (Weiland et al, 2023). More recent and general datasets, relying on fully randomised controls, seem to show that early childhood education effects might be smaller and shorter lived (Whitehurst, 2017;VerBruggen, 2019).…”