Early intervention

I'm pretty sure that Head Start doesn't do much of anything to improve academic performance.

But do such interventions have any other benefits? Suppose they encouraged students to stay in school, and not get involved in crime? From 2001:

" children who participated in the preschool intervention for 1 or 2 years had a higher rate of high school completion (49.7 % vs 38.5%; P = .01); more years of completed education (10.6 vs 10.2; P = .03); and lower rates of juvenile arrest (16.9% vs 25.1%; P = .003), violent arrests (9.0% vs 15.3%; P = .002), and school dropout (46.7% vs 55.0%; P = .047).

Not exactly a silver bullet, but if this reproduces (and since this is a longitudinal study that takes time), it would help. It's 20 years old, with hundreds of citations.

Another group used their data to study the effect of "Adverse Childhood Experiences" (they make things worse), and 37% of these high-risk youngsters had none from birth to 17. (Things like abuse were measured from police records, not self-reporting.) Somehow that number seems both horribly low, and surprisingly high.

I wonder what sorts of facilities would be required to do this sort of early intervention on a large enough scale. In a big enough district you could set aside whole buildings for the project, but in a small one you're duplicating a lot. If you got rid of a lot of administrators and consultants you'd get some of the way to affording it--and that's not happening. Maybe there are some non-public options.