Early Childhood Development Takes Center Stage in China: Questions & Answer with Scott Rozelle and James Heckman

【编者按】2018年11月17日，詹姆斯·赫克曼(James J. Heckman)教授在西安召开的“2018年儿童早期发展国际论坛”上发表主旨演讲，出席会议的有来自世界各地和中国各地的政要和顶尖学者。赫克曼教授就儿童早期发展(ECD)质量对生活在贫困和富裕社区的婴幼儿的重要性进行了广泛和深入的概述。他在演讲中阐明儿童早期发展质量对一个人的童年及其终生的健康、经济和社会性结果都有重大影响。高质量的儿童早期发展项目对整个社会的影响也是巨大的。他特别强调了儿童早期发展的经济学意义，认为政府投资弱势儿童的早期发展，其社会回报率非常高。赫克曼教授借鉴了世界各地的研究成果，包括他自己以及美国和其他发达国家的其他学者的研究成果。

罗思高主讲“清华三农讲坛” 解析中国农村人力资本问题

4月11日晚，清华大学中国农村研究院主办的“清华三农讲坛”第二十五讲在清华大学公共管理学院报告厅举行。美国斯坦福大学教授、清华大学中国农村研究院学术委员会委员罗思高（Scott Rozelle）作了题为“农村人力资本：一个中国中长期发展的挑战”的演讲。北京大学国家发展研究院院长、教授姚洋进行点评。农研院副院长、研究员何宇鹏主持讲坛。

Read the full article here.

Writer Alex Shashkavech writes about Prashant Loyalka's new study that "found that undergraduate seniors studying computer science in the United States outperformed final-year students in China, India and Russia on a standardized exam measuring their skills. The research results were published on March 18 in a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." Read the full article in Stanford News.

Author Chen Ying writes about Professor Scott Rozelle and REAP's projects supporting youth in rural China. Read full text here.  

罗斯高，斯坦福大学教授，发展经济学家。扎根中国农村近40年，是不折不扣的中国通。近十年来，罗斯高教授和他中国的同事在贫困农村开展一系列针对农村儿童的研究，并设计干预实验寻求解决方案...

Bloomberg Businessweek writes on China's historic economic reforms and the future to come, quoting Scott Rozelle and REAP's work on education and human capacity building in rural China. Read full text here.

Read full text here. 

儿童早期发展关乎人的一生，对贫困农村儿童早期发展领域的投入，会为社会发展带来长期且高效的回报。

2018年11月17日，“养育未来，从0开始——2018年儿童早期发展国际论坛”在陕西西安举行，诺贝尔经济学奖得主詹姆斯·赫克曼等国内外学者，用来自世界各地的成功案例提示着儿童早期发展工作的重要性。

而正在秦岭山区、陕西宁陕县推进的“养育未来”项目，成为与会专家们讨论的焦点，“宁陕模式”成为中国在0-3岁儿童早期发展工作上全新的经验。

项目发起方之一阿里巴巴脱贫基金副主席彭蕾在现场称，希望携手各界，以宁陕实践为起点，共同探索可复制、宜推广的社会模式，让中国儿童早期发展的探索，从0开始，走向世界。

Researchers from Stanford University, working together with Chinese academics, found a high drop-out rate in rural China. Many of the drop-outs are left-behind children. 

Constrained by time and money, migrant parents usually manage to go home only once a year, typically during the Lunar New Year. The lack of interaction between parents and children has led to psychological and developmental problems for some children. 

A Stanford-led study in China has revealed for the first time high levels of a potentially fatal tapeworm infection among school-age children. The researchers suggest solutions that could reduce infections in this sensitive age range and possibly improve education outcomes and reduce poverty.

The study, published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, focuses on Taenia solium, a tapeworm that infects millions of impoverished people worldwide and can cause a disorder of the central nervous system called neurocysticercosis. The World Health Organization estimates that the infection is one of the leading causes of epilepsy in the developing world and results in 29 percent of epilepsy cases in endemic areas. It is thought to affect about 7 million people in China alone.

A 2016 McKinsey & Company study found that nearly three-quarters of Chinese customers worry that the food they eat is harmful to their health. The vast number of small farms makes China’s food system “almost completely unmanageable in terms of food safety,” says Scott Rozelle, an expert on rural China at Stanford University.

随着科研的深入，罗斯高意识到要解决根本性的课题—“摆脱贫困”还得依靠教育。他认为中国要想成为发达国家，就要让每个孩子都上高中，而且是普通高中，不是职业高中。“我们需要考虑的是未来，那时候没有那么多路可以修，没有那么多楼可以盖，劳动密集的工厂也都转移到其他工资更低的国家去了。”罗斯高说，到那时大量没有接受过高中教育的中国劳动人口将面临失业，拖累中国变成高等收入国家。

本来的报道

Making matters worse are the millions of children in rural areas who are being raised by their extended families. With their parents working in faraway cities, these children tend to fare much worse in school and on IQ tests. Stanford economist Scott Rozelle has referred to this as an "invisible crisis" in the making: In the coming decades, he estimates, some 400 million underprepared Chinese could be looking for work. His research has touched such a nerve that even state media has given it serious coverage.

Glasses askew and gray hair tousled, Scott Rozelle jumps into a corral filled with rubber balls and starts mixing it up with several toddlers. The kids pelt the 62-year-old economist with balls, and squealing, jump onto his lap. As the battle rages, Rozelle chatters in Mandarin with mothers and grandmothers watching the action. 

Elsewhere in this early childhood education center in centralChina, youngsters are riding rocking horses, clambering on a jungle gym, thimbing through picture books, or taking part in group reading. Once a week, caregivers get one-on-one coaching on how to read to toddlers and play educational games. The center is part of an ambitious experiment Rozelle is leading that aims to find solutions to what he sees as a crisis of gargantuan proportions in China: the intellectual stunting of roughly one-third of the population. "This is the biggest problem China is facing that nobody's ever heard about," says Rozelle, a professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Surveys by Rozelle's team have found that more than half of eighth graders in poor rural areas in China have IQs below 90, leaving them struggling to keep up with te fast-paced official curriculum. A third or more of rural kids, he says, don't complete junior high. Factoring in the 15% or so of urban kids who fall at the low end of IQ scores, Rozelle makes a stunning forecast: About 400 million future working-age Chinese, he says, "are in danger of becoming cognitively handicapped."

Following the formulation of the UN’s “sustainable development” goals in 2015, governments worldwide have committed to expanding access to primary care services. Experts believe that primary care can address about 90% of health problems and it has been found to be related to higher life expectancy and lower child mortality rates. However, experts are concerned that a lack of access to primary care and the poor quality of health services will be incapable of meeting the growing burden of chronic illness in poor countries. 

The WHO calculated that about 400 million people globally are unable to access “essential health services,” such as antenatal care and treatment for tuberculosis. However, this figure does not take into account the global burden of non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease. Non-communicable diseases are expected to account for over 70% of deaths in developing countries by 2020, but findings from the World Bank and WHO demonstrate that access to treatments for these diseases are severely deficient. For example, it is estimated that more than half of individuals in developing countries with hypertension are not aware they have this condition, and between 24% and 62% of individuals with diabetes do not receive treatment.

"This is the biggest problem that China faces that no one knows about. This is an invisible problem," said Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program (REAP) at Stanford University, "China has the lowest levels of human capital (out of all the middle income countries in the world today). China is lower than South Africa, lower than Turkey. We think that's related to when they were babies, they didn't develop well.”

Rural Chinese children have a significant delay in their cognitive development compared with their urban counterparts, researchers have found, which could potentially hinder the country’s economic development.

Possibly the single most important of the tensions stoked up by President Trump is the rivalry between the United States and China. Economic strength will be the ultimate determinant of this struggle for the position of Top Nation.

The annual output in China is currently around $10 trillion a year, compared to the $17 trillion in America.

Hongbin Li, Prashant Loyalka, Scott Rozelle, and Binzhen Wu recently published a piece in the Journal of Economic Perspectives particularly worth flagging. It touches on one of the hotter social debates in China over the past few years: whether the massive expansion of college education since 1999 has created an over-supply of graduates, or is just the beginning of the necessary transformation of the education system to meet the needs of a modern economy.

The outlines of China’s demographic challenge are well-known: By 2050 almost 27 percent of the population will be 65 or older, up from around 10 percent in 2015. Less recognized is that the crisis will hit hardest in rural villages.

The Lancet reckons that 43% of under-fives in poor countries, in other words about 250m kids, will fail to meet their “developmental potential” because of avoidable deficiencies in early childhood development (ECD).

Children in rural areas of China suffer from slow cognitive development due to a lack of proper parenting and nutrition, casting a shadow over the future of the country's economy, a Stanford University study shows.

Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Stanford University Rural Education Action Program (REAP), told Caixin that more than half of the toddlers 24 to 30 months old and about 40% of the infants 6 to 18 months old scored below average in IQ tests. The average IQ score for these age groups should range between 90 to 109.

The winners of the Clearly Vision Prize will share cash prizes totalling $250,000 to help them accelerate their progress and move us another step down the road towards a world where everyone can see.

The Rural Education Action Program (REAP), an impact-evaluation organization, aims to inform sound education, health and nutrition policy in China. Since 2011, REAP’s five randomized controlled trials have shown that quality vision care is the most cost-effective intervention for improving child welfare, and leads to large and sustainable increases in learning and school performance, along with positive spillovers to children who don’t have poor vision.

The US-based startup has partnered with eyewear company Luxottica OneSight to help scale eye care to ten million people in China that do not have access to affordable services. According to research conducted by Stanford University, only one out of six rural children in China has a set of glasses and most rural students have never had an eye exam. The for-profit ran a pilot operation in conjunction with the Chinese Academy of Sciences before launching in the provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu, where it distributes low-cost glasses, trains doctors and teachers, and constructs clinics. Teachers can test vision directly in classrooms and use mobile phones to automate patient referrals and prescriptions. Smart Focus argues the nonprofit route would never have been a sustainable or scalable way of helping the number of children that need eye care.

The sprawling National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) in China is one of the world’s largest bureaucraies. Its reach spreads from the bustling supercities on China’s eastern seaboard to the remote villages that dot the country’s vast rural interior. For decades, NHFPC officials had responsibility for enforcing China’s One Child Policy. In their relentless drive to keep fertility low, these officials sometimes fined noncompliant families into a state of poverty or even subjected women to forced abortion or sterilization procedures.