Social Impact Bonds

Exploring the SIB and its efforts on underfunded schools

Social Impact Bonds are broadly defined as privately managed investments designed to address public societal issues. I would argue that the SIB can be a reliable way as it stands to either predict success in education from an early age and identify earlier one’s path to upward movement foreseeing many obstacles ahead, i.e. familial issues not yet apparent, institution bias, and debunking the overall design seen historically for the upper classes of society. One of the most persistent issues within SIB is concerning school finance, underfunding or misguided funding - schools are not financed equitably. Circumventing much of the dangling carrot tactics present between federal and state education funding, privately managed funds can be funneled directly without delay into new initiatives foreseeing return on monetary capital combined with cost savings through SIB use. I propose a SIB whereby scalability of an intervention in early childhood education will go hand in a hand with benefits across sectors contributing to cost savings of public services and resources. Investment in year round mass Pre-K education will contribute to educational benefits and savings directly by decreasing special education resources necessary. The scaling up of this initiative will prove beneficial to areas such as mental health misdiagnoses, special education costs, crime reduction in turn decreasing justice system costs, involve parents in an education routine and rigorously train their expectations for subsequent grade levels, and provide a necessary shift in the overall poverty paradigm in the long-term.