Back to Preschool

 August 28, 2008

This fall, more Connecticut toddlers than ever will be marched off to preschool.

To the unreflective, that’s a good thing. Those willing to dig a bit deeper are less sanguine about “early childhood education.”

One of the best ways to judge the value of a public-policy prescription is to list the gains proponents say are sure to flow from it. Generally, the greater the number of predicted benefits, the more skepticism is warranted.

And preschool is Exhibit A for the kind of extravagant claims that are made when ideologues choose fantasies over facts. Taxpayers are told that pre-k will close the “achievement gap,” depress the dropout rate, reduce teen pregnancy, fight “income inequality,” cut crime, send more kids to college, and provide employers with a better-skilled workforce.

Wow -- can preschool halt “global climate change,” too?

Maybe not. But it can strengthen the stranglehold educrats have on learning in Connecticut. And given the weak “science” behind the drive for more preschool funding and regulation, it’s clear that the campaign is largely an attempt by beneficiaries of education’s status quo to maintain their prestige, funding, and political power.

Here’s the “money stat” on early education: In the 1960s, less than 11 percent of the nation’s three- and four-year olds received any schooling before kindergarten. Today, that figure is 56 percent. (In Connecticut, it’s 77 percent.) Do today’s elementary and secondary students have superior reading, writing, and math skills than their counterparts did 40 years ago?

Level-headed education analysts believe that for kids from stable and supportive homes, preschool is seldom necessary. The Pacific Research Institute’s Lance T. Izumi and Xiaochin Claire Yan note that “there is no long-term evidence of the benefits of preschool to middle-income and upper-income children, and the short-term evidence is inconsistent and hardly predictive of long-term effects.”

As for children living in hellish surroundings -- e.g., Connecticut’s inner cities -- the progress occasionally observed from early-education programs, including the Great Society-era Head Start, quickly dissipates. Preschool’s long-term failure, write education scholars Darcy Olsen and Lisa Snell, is called “fade out,” and it suggests “that early schooling may be immaterial to a child’s later school performance, or that the current school system as structured is unable to sustain those early gains.”

In Connecticut, heavy taxpayer “investment” in preschool began in 1997, with the adoption of a statewide “school readiness” strategy focused on children of low socioeconomic status. A decade later, the results are mixed -- and that’s being charitable. The percentage of Connecticut’s fourth-grade students rated as “proficient” on the math portion of the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress is higher. The proficiency rating for those same students in reading, which receives the most attention in preschool, is lower.

But back to those educrats: The folks who benefit from Connecticut’s school monopoly have a problem. The Nutmeg State’s population is stagnant -- in the near future, it may start to shrink. Throw in a low birthrate, and that means dwindling school enrollment.

Judged in the proper context, the push for preschool emerges not as an honest effort to help children, but a rearguard action by a desperate and declining industry. That characterization is too harsh for some, but remember that nearly all of the politicians, “business” lobbyists, teacher unions, and social-welfare bureaucrats who press so strongly for expansions of early education also recommended disastrous school “reforms,” including huge raises for teachers, reduction of class sizes, and computers in classrooms. 

Connecticut’s preschool experiment has cost taxpayers billions of dollars. But the opportunity cost of the state’s “readiness” mania has been far more expensive. Resources -- not just money, but also the attention of policymakers and the public -- devoted to ill-advised programs aren’t available to explore promising approaches to educational and social problems.

What does the state’s homeschooling community have to teach about the wisdom of keeping young children out of institutional settings? What role do Connecticut’s immense tax and regulatory burdens play in forcing long hours on many middle-class parents, who often don’t spend enough time nurturing their young children? Why are so many toddlers in impoverished and/or single-parent domiciles subjected to nightmarish living conditions that in the long term, no well-intentioned, intricately designed preschool program can do anything about? Is it time to start exploring the permanent removal of children from the households of obviously unfit parents?

Unless the “progressives” who dominate public discourse in Connecticut start asking such thorny questions, and abandon their naïve fetish for trendy nostrums like preschool, they’ll never be credible advocates for children.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and public-policy researcher. His website is www.dowdmuska.com.