BCT Editorial – 6/10/05

This page was last updated on June 11, 2005.

Jogging around; Editorial; Beaver County Times; June 10, 2005.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject editorial.

“PAY EARLY, PAY LESS: By paying a little now, you avoid paying more later. That’s a plan few people controlling the checkbook would pass up. And that’s the taxpayers’ economic advantage of a high-quality preschool, says a report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Workplace Center and Legal Momentum. Researchers reviewed 40 years of re-search [sic] to come to the not-so-surprising conclusion that kids who went to a high-quality preschool were more likely to succeed in school, graduate from high school and land a higher-paying job than kids who didn’t. Plus, the report made a case for the high-quality preschool graduates paying more taxes as adults and keeping the economy going by buying more stuff. That’s pretty convincing grounds to nudge us into teaching children how to learn early on in life.”

[RWC] The editorial doesn’t waste any time trying to mislead us. It cites MIT as the lead when the report itself cites Legal Momentum’s Family Initiative (LMFI) as the lead. Who is LMFI? According to the report itself, LMFI “is a major campaign to educate, engage and mobilize women and their families for accessible and quality child care, preschool and afterschool for every family that chooses them. Since 1970, Legal Momentum has advanced the rights and opportunities of women and girls by using the power of the law and creating innovative public policies.”

Here’s the real kicker. Legal Momentum is merely the new name for the National Organization for Women (NOW) Legal Defense and Education Fund. A variation on “follow the money,” following the name is also wise.

Given that NOW was the driver behind the report, do you even need to read the report to know what its conclusions would be? It’s only my opinion, but I suspect NOW merely wrote a “report” around its predetermined conclusions.

The editorial stated the report “findings” but didn’t get into any details of the underlying study. Though touted as “40 years of research,” the cited study included only a handpicked group of 123 “low-income African-American children who were assessed to be at high risk of school failure.” 58 of the kids attended the specially designed preschool program. Other omitted details were handpicked teachers, two years of preschool, very small class sizes, and biweekly home visits by the teachers.¹ Does that sound like something that could be scaled up?

The report cites the Abecedarian Project for support but it fails to include some important details about that project. For one, the director of the study wrote, “It seems unwise to claim that the benefits produced by such exemplary programs would necessarily be produced by ordinary preschool programs conducted in communities across the United States.” More details are at the end of this critique.

Further, if you look at the alleged results, they are not that impressive in my opinion. Quoting the report,

“Specifically, the program group at age 40, compared to the non-program group,

· was more likely to have graduated from high school (65 vs. 45 percent);

· was more likely to be employed (76 vs. 62 percent);

· had significantly higher median annual earnings ($20,800 vs. $15,300);

· had a higher percentage of home-owners (37 vs. 28 percent);

· was more likely to have a savings account(76 vs. 50 percent);

· had significantly fewer lifetime arrests (36 vs. 55 percent arrested five or more times) and significantly fewer months in prison or jail by age 40 (28 vs. 52 percent ever sentenced).”

The editorial also failed to note similar studies showed little or no long-term differences.

In case you wondered about the agenda of the report, consider that one of the “benefits” cited by the report would be an employment increase of 3,000,000 - probably mostly unionized and women – workers to provide the preschool experience. Look out taxpayers.

Do I believe there’s anything wrong with preschool? Of course not. If a child’s parents believe preschool makes sense for their child, they should enroll the child and pay for the tuition themselves. For that matter, I believe parents should pay for tuition regardless of grade level.

What I object to are people with agendas that have nothing to do with true concern for the child trying to impose government education on kids at earlier and earlier ages. In this case, NOW’s agenda is to provide “free” daycare to make it easier for parents to dump their kids on someone else.

1. Early Childhood Education for All – A Wise Investment; Legal Momentum’s Family Initiative and the MIT Workplace Center; April 2005.

Below is an excerpt of an e-mail note I wrote to State Rep. Vince Biancucci (D-15) and State Senator Gerald LaValle (D-47) on April 23, 2003. The subject of the note was Gov. Rendell’s first budget proposal and the note covered other topics in addition to preschool.

Early Childhood Education Spending Fund

The pre-school and kindergarten proposal is a thinly veiled attempt to provide more taxpayer-funded daycare and to add union dues-paying teachers. If our present school system can’t adequately prepare older students, as confirmed by PSSA and SAT scores, why should we expect that same system to do a good job with even younger children? Even if it were a good idea, where would all the required excellent teachers come from? Are they all sitting at home waiting for a call? Who will pay to build the new classrooms?

The goal of “… the state’s schoolchildren will be reading on grade level by the time they start fourth grade” makes no sense. This means children in this program will be below grade level for five years (pre-school, kindergarten, and grades 1-3) while under public school control. I’m sorry, but I’d want my kid to be able to read at least at grade level in every grade.

The bases for the early childhood proposals are flawed. All of the cited studies are for “at risk” children. “At risk” is a code phrase for children in low-income and/or minority households. In Pennsylvania, the vast majority (> 80%) of households do not fall into these categories.

Another assumption is that preschool provides long-term benefits. Preschool studies show mixed results with respect to short-term benefits. However, virtually no valid studies demonstrate long-term (four or more years after preschool) benefits.

The proposal cites Abecedarian Project results to support pre-school. However, according to the Cato Institute, the proposal omits some facts about the Abecedarian Project.

· The Abecedarian Project was not merely pre-school. Children entered the program at an average age of 4.4 months. The infants were placed in an eight-hours/day, five-days/week, year-round educational daycare center. They received free medical care, dietary supplements, and social service support for their families. As you can see, the program was far more intense than universal preschool.

· The project children did not represent the general population. The children were deemed at risk on the basis of their parents’ income, education, and other factors. There’s no reason to believe the results would be relevant for children of differing demographics.

· Independent reviewers have questioned some of the results. For example, the claimed IQ improvement was based on only two of the four groups in the study. Two of the groups actually lost IQ points. When all groups were considered, there was no significant IQ improvement. Also, the reported IQ improvement at age five and 12 actually had been achieved by an average age of six months. Remember, though, the average entry age was 4.4 months. What happened in the first 1.6 months in the program and why was there no improvement in the following 4.5 years of intense intervention? These are among the points that call the project’s reported results into doubt.

· A director of the Abecedarian Project said, “[Many] intervention programs [like the Abecedarian Project] were conducted under ideal circumstances: skilled researchers, capable staffs with lots of training, ample budgets, and perhaps in the glow of Hawthorne effects. It seems unwise to claim that the benefits produced by such exemplary programs would necessarily be produced by ordinary preschool programs conducted in communities across the United States.”

As with the Abecedarian Project, the Chicago Child-Parent Center program is much more than universal preschool. The Rendell proposal reports the improvement in high school graduation rate by age 20 was 30%. It was actually 29% by age 21. However, the more important figure is that even with this improvement, the graduation rate by age 21 was less than 50%. This is hardly something to brag about.

Other studies show universal preschool provides no long-term benefits. Researchers at Georgia State University (GSU) found Georgia’s universal preschool provided no measurable benefit. GSU concluded, “The study sample does not differ from the entire kindergarten population in GKAP (Georgia Kindergarten Assessment Program) capability scores.” In other words, children who attended preschool scored the same as children who did not. Quoting the Georgia State School Superintendent, “The only message you can get from it is that our kindergarten non-ready rate is the same, regardless of what we do.”

In Belgium, England, France, and Spain, 90% of children attend public preschool. By age nine, when preschool benefits should be apparent, U.S. Department of Education statistics show American students consistently outscore European students on tests of reading, math, and science despite (because of?) the absence of universal public preschool. It’s only in subsequent grades, after years in public schools, that American students fall behind.

The Rendell proposal did not mention Head Start results. Head Start is interesting because it is not a model intervention program like those above. The Department of Health and Human Services concluded, “In the long run, cognitive and socioemotional test scores of former Head Start students do not remain superior to those of disadvantaged children who did not attend Head Start.” Once again, we see a preschool program with no long-term effects.

The Rendell proposal cites the Tennessee STAR Project as the preeminent study on class size in grades K-3 and its long-term effects. The proposal didn’t report Tennessee’s academic achievement ranking on the 2002 ALEC Report Card. At 47, Tennessee ranked even lower than Pennsylvania (41).

The proposal does not say what will happen to existing private sector daycare and preschool businesses as a result of universal daycare. What will happen to the employees of these private providers? Is this another example of being friendly to business?

The Rendell proposal omitted the fact that public preschool costs more than private preschool. Using 2000 dollars, the National Association for the Education of Young Children estimated the cost of public preschool to be $5,800/child. The National Education Association estimated the possible cost at between $8,000 and $9,000 per child. According to the Census Bureau, families who pay for private childcare paid roughly $4,420/child.

The “examples of success” held up by the Rendell proposal are questionable at best. In reality, these states have academic achievement results similar to, and sometimes worse than, Pennsylvania. According to the proposal, “The plan draws on the success of states like North Carolina, Texas, and Kentucky by offering schools new investment while holding them accountable for the results.” The proposal fails to mention that on the 2002 ALEC Report Card, these “examples of success” ranked 32, 37, and 40, respectively, in terms of academic achievement. As mentioned previously, another example is Tennessee with respect to smaller class size, and at 47 Tennessee ranked below Pennsylvania. Our goal for academic achievement should be higher than the bottom 39%.