For decades I supported the Head Start program on the grounds that it was needs-based and devoted resources to kids who desperately needed attention. My support began to wane as mixed results began to be reported.
Today the editors of the Wall Street Journal criticize the pre-K component of President Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill on empirical grounds:
Researchers at Vanderbilt University have been running a long-term study on Tennessee’s state pre-K program, following 2,990 low-income children. The program was oversubscribed, so researchers followed applicants who ended up in a program versus those who were turned away. This means all the children had parents motivated to sign them up for pre-K, which makes for a statistically appropriate control group.
Democrats say pre-K will give poor children a leg up for the rest of their lives, a “transformational investment,†as the White House pitched it. But the latest Vanderbilt findings, in the journal Developmental Psychology, found that “children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade.â€
Also: “A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.†That more children needed special education is especially salient: Part of the progressive pitch is that government will spend less money on such interventions later if it shells out for pre-K. Don’t count on it.
They also give a shout-out to the study that caused me to begin questioning Head Start:
A seminal government study on Head Start, the 1965 early education program for low-income children, found the program produced no discernible advantage in elementary school performance. At least that program appears to be merely a waste of money instead of threatening active damage.
I wonder a bit about the Vanderbilt study, curious about how randomized it actually is and whether the controls are actually controls at all. But the point is well-made. What’s important is not how well-intentioned the program is but how well it works. Let’s not succumb to the politician’s fallacy:
- Something needs to be done!
- X is something
- Therefore do X
I also have reservations about the social model represented by universal pre-K but that’s a different question. It will have run-on effects that are hard to anticipate. Will it give us the kind of society we really want?
The evidence for lasting benefits for structured education at such early ages is thin, to put it charitably. In reality, it’s a way to provide state-subsidized childcare by calling it education.
I’m not familiar with either study but have no reason to believe they were poorly constructed. But I doubt that is really germane. I think no matter how well intentioned the programs the dominating variables are really home environment, attitudes towards education (“thinking white”) and the neighborhood environment (gangs or unrealistic sports aspirations, and the culture of quick profit).
These maladaptive thoughts and behaviors build over the elementary and then high school years until any possible benefits of pre-school are long since washed out. But that’s a politically incorrect view not generally allowed to enter the conversation.
As for Andy’s observation, I have a daughter teaching elementary grade school children who would point to parents with that school- as-day-care attitude first and foremost.
For nearly a century it has been well known that children develop cognitively and physically at a certain pace and, whatever measures are taken to accelerate that development, unless the child is at the stage at which the development is appropriate, the measures will not be effective.
Shorter: pre-school kids should be playing. That is the activity most conducive to their developing the skills they will need for their next stage of development.
Link to early results follows. It looks like pre-K had early positive effects. What is the theory about why it would turn negative? Is it telling us something about pre-K or about after K schooling?
https://hechingerreport.org/preschool-education-go-big-or-go-home/
Steve
“That is the activity most conducive to their developing the skills they will need for their next stage of development.”
” It looks like pre-K had early positive effects. What is the theory about why it would turn negative? Is it telling us something about pre-K or about after K schooling?”
Cumulative subsequent maladaptive behaviors.
I can agree with that. I doubt that pre schooling was actually harmful which is kind of what those writing about the article are claiming. It seems much more likely that what the study shows is that even if pre schooling gives kids a head start it can be overcome with either poor schooling or poor parenting or both.
Steve