The following interview with Dr. Heckman was conducted over the phone. We subsequently video taped an interview in his home in Chicago. The following transcript has not been edited for journal or magazine publication (see 'Interview Notes' for more details). Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview.

David Boulton: I am not an economist, but as someone whose life’s work is about ‘stewarding the health of children's learning’, I'm really taken with your ‘Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children.’

Dr. James Heckman: This is something that I am very passionate about, but I'm passionate because I believe there's a scientific basis here and I just want to sort out the good arguments and the bad ones. I'm very, very actively engaged. As an economist, I'm primarily interested in what we call the technology of skill formation. But what that comes down to is really exactly what you are calling 'affect' and its relationship to cognition - how it is and where it is we should intervene, and what's the best evidence based on the various studies. They haven't been fully synthesized and that's what I'm in the middle of doing.

David Boulton: I want to help in any way I can with what you're doing. Our society needs to have an appreciation of the capital value of learning - it doesn't ‘get it’ right now.

Dr. James Heckman: Exactly. I think it's amazing how much we disregard early childhood, and the family structure. What I've been getting at, and you saw on the Committee of Economic Development paper, The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children paper. What I want to put together, more systematically, is the structure of how the disadvantaged family - just what a disadvantaged family does, what its harm is, what the environment is. Right now, so much of the discussion on economics and in many other areas, World Bank, it doesn't matter where, is just on income. As though if we give the family another $1,000 - that's it. And that's nuts.

It has nothing to do with it. Now, maybe the family, in its wisdom, could spend the income. But I think you're absolutely right, there's a huge amount of ignorance about what to do and where to focus. See, economists have this little bit of schizophrenia about this process. Namely, on the one hand, if you look at bond markets in New York, we tend to think they work very smoothly. In fact, they process information quickly, there are billions of dollars to be made, and a mistake will cost you your job and your fortune. Those are kind of documented decisions.

But raising a kid is not that at all. You're just learning for the first time. Almost everybody is an amateur. And even when they get to be really proficient, the kids have gone. They just know the mistakes. I remember when my kids were born, I was reading McVicker Hunt, I was reading all these books by Piaget that I thought I should really learn, and then I gave up. I said, first of all, there are a lot of disagreements here in this community and I don't know what to do. I've got an idea of what to do. The kids have turned out okay so far, so I'm not complaining, but I mean, the fact is there really is a lot more to be learned about the skill process.

David Boulton: Yes.

Family Effects:

David Boulton: I'm surprised that so few of the people (that I encounter) in education seem to understand that most of the ‘effects' that correlate most strongly with 'student performance’ are happening or caused outside of school. 

Dr. James Heckman: Well, you know it’s a funny thing. I'm not sure they don't understand that. I think there are a lot of institutions in place that maybe divert their attention away from it. I think that may be a better way to describe that.

David Boulton: Okay. And, just in terms of my personal interactions with people in education, when I bring this up it’s like a revelation to them. 

Dr. James Heckman: Well, I think there are a lot of institutional reasons why people don’t get this. Don't forget the way that a lot of these topics are discussed. You have a feature, which is that a lot of these people discussing it are either academics or else they are people who are committed in some way or other to support a particular…

David Boulton: Ideology or methodology.

Dr. James Heckman: Or institution as far as a life cycle process. Academics largely have no reality check. I mean, common sense, as you well know, is probably in short supply. This is an argument that's actually very commonsensical. But what happens is that people collect data, they work on a certain problem, they become enormously absorbed into a certain mindset and then they lose the ability to think more broadly or really understand what we've been learning from the developmental processes of the last twenty years or so, and even longer going back to the Coleman Report.

There are a lot of signs that point in this direction. I think anybody who's got common sense would accept it.

David Boulton: Well, there is a convergence that’s happening that supports this which is coming ‘bottoms up’ from the neurosciences about how important the early years are to the infrastructure forming in the brain.

Dr. James Heckman: It is, but you've got to be careful. I'm very interested in the neuroscience evidence. I'm writing a paper with a primatologist and a neuroscientist exactly exploring this link; a guy named Eric Knudsen who happens to be a neuroscientist at Stanford and a woman named Judy Cameron who is a primatologist at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center. And there is evidence from both the neuroscience and from the primatology communities that is relevant. But you have to be careful. These are hints, they’re indications. We don't have anything really hard in the sense that a neuroscientist would call "hard" to a body as large as a human being, to an organism as complicated as a person. Partly because no experiments have been done. And secondly, the scale of organizing up from the cellular responses that are studied by a lot of neuroscientists. Serial synaptic responses are quite different from what we see in the organization of human thinking and behavior. Yeah, the hints are there. I think the evidence is there, I do. I just think you have to be really careful in sorting through that.

David Boulton: I appreciate the distinction. The neuroscience I was referring to is the neuroscience that’s showing what allows a brain to develop the kinds of infrastructure it needs to process, for example, in the case of reading, this artificially confusing code. There's a kind of growth that has to happen or learning that has to happen that we can see is related to the kind of language environment that the children are developing in.

Dr. James Heckman: Correct. Oh, absolutely. No question about that.

David Boulton: And that neuroscience connects up with other types of research. For example, the Hart-Risley work.

Dr. James Heckman: I've heard of this work, but go ahead.

David Boulton: Basically it showed that there was a thirty plus million word exposure difference in the amount of talk children experienced by the time they were four years old.

Dr. James Heckman: Yes, I’ve heard of this.

David Boulton: And a consequence of this is a radical difference in the exercise environment that the brain needs to create the kind of differentiations in language that are critical for taking off in reading.

Dr. James Heckman: Exactly.

David Boulton: So, there is a connection between the neuroscience outside of reading with respect to what facilitates the neurological growth and differentiation needed to deal with complexity in sound and so forth. And then there are language studies, reading research, family effects, and economic pointers that are all kind of converging here.

Dr. James Heckman: Oh, I agree. And that's what I was trying to get with that paper. It's crude, and I think the whole synthesis right now is crude, but it’s very suggestive and I do believe that they all point in the same way. Absolutely.

Take the language question, which very much fascinates me. See the dual sides of the language problem are that not only do we know that early environments, in the sense of early access to enriched environments, whether from the parents or from some other source, essentially promote language skills. But we also know that this process, if not put in place, is very difficult to remedy.

Recently, I've been studying the effects of programs that are designed to solve things like adult illiteracy and adult innumeracy. But there are problems. First of all, sometimes these are prison populations, and sometimes these are problem populations outside of prison. For example, government training programs and programs that are focused on disadvantaged populations like charity groups and the like.

What's interesting is that vocabulary can be acquired over the whole life cycle. One can learn words. But syntax, language structure, certain modes of expression and the like, really do get acquired at an early age. An extreme example is the question of acquiring a language without an accent. We know there is a critical period for that - up to age eleven.

David Boulton: Laura-Ann Petitto and others have done some really interesting work on bilingual brains that supports and also adds to this. Pettito and Kevin Dunbar did a paper that came out in November 2004 called "New Findings from Educational Neuroscience on Bilingual Brains, Scientific Brains and the Educated Mind."

David Boulton: So, we're tracking in similar terrains. I'm really interested in both the cognitive science / neuroscience side, and the affective side because, as I'm sure you're aware in your trek into this, there’s another dimension to all this, which is how does the developing child feel about how well they're learning.

Dr. James Heckman: That's the part that is really mostly ignored in everything of social science as far as I can see.

David Boulton: But it has fundamental cognitive implications.

Dr. James Heckman: Oh, absolutely.

David Boulton: It’s not just a ‘wouldn't it be nice’ emotional surface.

Dr. James Heckman: I've seen it argued both ways. We had a conference here [in Chicago] last September and there was a group from Montreal that came in, including Richard Tremblay. He's a psychologist who works a lot on crime and the origins of criminality. He has long-term longitudinal studies where he looks at aggressive behavior at different stages. So, it’s not just crime, it’s really a whole series of self-control measures and measures of violence, of what we would think of as affective control.

He and some of his group argued that yes, there were very important interactions, but he also thought that there was an interaction the other way. So, there certainly is a question about motivation and the like effecting learning, big time. So, that's how I interpret the Perry Preschool and a lot of the evidence on early intervention. It seems that they do affect primarily the ability of the child to sort of concentrate, to focus, to encourage, to provide self-discipline and motivation.

But what they were arguing was that what they were calling the "executive function" was partly prompted by intelligence or what you would think of as the cognitive. So, it seems like a two-way flow here. You were describing it as one way and I think I would agree that's where the primary evidence lies, although even that evidence isn't out in the community as far as I can see.

David Boulton: Nobody has yet correlated cognitive processing stutters with affect-emotion triggering at the high-speed frequency level that is implicate here.

Dr. James Heckman: Yes. That would be amazingly interesting to see. Is anybody working on that?

David Boulton: I’m trying to get some people interested in working on that, suggesting using eye tracking and ERP and EEG and other methods in co-registered ways to show the effect of affective turbulence on cognitive entrainment and engagement.

Dr. James Heckman: That would be amazing.

Dr. James Heckman: I'm writing a paper now, which is crude, it’s limited by the kind of data that a lot of social scientists have, but it's very suggestive. It’s a study that grew out of what looked like a very minor project but has become one of my passions over the last decade - the GED program. One of the big findings that came out about three to four years ago that caused me to stop in my tracks a little bit was that the GEDs were actually just about as smart as high school graduates who didn’t go on to college.

So, in terms of all the measures of cognitive abilities, especially the pure measures of cognition, they were as smart as, if not smarter than, the high school graduates who didn’t go on to college or succeed in college. I should say that about half of all the GED’s go on to college. Actually it’s more like sixty percent, but only about three or four percent actually graduate even two-year college. That’s another story.  

What’s interesting is that we found these big gaps not in the ability as measured but in the behavior, in the sense that we found much more indications of poor behavior: hitting people, punching people, even back when the kids were six years old. And tracking them through the lifetime there seemed to be very interesting traits which caused these people to basically never get jobs that are stable. Never finish anything. They are just unstable.

David Boulton: Essentially, they can’t engage in anything in a stable way.

Dr. James Heckman: Exactly, so they can’t finish anything. So, they go in the army and they do not even finish basic training. They get thrown out. They tend to be more violent, too. The Marines, interestingly enough, wouldn’t take them. And the reason was that the GEDs they got were too violent and lacked self-control. They couldn’t take the platoon discipline.

David Boulton: Have you read any of Sylvan Tomkins or Donald Nathanson’s work on affect theory?

Dr. James Heckman: No, but this is really central. We’re actually showing now that a big chunk of this two-way interaction and for these various measures is what we call non-cognitive abilities. Which are basically measures of time preference, self-control, and discipline. They’re not the same.

David Boulton: No, but they can be seriously harmed by how we learn cognitively.

Dr. James Heckman: Exactly. But is that well established?

David Boulton: Well, that’s part of what is converging right now. Take, for example, the shame aversion that children feel when they can’t stay in the frustration of learning to read.

Dr. James Heckman: Yes.

David Boulton: It becomes an aversion to reading. And this aversion to reading is basically learning disabling to the process of learning to read, and potentially to their learning in general.

Dr. James Heckman: But is it the aversion or is it the lack of the ability that causes the shame? Which then causes the kid…

David Boulton: It’s a downward spiral because the less the experience, the more that they "frustrate out" in the confusion.

First of all, in the case of reading, we’re talking about an artificial (to our organism) maze of confusions. And the confusions are frustratingly difficult to learn through for a lot of reasons. Children’s primary response to failure in reading, according to National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and others, is to take it as an indication of something wrong with them, to blame themselves. So, they feel shame in relation to this confusion. (see "Shame Stories")

Now, if they’ve got good oral language abilities and processing speed and other variables we could talk about at the neuro-substrate level, many of them will pop through that threshold of confusion and start to get positive experiences of reading that provide them with learning traction and helps them bootstrap themselves up into doing better.

Those that can’t learn their way through the confusion start to become self-conscious about it and the movement into self-consciousness diminishes their brains capacity to learn through the confusion. They ‘stutter up’ at both the processing and emotional levels and that leads to a downward spiral.

Dr. James Heckman: Well, is this confined only to children though? What about adult literacy programs?

David Boulton: No, I think it’s across the board. Unfortunately, when you get to adults, and we’ve interviewed a number of adults and talked to the presidents of of ProLiteracy and the National Center for Family Literacy and others, what we find is that one the biggest things working against them learning now is how they feel about it.

Dr. James Heckman: What do you mean?

David Boulton: It triggers so much shame.

Dr. James Heckman: Right, I understand. They’re afraid to admit that they’re illiterate.

David Boulton: Or even if they will admit their feelings when trying to learn, the frustration and the long time of shame associated with that frustration is actually exacerbating the learning difficulty.

Dr. James Heckman: There’s always the question here: which comes first? My own sister has a child who is really substantially mentally impaired. He is now in his thirties. I think he attained a third or fourth grade level finally, but in the course of his education, you could see, and I was told this was fairly typical, deep frustration because he was in classes and he could see that other people were learning. He wasn’t an idiot in any sense. He could understand and he could also understand when he didn’t understand and the comparison was inevitable. And so what was put in place was definitely a psychological process. But it was caused by an initial learning disability. That’s the question. How do you sort those out?

David Boulton: Let’s talk about learning disabilities. From my conversations with James Wendorf, the Director for the National Center for Learning Disabilities, with Reid Lyon at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and with Sally Shaywitz in the neuroscience/dyslexia field, there seems to be a general consensus that the amount of neurobiologically innate learning disabilities is about five to six percent.

Dr. James Heckman: Okay.

David Boulton: Yet, the amount of people struggling with reading, depending on where you cut the line between basic and proficiency, if you take the position, as we do, that anybody who is below proficiency in reading is being harmed by not having made it through, then there’s an enormously greater dimension of the population effected by the reading problem and being in various ways disabled in their learning because of it, than because of innate neuro-biological issues.

Research from this same group indicates that ninety-five percent of the kids could learn if we met them the right way in terms of what they need as they’re climbing up the stairway through the reading challenge.

So, implicitly, ninety-five percent is within the scope of learning. Whatever percentage of the population that’s having trouble with reading, ninety-five percent of that, at least or in that zone, are in trouble because their learning needs haven’t been met.

Dr. James Heckman: I can believe that. It’s a very important question you’re raising. I deeply wish we could get a handle on it more than we do. There are all these correlates though. I mean, if you were to say children from homes that are broken homes, children from homes where the mothers is fourteen, children from homes where you get bad environments by different standards, almost always are the ones who are over-represented in the problem pools and that are going to prison, and so on and so forth. I think we would agree on that.

David Boulton: Absolutely. And what’s most commonly implicate is that these different environments are unhealthy learning environments. They are unhealthy in terms of how the child is coming into – learning into - their own learning.

Dr. James Heckman: Right, I understand. I think that’s extremely important. But we do know that we have a limited set of these interventions where long-term follow-up has occurred. They have not analyzed in a kind of systematic way to look at something as fine grained as what you are talking about. But, I’m just wondering, what do we know in that context about the remedies that might be put in place for kids who’s mother is fourteen and maybe even abusive? We want to foster the right kind of emotional framework for the kids to learn.

David Boulton: Clearly, I think we can say the main thing we need to do is to reduce the confusion and create an emotionally safe place for them to learn through the confusion.

Dr. James Heckman: Right. Is that so easy to do though?

David Boulton: No, it’s not. But I think it starts with what you’re trying to do in a way. It starts with recognizing the fundamental, profound and capital value of 'stewarding the health of our children’s learning.'

Dr. James Heckman: I agree. I think everything points in that direction.

David Boulton: Which is deeper and more radiant than saying we’re about this particular thing or that particular thing.

Dr. James Heckman: I agree. I think you want to get to a basic set of principals and this is clearly it.

So, if you look at the later interventions, even in the adolescent years, they do seem to have some effect. They have some effect, not a lot, but they do. I mean, if you take a thirteen year old and counsel the kid, the kid is not as likely to drop out of school, more likely to read, more likely to achieve, grades go up and on and on. That’s the interesting thing. It seems like the processes that we’re talking about that are, I think, largely governed by the prefrontal cortex, they seem to mature at a later age as I understand the brain science. That means there’s some scope for remediation that’s not as present in things like raw IQ. Again, I’m telling you things you probably already know and have known.

David Boulton: I’m appreciating the dialogue and the opportunity to tune in to being able to communicate well. I really appreciate where you’re coming from.

Dr. James Heckman: This is extremely interesting to me. You mentioned something about ProLiteracy. I know some of these groups, but do these groups like ProLiteracy actually look at adult literacy programs, which ones work and which ones don’t work? I’ve been looking left and right for studies in adult literacy and I found a few programs. I found one study of Alabama prisoners and job training studies scattered here and there, but not a body of work so far.

David Boulton: I have had conversations with Robert Wedgeworth, the President of ProLiteracy, which is the world’s largest adult literacy organization, and they have a lot of interesting research. I’m not sure what kind of research would be most helpful to you.

Dr. James Heckman: Well, I’m thinking about the evaluation of a literacy program. Take an adult, take a late teenager, eighteen, nineteen, essentially illiterate. Say, level one – I don’t know if you know these various levels…

David Boulton: Yes, the different levels used by NAAL.

Dr. James Heckman: Exactly. I would like very much to find out more about these adult literacy studies. I review the evidence on a regular basis and I scour it daily actually and generate some of my own, but I’m not as plugged into some of these other organizations as I should be. I know there must be more work than I’m aware of on this whole range of issues. I haven’t seen it all, especially on adult literacy. We’ve had graduate students researching for the last few months. I sent the work out through my connections, which aren’t too limited, to get evidence on adult literacy, for example, or even literacy programs for early teenagers and haven’t been able to succeed. I’d be very curious if I could get any leads.

David Boulton: I’m making notes and I will look into that for you. I mentioned ProLiteracy, I also work with the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) which comes at things differently. The NCFL is trying to turn up the language and literacy learning inside families.  They’re trying to help adults and children learn together.

I am also aware of a Goodwill program in Kentucky that, rather than focusing on literacy as an outcome, finds out where the adult would like to go in life, what’s a reasonable attainable next step in life, and then helps the adult develop a stairway between where they are and where they want to go that helps them through literacy/math as needed to do that.

Dr. James Heckman: That would be interesting to know. How effective are these programs?

David Boulton: My access to it is from interviewing some people that have gone through it and the person that is leading it. I really like what I see, but I don't have any data about long term effectiveness.

With a few exceptions, I think that an awful lot of work in literacy, however, is in the shadow of some mass ignorance about what reading is.

Dr. James Heckman: Right.

David Boulton: And so a lot of what’s going on, it seems to me, is intervening the wrong way at the wrong times.

Dr. James Heckman: I think so, but there’ s not a very clear understanding to my knowledge of language skill acquisition. I mean, there are books written on it, but it doesn’t seem to effect much of the public policy discussion, does it?

David Boulton: No, although the focus on reading is coming to such a point with so many different converging tracks of information that it’s possible that we’re going to be able to register more planes of data and get some action here.

Dr. James Heckman: Well, that’ll be interesting. Do you have any particular synthesis in mind?

David Boulton: Well, I think that some of the most important developments in reading science go back to the interactive compensatory model of Keith Stanovich and the verbal efficiency theory of Charles Perfetti. Both basically say: there are many different levels that have to operate concurrently and that the base level, where the code is turned into sound representations, has to result in word recognitions flowing above a certain rate for reading to work. If it takes too long to work through the processing involved at that point, then it’s burning too many brain resources for comprehension to sustain engagement.

These layers all nest in each other.

It’s really clear that how we help kids and adults get through the confusions and ambiguities associated with the low-level code processing tasks creates brain infrastructure.

It all has to happen faster than thought. The brain must translate the code into sounds fast enough to create a virtually heard or spoken stream that flows like language. So, this virtual reality projector - this artificial intelligence structure - that has to grow in the brain in order to process the code, if it doesn’t grow right, either because of innate neuro-biological issues, shame, or any number of other things during its early stages of development; if it doesn’t form right, then the whole inner assembly process doesn’t work efficiently enough for reading to take off.

Dr. James Heckman: What’s the best single reference on this? What’s the best set of references where we have this synthesized in the way that you just put it?

David Boulton: You’d have to go to a lot of places to get it the way I just explained it. Although that’s what we're trying to do is to draw that together.

Dr. James Heckman: I would be very interested in reading it when you do it or finding the links to the various work.

David Boulton: Well, a lot of those are on the site now. Even our home page is a kind of quick tour through here, although it does not go as deeply into the neurological and cognitive dimensions. However, I am engaged in some dialogues with neuroscientists where we’re actually exploring this together and we’re trying to get the work that’s being done in a couple of different research centers to correlate together in a way that better reveals what I’m describing here.

So, at the root of it for me, again, is that we’re talking about this: nothing is more practical or profound than 'stewarding the health of the children’s learning.' It’s just connected to everything. Yet, unconscious to us, children are growing up learning disabled in various ways because of our ignorance about what learning is.

Dr. James Heckman: I agree with that. But do we know enough about the learning process and the specifics of what’s required for an individual child to devise really effective interventions? Take a kid who just walks in off the street or is brought in off the street.

David Boulton: I think we could do a radically better job than we’re doing now. Unfortunately, we’re heading in a direction where, if we’re not careful, we’re going to get an amplification of the digital divide. Kids that grow up in environments that have the money and time and computers and other things to help them have a big advantage over those that don’t.

Dr. James Heckman: No question. I think the technology is moving in a direction toward making the relatively poor more disadvantaged.

David Boulton: Which is really scary.

Dr. James Heckman: You’ve seen these studies, like Suzanne M. Bianchi’s at the University of Maryland, that find that more educated women, over the last twenty years because of the emphasis on the early years, have actually been spending more time with their kids even though they are working, they are spending more time on child development. But less educated women show no such trend. So, you’re getting basically a growth in this divide, as you call it, that is leading to some huge, huge deficits or relative deficits. Some huge gains at the top, which is good, but with nothing at the bottom.

David Boulton: Yes, it’s tragic. It’s only in the past few years that organizations like Head Start, for example, have started to recognize that it’s important to encourage parents to be more verbally engaging with their children.

Dr. James Heckman: Well, you know the early interventions, the Perry Preschool Project and especially the Abecedarian Project, have had this aspect of trying to educate the child’s parents as part of the intervention. In fact, one version of Abecedarian that’s most effective is one that essentially teaches the child’s parents exactly the task that you’re talking about.

David Boulton: Another great thing that intersects here is a movement happening in education trying to move it into becoming more evidence and science based and, in particular, to operate like or model the way medicine was transformed in the early twentieth century.

Dr. James Heckman: So, what form is that taking?

David Boulton: Well, it seems like there’s a big debate in this space between those that feel that the rigor of becoming evidence based and case based in determining what we’re doing is leading to less harm to the population of children as a whole because we’re reigning in all kinds of idiosyncratic teacher behavior.

On the other hand, we’ve got teachers who feel like they’re becoming robotic extensions of the impersonal political-educational machinery.