by Rob Roper Vermont has been actively expanding taxpayer funded universal Pre-K since 2007 (Act 62). The claims back then and the claims today haven’t changed. Advocates promise that in the long run, these programs will prove great for kids and taxpayers! But ten years later, as we’re looking at an even more dramatic and expensive expansion of these programs, we have to ask if what we’ve done so far has lived up to the hype.
At a recent meeting of the House Education Committee, chairman David Sharpe (D-Bristol) noted that there has been, among other issues, an increase in number of disruptive students in the classroom. This prompted him to inquire, “I applaud your [Pre-K advocates] efforts,” said Sharpe, “but are we creating these agencies to replace parents because we’ve created a culture where mom and dad get up every day and go do work and aren’t a part of their kids’ lives? Did we create this problem by creating a culture where children are without parents for so much of their life?”
Yes!
It’s easy to buy into the pro-pre-k hype. It sounds so wonderful. The Blue Ribbon Commission for Affordable Child Care is the latest to parrot the promise that “Every dollar spent on high-quality early care and learning programs yields a return on investment that ranges from $4 – $9.” Who wouldn’t want that? But this is, in the vernacular of the day, fake news.
The Blue Ribbon study making this claim (as well as everybody else) cites in a footnote the Center on the Developing Child (2009), which in turn cites three original studies: The High Scope/Perry Preschool Project, the Abecedarian Project, and the Nurse Family Partnership.
But here’s the catch: These studies have absolutely zero relationship to the programs being proposed in Vermont, nor did they serve populations even remotely similar to those that Vermont’s programs serve. To state or imply that Vermont pre-k programs would yield similar results is flat out dishonest.
For example, the Perry Preschool Project only involved 123 (just 58 of whom received services, 65 were in the control group) African American kids from economically disadvantaged households, at “high risk for school failure,” with IQs between 70 and 85. It is dishonest to imply that mainstream Vermont kids in a less intensive, universal program like the one we have in Vermont would respond in the same way.
Similarly, the Abecedarian study was limited to 111 kids, 57 of whom received services. Again, these were all kids identified as being “high risk” based on family income, etc. and the program was birth to five, 6-8 hours a day five days a week with a child teacher ratio of 1:3 to 1:6 – nothing remotely resembling the universal, 10 hour a week program for 3-4 year olds we have in Vermont!
The Nurse Family Partnership isn’t even an early childhood education program, it’s home healthcare program.
As the High Scope website specifically cautions: “The findings of the High/Scope Perry Preschool study and similar studies would apply ONLY [emphasis added] to children served by these programs who are reasonably similar to children living in poverty or otherwise at risk of school failure. (Pg.13) Therefore, when our politicians, advocates and educators use these studies to justify investment universal early education programs for a majority of mainstream kids – and when our media reports these claims without challenge – they are all, at best, misleading the public.
Meanwhile, relevant studies of programs of similar size and scope tothose Vermont is implementing do not show meaningful benefit to kids, and one even indicates possible harm.
Vanderbilt University recently evaluated Tennessee’s Pre-K program (3000+ subjects) and found that students who attended the state’s pre-k program did worse by third grade than students who had been denied access to the program via lottery.
Similarly, the Head Start Impact Study (5000 subjects) done by the U.S. Agency for Health & Human Services finds, “the advantages children gained during their Head Start and age 4 years yielded only a few statistically significant differences in outcomes at the end of first grade.”
Vermont has been expanding universal preschool programs in earnest for a decade. Since then, the classes of fourth graders who have matriculated through the system having had greater access to “high quality” early education have seen their standardized test scores DROP. The data doesn’t exist (or I’m unaware of it) to determine if this is causal or coincidental, but it is certainly worth serious investigation before we pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a program that may be doing more harm than good.
Rob Roper is president of the Ethan Allen Institute. He lives in Stowe.