I’m sure Professor Heckman, me, and you all agree that all families should be treated equitably. The challenge is, what does equitable treatment mean?

If all families are charged the same fees for high-quality preschool or child care, that is treating all families the same from one perspective. But in practice this will mean that some families will not be able to afford high-quality preschool or child care, which is a type of inequity.

Professor Heckman argues for income-based fees for high-quality early childhood programs. In practice, the details of what those fees are matter a great deal to the impact of such a program, or how we should judge its fairness.

I looked into this. But the Manager of Publications of the Upjohn Institute is out of town this week.

We don’t currently have Kindle or Nook versions of Investing in Kids, because that actually would be surprisingly costly, given that the book has a lot of figures and tables. There is an electronic version of the book that you can access if you have access to a university library that uses Project Muse, which distributes a lot of academic journals and university press books. All the book is downloadable as pdfs if you have access to such a library. But as far as I can figure out, you can’t buy access to an individual book. So this isn’t helpful to you unless you have access to a university library that subscribes to Project Muse.

I’ll update this next week if I get further information.