Monday, February 13, 2006
Congratulations to economist Art Rolnick of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Board, who was recently selected by Minnesota Monthly magazine as Minnesotan of the Year. Art has been a champion of the positive economic benefits to investing in quality early childhood education. The following is an excerpt from the linked story...
To hear Rolnick tell the story, his recent fixation on the schooling of preschoolers just sort of shimmied into his path. Two years ago, he was attending a breakfast gathering put together by former Minnesota governor Al Quie and ex-Minneapolis mayor Don Fraser for Ready 4 K, a local early education advocacy group. Quie and Fraser were arguing for state funding. But to Rolnick, their pitch seemed incomplete. “I naively raised my hand and said, ‘This sounds good, but I can make all kinds of moral arguments for K–12, higher education, reducing pollution, reducing crime,’” he recalls. “‘I just think you’re not going to make much headway without making the economic case for it.’”
Rolnick had just turned himself into Minnesota’s pied piper of early learning: “They
said, ‘Okay, Rolnick, write us up a white paper, the background.’ I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”The result was an essay, coauthored with Minneapolis Fed regional economic analyst Rob Grunewald, titled “Early Childhood Development: Economic Development with a High Public Return.” It was fairly arcane stuff, but its impact was dramatic. By framing the childhood development argument in terms of returns on investment, the authors hoped to appeal directly to fiscally minded members of the business community.
The essay recommends the creation of a $1.5 billion state endowment to permanently fund high-quality early learning for all 3- to 4-year-old kids from low-income households in the state. A 6 to 7 percent return on investment in AAA bonds, Rolnick argues, would yield about $90 million a year, plenty to pay for the program statewide. (Incidentally, Minnesota now spends about 40 percent of its budget on K–12 education, but less than 1 percent on preschoolers.)
Rolnick was unprepared for the massive response. “I wrote the paper, and I thought I was done,” he says. Hardly, says Todd Otis, president of St. Paul–based Ready 4 K. “He did the research and became almost a rock star of early childhood,” Otis says. “It’s been a real shot in the arm for the early childhood movement.”
If you have not read “Early Childhood Development: Economic Development with a High Public Return” read their paper…
There is a article in the Star Tribune Commentary section and an article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press Business section about Mr Rolnick.
