Early Childhood Education
This is a recent study on the effects of pre-school education on kids. Basically, the idea is that the gap we see in achievement in this country is due mostly to increasingly difficult home environments. There are some scary graphs and charts you can look at, the creepiest being the one that predicts education level by the mother's education level (and it's a straight line). The conclusion is that we should probably pay for universal day-care/preschool for everybody or at least everyone who has some risk factors. The study says that the return on investment would be about 10% in terms of GDP, so that sounds ok.
Anyway, the sad part of all this is that the suggestion made by the study is that intervention after age 5, and especially by High School, isn't particularly important unless you spend a truly wacky amount of time and money. So maybe if I really want to make a big difference I need to change careers. I mean, little kids are cute...