This Brookings Study is linked to by instapundit.com: “New Evidence Raises Doubts on Obama’s Preschool for All.” It’s a study of the impact of providing free preschool for 4 year olds, based on a randomized study in Tennessee, following the outcomes of low-income children who “won” the lottery to participate in a full-day preschool program and those who did not. On nearly all measures, the “winners” did not see measurable improvements in academic, social or behavioral skills when evaluated in first grade, as compared to the control group — in fact, they performed more poorly.
Now, this is not just warehousing children, but a program considered “high quality” by all standards. These programs were either run by local school districts or contracted out to child care centers that met appropriate standards.
What’s the take-away from this? The universal preschool supporters’ take-away is generally to ignore such findings and focus on the two, never replicated Perry and Abcdarian studies.
But look at Germany: I know about this. My kids were in “kindergarten” (effectively, a universal pre-k program, for children ages 3 until they begin school in 1st grade, at 5 1/2 or 6) there. In our town, we could choose half-day, 3:00 pick-up, or 5:00 pick-up; we had the last of these because of our work schedules — but in other places the full-day option wasn’t always available.
But consider this: there was no interest in teaching them letters or numbers or completing worksheets or learning sight words. Reading began in first grade with no attempts to push it forward to kindergarten. There may have been some “social studies” or “science” in terms of what kids of books the teacher read the kids, or what special projects were going on. The kids spent a lot of time playing outside, too. The main goal of kindergarten was to teach children to be accustomed to being in a group, develop friends, play nicely together (they encouraged a lot of board game-playing), and so forth. Secondarily — but of increasing importance — was its role as daycare, for working parents, or to enable mothers at home to have some time for errands (which, in a German household, are significant — shopping, for instance, is traditionally a daily, not weekly activity).
So let’s be honest: “universal pre-k” isn’t about boosting academic achievement. It’s not going to do that. And it’s not going to keep kids out of jail 14 years from now — there are too many influences in the meantime.
“Universal pre-k” is ultimately about providing daycare to working families free of charge and in a standardized way (that is, not specifically as a welfare benefit), in the same way as school has the dual function of teaching children and freeing parents from needing to care for them during school hours. Let’s be honest about this.
(It occurs to me that England is much more like the US in terms of academic expectations in the “pre-school” years — maybe I should look around later and see if there’s any literature on the UK experience.)
UPDATE: It universal pre-k about providing more union jobs for teachers? I think that’s only a small part of it, given that Tennessee isn’t the only state to contract out to private daycare centers; as I recall from reading about this a while back, Oklahoma does, too. (Which is kind of ironic — vouchers are out of the question for primary and secondary school, but perfectly fine for pre-primary and tertiary education.)
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