There are innumerable small-scale programs that show limited positive results, but almost none of them scale up (see http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2007/11/scale-ma... for more on that general problem; her book The Upside of Down is also good on this subject). Lots of small-scale Head Start programs show promise too, but the program's effects on the whole fade out after a couple years, and on a large scale it hasn't done anything except provide daycare and jobs.

Programs like "Nurse-Family Partnership – Top Tier" already operate. I know because I've written numerous Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Healthy Start Initiative (HSI) proposals (see more about the program here: http://blog.seliger.com/2013/12/15/hrsas-healthy-start-initi...) that attempt to do just this. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, so I see citations like yours all the time. Next time I write an HSI or similar program, I'll cite "Nurse-Family Partnership – Top Tier." Doing so isn't going to make the program any better, because HSI has been operating for a couple decades, under different names, and hasn't accomplished much on a large scale, in part because of the scale-up problems described in the first paragraph.

Ideas like "Nurse-Family Partnership – Top Tier" sound good, but the gap between the real world and the proposal world is quite wide (http://blog.seliger.com/2010/04/11/the-real-world-and-the-pr...). Zuckerberg has evidently learned this.

Apologies for the length of this post, but the issue is a complex one that is hard to explain and harder to understand—hence all the links!

Many thanks for the info - this is a topic I care about deeply so I appreciate your time and the resources you mentioned.

I understand that scaling is very difficult. But what makes you think scaling these types of programs is harder than scaling those that directly target education? In fact, the first link you provide talks about the difficulty of scaling an educational program.

I'd love for there to be strong evidence backing a scalable program that addresses generational poverty, be it an educational approach or not, but I don't know of any. Until we find that, I really don't think it's helpful to limit public discourse to only one potential solution to such a complex problem.