Monday, May 10, 2021

May 10, 2021

By David Leonhardt

Good morning. Biden wants universal pre-K. A large new study examines its likely effects.

A pre-K classroom in Boston's Brighton neighborhood in 2017.Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

Life outcomes, not test scores

In the late 1990s, Boston expanded its public pre-K program, but it did not have nearly enough spots for every 4-year-old in the city. So it used a lottery to help determine which children could enroll.

That lottery created an opportunity for academic researchers. It meant that thousands of otherwise similar children would have different life experiences based on random chance. And random chance is a powerful way for social scientists to study cause and effect. It may be the closest thing to a laboratory experiment in the real world.

Pre-K was a particularly good subject to study, because there has been a long-running debate about how much it matters. In the 1960s and '70s, studies of two small preschool programs — known as the Perry and Abecedarian programs — showed major benefits for the children who attended them. But some experts pointed out the two programs were of a higher quality than most pre-K programs. For that reason, a community that enacted universal pre-K could not expect to replicate the benefits of Perry and Abecedarian.

The evidence about larger pre-K programs — like the federal Head Start program — was more mixed. Graduates of Head Start seemed to do better on math and reading tests during the early years of elementary school. As they got older, though, the positive effects often faded, leaving the value of universal pre-K unclear.

This debate now has a new urgency. President Biden is calling for the federal government to subsidize state pre-K programs. About two-thirds of 4-year-olds and half of 3-year-olds now attend such programs. Biden wants to make them universally available, at an additional cost of about $20 billion a year (or less than 1/30th of what the federal government spends on Medicare). He would pay for it by raising taxes on the wealthy.

In today's newsletter, I want to tell you about the results from the Boston pre-K study. They are being released this morning by three economists, from the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley.

A Head Start classroom in 1969.Ted Streshinsky/Corbis, via Getty Images

Social and emotional skills

Let's start with the negative results: The Boston students who won the lottery did not do noticeably better on standardized tests in elementary school, middle school or high school, according to the three researchers, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Parag Pathak and Christopher Walters. These findings are consistent with the mixed evidence on Head Start.

But test scores are mostly a means, not an end. More important than the scores are concrete measures of a student's well-being. And by those measures, the students who won the lottery fared substantially better than those who lost it.

The winners were less likely to be suspended in high school and less likely to be sentenced to juvenile incarceration. Nearly 70 percent of lottery winners graduated from high school, compared with 64 percent of lottery losers, which is a substantial difference for two otherwise similar groups. The winners were also more likely to take the S.A.T., to enroll in college and — though the evidence is incomplete, because of the students' age — to graduate from college.

These positive effects were similar across racial groups and income groups. They also spanned both sexes, with larger effects for boys than girls. The authors note that their findings are consistent with several other studies, which also found that early education had a bigger effect on long-term outcomes than short-term metrics.

How could pre-K have these positive effects without lifting test scores? It seems to improve children's social and emotional skills and help them mature more than it helps in a narrow academic sense, the researchers told me.

The findings are a reminder of how complex a process schooling is. We can't simply give up on test scores. Measurement and accountability are vital parts of education, just as they are with most human endeavors. Without them, society ends up tolerating a lot of mediocrity and failure. But measurement often needs to be nuanced to be accurate.

"An important implication of our study," Walters, a Berkeley economist, said, "is that modern large-scale public preschool programs can improve educational attainment."

For more: How child care became a top issue in Biden's Washington, by The Times's Emily Peck; and why Republicans are abandoning their past support for universal child care, by Elliot Haspel, in The Washington Post.

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THE LATEST NEWS

The Virus

A line for vaccinations in Cologne, Germany, this weekend.Sascha Steinbach/EPA, via Shutterstock

After a slow start to its vaccination campaign, the European Union is administering nearly three million doses a day.
Several states — including Wisconsin, Iowa and the Carolinas — have asked the federal government to send fewer doses as U.S. demand continues to fall.
Most schools have reopened, at least partly. But students continue to opt out of in-person classes — often for reasons beyond the virus.
Virus resources: Google is adapting its offices for life after the pandemic. Take a look.

Politics

Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, endorsed Elise Stefanik to replace Liz Cheney in the party's leadership.

The White House is planning to require stronger digital security for federal agencies and contractors. This weekend, a cyberattack forced a major pipeline to shut down.
With narrow margins in the House and Senate, some Democrats worry that deaths or illnesses among their members could derail Biden's agenda.

International News

Bombings this weekend in Afghanistan targeted girls. The scale of the killing and the innocence of the victims looked like signs of a country's violent unraveling.
China is forcing Muslim women in Xinjiang region to have fewer children.
The U.S. and Iran want to restore the nuclear deal. They disagree on what that means.
Debris from a Chinese rocket landed in the Indian Ocean yesterday. NASA's head accused China of "failing to meet responsible standards."

ARTS AND IDEAS

J. Kenji López-Alt's no-knead bread.Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

The no-knead revolution

Bread baking changed in 2006. That's when Jim Lahey and Mark Bittman published their fresh take on the form in The Times: a recipe that lets time do most of the work, no kneading necessary.

The technique led to an explosion in amateur baking and changed professional baking as well, the chef J. Kenji López-Alt writes. It changed his life, too. "Learning how time can do the work for you turned me from someone who baked perhaps one or two loaves a year into someone who throws together dough on a whim before bedtime several times a month," he writes.

López-Alt's basic instructions: Mix flour, water, salt and yeast in a bowl just until they all come together. Cover the bowl and let it sit on your counter overnight. The next day, shape it into a loose loaf, let it proof, then bake it in a preheated Dutch oven with the lid on. — Claire Moses, a Morning writer

For more: Here's López-Alt's updated recipe for no-knead bread.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

Evan Sung for The New York Times

Combine a main-course salad, like this Salade Lyonnaise, with your no-knead bread.

What to Watch

Two comedies on Peacock — "Girls5Eva" and "Rutherford Falls" — rely on reminiscing, but are also warnings about living in the past, the critic James Poniewozik writes.

Late Night

Elon Musk's turn on "S.N.L." was a bit self-deprecating and a bit self-aggrandizing.

Now Time to Play

The New York Times

The pangram from Friday's Spelling Bee was vitriolic. Here is today's puzzle — or you can play online.

Here's today's Mini Crossword, and a clue: Fleeting trend (three letters).

If you're in the mood to play more, find all our games here.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David

P.S. President Woodrow Wilson set Mother's Day as the second Sunday in May, urging Americans to display the flag "as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country," The Times reported in 1914.

You can see today's print front page here.

Today's episode of "The Daily" is about vaccine hesitancy. On the Book Review podcast, Michael Lewis discusses "The Premonition."

Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Tom Wright-Piersanti contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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Friday, May 7, 2021

The Morning: Biden vs. Putin

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May 7, 2021

By David Leonhardt and Claire Moses

Good morning. With tensions rising, we explain the new relationship between Russia and the U.S.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, center front, in Kyiv yesterday.Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Ministry, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Biden, Putin and Ukraine

Russia has stationed nearly 80,000 troops on its border with Ukraine. Not far away, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, Russian-backed separatists have recently intensified their attacks. And yesterday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Kyiv, to emphasize American support for Ukraine.

Blinken, holding a bouquet of roses, stood in a rainstorm to visit a memorial for Ukrainian soldiers killed in the fighting with Russia. He later said he had been emotionally moved "to pay tribute to those who lost their lives defending Ukraine's democracy."

Since President Biden took office — following Donald Trump, who was famously solicitous of President Vladimir Putin — tensions between Russia and the U.S. have been rising. This morning, we want to help you make sense of what's going on.

What is Putin doing?

The buildup of troops since March is both a message to Ukraine as well as to the U.S. and the European Union.

For Ukraine, it appears to be a classic attempt at intimidation. It is a reminder that Russia considers the country to be within its sphere of influence and opposes Ukraine's attempts to join NATO. Russia has already annexed Crimea from Ukraine, after a 2014 invasion. Now, says Michael Crowley, a Times correspondent traveling with Blinken this week, the 80,000 Russian troops may be partly an attempt to strengthen Russia's position in peace talks over the Donetsk region, potentially giving Putin more control over eastern Ukraine.

By The New York Times

For the U.S. and the European Union, the troops are a signal that Russia cares more deeply about Ukraine than they do. The U.S. and NATO are currently staging their own military exercise across Eastern Europe, called Defender Europe, which involves 28,000 troops. Russia's deployment "is essentially intended to call the bluff of the United States and Europe," The Times's Helene Cooper and Julian Barnes wrote, "and to make clear to Kyiv the limits of Western support."

It's not just Ukraine

The troop deployment also seems to contain a message bigger than just Ukraine. It is a show of strength by Putin as he also takes steps to quash the protest movement led by Aleksei Navalny, which has inspired more dissent than Putin has faced in years. And it's a reminder to Biden that if he becomes too aggressive toward Russia, Putin can create problems for him.

Biden has an ambitious foreign policy agenda, some of which has little to do with Russia and some of which requires Russian cooperation, such as climate change and Iran's nuclear program. An escalating conflict over Ukraine would make all of that more difficult.

"Putin is a master of raising tension and then tamping it down a bit," Roger Cohen, a longtime Times correspondent, told us. By getting more aggressive with Ukraine, Putin can show Biden and Europe's leaders that he has leverage over them.

Ukrainian armed forces moving through Donetsk last month.Oleksandr Klymenko/Reuters

And what is Biden doing?

Biden has used some harsh words about Putin — calling him a killer — but Biden's actual policies have been more moderated. On the one hand, Blinken's visit to Kyiv has been provocative, and last month the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia, in response to hacking and election interference.

But the sanctions stopped far short of what the U.S. could have imposed. "I was clear with President Putin that we could have gone further, but I chose not to do so," Biden said when announcing them. "The United States is not looking to kick off a cycle of escalation and conflict with Russia."

Anton Troianovski, The Times's Moscow bureau chief, describes the White House strategy as "a carefully choreographed carrot-and-stick approach." Lara Jakes, who covers the State Department, points out that Biden and Putin have known each other for years and that their relationship, for all of the tension, is characterized by "pragmatism and a fair bit of predictability."

Perhaps Biden's biggest goal is to create a stable relationship in which Putin decides that he has more to lose than to gain from confrontation. And that's not easy.

Russia, as The Economist recently wrote, is already "the single most prolific stoker of instability on Europe's borders, and arguably the most energetic troublemaker in rich democracies, funding extremist parties, spreading disinformation and discord." But of course Russia could still cause even more trouble, as Putin is now demonstrating in Ukraine.