Pre-School Education

White House musings cum executive orders continue. There are a number of high priority wishes to be made bureaucratic, something damaging to wealth, something to do with women's wages, something to do with alternative energy without batteries. One recurring favorite seems to be the oxymoronic preschool education. 

There are two major precedents for preschool education, Head Start and the highly acclaimed Perry Project. Each presents difficult but different logic questions.

First, Head Start. "Head Start is a federal program that promotes the school readiness of children ages birth to five from low-income families by enhancing their cognitive, social, and emotional development," says their own website. The objective here was "school readiness," the preparation of children presumed disadvantaged in their preparation for the formal educational system. Regrettably, the government’s own evaluation of Head Start by the Department of Health and Human Services showed that, while there were some initial positive impacts from Head Start, “by the end of third grade there were very few impacts found in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices.” Support continues for the project, presumably because it has an optimistic feel and there does not seem to be an easy way to by-pass the negative effects of malignant social and family settings. (Emphasis on "easy.")

Other pre-K programs have emerged in less structured ways. Well-established pre-K programs in Georgia and Oklahoma also show that a majority of 4-year-olds failed to justify the money spent. Recently the Brookings Institution admitted that the supposed benefits of pre-K programs often “don’t last even until the end of kindergarten.” Brookings’ lead research analyst commented, “I see these findings as devastating for advocates of the expansion of state pre-K programs.”

Second there is the Perry Project. 123 pre-school children were chosen to be tutored by experienced teachers. Each teacher conducted a two-and-a-half-hour-daily class with the children, and then had a 90-minute visit at each child’s home in the afternoon. There were a few prerequisites: The mothers in the Perry Project were required to be stay-at-home moms, married, and supported by the husband’s income. The results looked very promising.

There are a number of obvious significant problems here. First, the study was done from 1962 to 1967 when the society was quite different. Second, the families were highly selected: Married, stay-at-home moms are an unusual and increasingly endangered species. They--and their children--are certainly a special subset. Third, the cost, corrected for inflation, was about $19,000 a year per student. Finally, there have been many studies done to duplicate the results of the studies and none have.

President Obama is promoting universal tax-paid daycare for preschoolers with an estimated $75 billion in annual costs. Economist James J. Heckman asserts that “each dollar invested [in government daycare] returns in present value terms 7 to 10 dollars back to society.” This has been picked up by Obama economist Austan Goolsbee, who intoned the results of the Perry Project exceeded “the historical returns of the stock market.”

Heady stuff. But assessment of our previous experience with such ideas suggests this may be a tougher problem than our esteemed leaders are letting on. But it does appear to be easy.