You might want to take a look at Isabel Sawhill’s spirited defense of pre-kindergarten public education at RealClearMarkets. Here’s her peroration:
In the end, you can’t make public policy with RCTs [ed. randomized controlled trials] alone. We need to incorporate lessons from neuroscience about the critical changes to the brain that occur in early childhood and the insights of specialists in child development. We need to consider what happens to non-cognitive skills over the longer term. We need to worry about the plight of working mothers, especially single parents, who cannot work without some form of out-of-home care. Providing that care on the cheap may turn out to be penny wise and pound foolish. (A universal child care program in Quebec funded at $5 a day led to worse behavior among the kids in the program.) Of course we need to continuously improve the effectiveness of pre-k through ongoing evaluation. That means weeding out ineffective programs along with improving curriculum, teacher preparation and pay, and better follow-up in the early grades. Good quality pre-k works; bad-quality does not. For the most disadvantaged children, it may require intervening much earlier than age 3 or 4 as the Abecedarian program did — with strikingly good results.
Presumably, we should all agree that effective pre-kindergarten public education is worth funding and supporting but ineffective pre-K isn’t. We live in a world of limited resources. As long as that’s the case we should prioritize what’s effective.
In the case of pre-k there isn’t consensus about what “effective” means. The neurological, social, and psychological development of children has been a subject of intense study for nearly a century. If there’s one guiding star in that study it is that developmentally appropriate education can be effective but programs that are not developmentally appropriate are merely wastes of money.
The structure of public education isn’t determined by educators or scholars. It’s determined by politicians and that frequently means “give the lady what she wants”. Sadly, parents frequently focus inappropriate attention on cognitive skills without taking into account what is known about child development and the vital significance of non-cognitive skills in later success and politicians being what they are go along with the game.
If educators are to have the evidence they need to make their case, more rigorous attention to what is and is not effective is crucial.
I can’t believe you don’t have up posts about Conor McGregor’s announced ‘retirement’ or how homophobic Whole Foods is.
Not to mention anything about the new Power Rangers movie.
You’re slipping, Schuler!
Other than Elizabeth Banks playing Rita Repulsa suggests she has a better sense of humor about herself than any actress of my memory, I’m not sure I have anything to say.
Whether pre-k is good for kids is an open question. Whether it should be publicly funded is not: there is no excuse for charging the childfree for bennies for the breeders, especially since they already feed at the child tax credit and public school troughs.