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Preschool Hype: National Security Edition

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:05:00 EST

Retired officers push early childhood benefits to help national security

A bipartisan group of retired military officers says without more educational and health investments in children the country will face a growing “national security threat.”

Now, the group is pushing for significant investments in early childhood education, parenting guidance as well as mental and nutrition services.

“The safety of our country demands urgent and intelligent action,” the group says in its mission statement. “We call on all policymakers to ensure America’s national security by supporting interventions that will prepare young people for a life of military service and productive citizenship.”

Congress is considering legislation for a new initiative called the “Early Learning Challenge Fund” designed to help states improve their early education programs and expand access to include more at-risk kids. The House already passed its version of the bill, which would fund $1 billion annually for eight years in competitive grants to states. The Senate has yet to vote on that bill.

Ayn Rand Preschool Action with Barack Obama, Preschool Advocates as Comprachicos, and "Maggie Roark" Standing Alone Against the Daycare Worker of Her Time...

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:39:00 EST

Perhaps the title of President Obama's education agenda could have been pulled right out of an Ayn Rand novel: Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan for Lifetime Success through Education and perhaps Rand might see the President's objective for "a Preschool Agenda that Begins at Birth," as more evidence that the education establishment is made up of "Comprachicos" or individuals and entities who manipulate the minds and attitudes of children in a way that will permanently distort their beliefs or worldview. As Rand wrote in The New Left:

The production of monsters--helpless, twisted monsters whose normal development has been stunted--goes on all around us. But the modern heirs of the comprachicos are smarter and subtler. They do not hide, they practice their trade in the open, the results are invisible. In the past this horrible surgery left traces on a child's face, not in his mind. Today it leaves traces in his mind, not on his face. In both cases the child is not aware of the mutilation he has suffered. Today's comprachicos do not use narcotic powders. They take a child before he is fully aware of reality and never let him develop that awareness. Where nature put a normal brain, they put mental retardation. To make you unconscious for life by means of your own brain, nothing could be more ingenious. They are the comprachicos of the mind. They do not place a child into a vase to adjust his body to its contours. They place him into a school to adjust him to society.

See Reason.tv's Rand-O-Rama here including the bit from The Simpsons where "Maggie Roark" stands alone as an independent thinker against the daycare worker of her time. . .

Tennessee's Gold-Standard Preschool Not Effective After 2nd Grade

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:44:00 EST

Via Education WeeK:

A report released Thursday shows the effectiveness of Tennessee's pre-kindergarten program diminishes after the second grade, but supporters say it still provides a valuable foundation that will help at-risk children succeed.

The report commissioned by the state comptroller's office reveals kindergarten students who participated in the pre-K program performed better academically than a group of those who didn't.

However, it shows that there is "little evidence that the unique effects of pre-K" last beyond second grade.

Education Week also reports that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says that Preschool is Key to Solving the Education Crisis. Who knew the education crisis was kindergarten readiness?

Lower Standards in Schools: Preschool Edition

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:23:00 EDT

The new report from the National Center for Education Statistics calls into question whether we need a new $8 billion federal investment in early education challenge fund or whether we need to be spending scarce taxpayer resources on fixing the schools.

Today the New York Times reports on a new study from the National Center for Education Statistics that examines the rigor of proficiency standards from one state to another.

In the study, researchers compared the results of state tests and the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2005 and 2007, identifying a score on the national assessment that was equivalent to each state’s definition of proficiency.

The study found wide variation among states, with standards highest in Massachusetts and South Carolina. Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee had standards that were among the lowest.

What do Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee have in common besides setting a very low bar for proficiency for their kids? They all have what advocates consider to be gold-standard state-run preschool programs. Georgia and Oklahoma have universal programs.

There is a huge disconnect between these states spending billions in taxpayer funds on early education and then being in the very bottom for proficiency standards for 4th and 8th graders in math and reading in the nation. What's the point?

And it gets much worse! Not only do these states score very low when compared to federal benchmarks and other states, they have actually lowered their standards between 2005 and 2007.

Oklahoma is the poster child for high-quality universal preschool. Unfortunately, this supposed investment in high quality does not include having high standards for students once they enter elementary school. Oklahoma is perhaps the worst offender for gaming the state system and lowering proficiency rates for 4th and 8th graders so that more of them would appear proficient under the No Child Left Behind requirements for proficiency in reading and math. In fact, Oklahoma was one of three states that lowered the proficiency standards in all measured subjects and grade levels from 2005 to 2007. Georgia and Tennessee were among the 15 states that lowered proficiency standards for some of their tests in math and reading in fourth and eighth grade.

In addition, both Georgia and Oklahoma score below the national average on the just- released 2009 NAEP assessment for 4th and 8th grade math, which is considered the nation's benchmark for student achievement:

The average scale score in the nation for 4th grade math on the 2009 NAEP was 239; Georgia scored 236 and Oklahoma scored 237.
Similarly, the average scale score in the nation for 8th grade math was 282; Georgia scored 278 and Oklahoma scored 276.

The bottom line is that the two states in the nation with huge financial commitments to universal preschool for over a decade now have the lowest expectations for K-12 students in terms of grade-level proficiency and they continue to score below average on the nation's benchmark for student achievement.

Should the federal government really be investing more money to scale-up Oklahoma-style preschool programs that have not improved big-picture outcomes for the states that have already made these types of investments? Fix the schools, rather than spending billions more on the hope that early education can somehow compensate for low expectations in K-12 schools.

Slow the Preschool Bandwagon

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:31:00 EDT

In today's Washington Post, former U.S. assistant secretary of education, Chester E. Finn Jr., makes the case against universal preschool:

For all its surface appeal, universal preschool is an unwise use of tax dollars. In a time of ballooning deficits, expansion of preschool programs would use large sums on behalf of families that don't need this subsidy while not providing nearly enough help to the smaller number of children who need it most. It fails to overhaul expensive but woefully ineffectual efforts such as Head Start. And it dumps 5-year-olds, ready or not, into public-school classrooms that today are unable even to make and sustain their own achievement gains, much less to capitalize on any advances these youngsters bring from preschool. (Part of the energy behind universal pre-K is school systems -- and teachers unions -- maneuvering to expand their own mandates, revenue and membership rolls.)

In a new May 2009 backgrounder, the Heritage Foundation's Lindsey Burke asks Does Universal Preschool Improve Learning? Lessons from Georgia and Oklahoma. For example, in examining Georgia's universal program that spent $325 million on preschool in 2008, she reports on the typical "fade out" problem for universal preschool programs:

From 2001 to 2004, Georgia State University conducted a study of the effects of Georgia's pre-kindergarten program on four-year-olds. While positive gains were reported for children enrolled in the state preschool program on overall math skills and letter and word recognition, many of these gains had dissipated by the end of first grade. Georgia preschoolers, who participated in the study from 2001 to 2004, were above the national norm in letter and word recognition upon preschool entry, but their scores declined by the end of first grade. While the study reported that children showed significant gains over the national norm in terms of problem-solving skills, the gains applied "to the entire sample, including students who did not attend a formal preschool."

The study also stated, "It is important to note that Georgia's preschoolers, including those who had been enrolled in Georgia Pre-K, lost ground against the national norms between the end of kindergarten and the end of first grade on two measures of language skills, although their scores remained well above those achieved at the beginning of preschool." Furthermore, the report notes, "by the end of first grade, children who did not attend preschool had skills similar to those of Georgia's preschoolers."

Reason.tv on how Universal Preschool is Not a Silver Bullet here. Reason's universal preschool research is here.

Recession Stalls State-Funded Pre-kindergarten

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:22:00 EDT

The New York Times reports that the recession is slowing state-level investments in state-funded free preschool in the public schools.

One of the most drastic expansions of public education in recent American history unfolded quietly in this decade, as dozens of states added free pre-kindergarten classes to their traditional kindergarten to high school offerings....

From 2002 to 2008, spending on pre-kindergarten by states nearly doubled, to $4.6 billion from $2.4 billion, enabling states to increase enrollment to 1.1 million preschoolers from about 700,000.

But given the economic decline, nine states — Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina and South Carolina — have already announced cuts to state-run pre-kindergarten programs.

On the other hand, the federal government is expanding their investment in early education.

Congress has significantly raised federal financing for preschool education. Mr. Obama promised during the campaign to make large new investments in early childhood education, and in the economic stimulus package, Congress appropriated more than $4 billion for Head Start and Early Head Start programs and for grants to states to support child care for low-income families.

For those who are skeptical that universal preschool and state-run preschool programs, provided by the public schools, are the next silver bullet for education reform this is a marginal but positive turn of events.

The federal grants that support low-income families are usually offerred as voucher-like subsidies that allow low-income families to choose between a variety of public, private, and nonprofit community providers. The increased support for Head Start supports a disadvantaged population and is less likely to take away market share from community-based preschool providers.

In other words, preschool expansion at the federal level, while not a silver bullet, is less likely to destroy the current mixed market for preschool in the United States and replace it with a monopoly public schol provider.

The bad news is that when President Obama gets around to it, he plans to offer states billions in additional federal money to incentivize funding at the state level on state-run public school preschool programs.

Reason.tv on universal preschool here.

Reason on the effectiveness of universal preschool and early education here and here.

Differences Between Obama's Education Speech And His Adminstration's Actions

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:30:00 EDT

My new column looks at President Obama's recent education speech, which had some good rhetoric that would appeal to those of us interested in seeing some real education reforms. The president endorsed the expansion of innovative charter schools, performance pay for teachers, and the elimination of ineffective teachers. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any real legislative action planned on any of those items:

Most of the reform policies that Obama mentions, from charter schools to performance pay, are completely missing from the actual legislative agenda.

Charter schools received almost no funding from the stimulus package and there was no requirement for states to remove destructive charter school caps in exchange for billions. Similarly, while he plans to fund a few teacher incentive pilot programs, President Obama missed the opportunity to tie the billions in new federal education dollars to outcomes that could result in serious personnel reform.

Mr. Obama has also remained silent about the children who have escaped Washington, DC,’s failing public schools and used vouchers to attend higher performing private schools. At the very moment, he was giving his speech on how to fix America’s schools, Senate Democrats voted to effectively kill the DC voucher program and prevent more poor kids from fleeing failing schools.

Obama’s staff has hinted they’ll try to preserve the voucher program, at least for the kids already in it.

"I don't think it makes sense to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. "I think those kids need to stay in their school."

And Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that “it wouldn't make sense to disrupt the education of those that are in that system, and I think we'll work with Congress to ensure that a disruption like that doesn't take place.”

We’ll see if the administration follows through. Right now the president’s education plan is rife with inconsistencies. He is willing to spend more on Pell Grants (vouchers) for adults to attend college, but opposes them for children. He calls for professionalizing the teaching profession, yet effectively gives the unions huge amounts of new money to preserve the current rigid staffing models. He says the education system is failing, but wants that failing education system expanded to include universal preschool.

President Obama often talks about challenging the status quo. Education offers him the chance to do just that. Unfortunately, right now it looks like we’re just throwing more money at that status quo.

Full Column
Obama Can Help Michelle Rhee Fix DC's Schools

The Inconsistencies In President Obama's Education Plans

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:18:00 EDT

President Barack Obama recently delivered his first major education speech, titled “What’s Possible for Our Children.” In the speech he used strong language that appealed to those seeking real education reforms. The president endorsed the expansion of innovative charter schools, performance pay for teachers, and the elimination of ineffective teachers.

Many news stories suggested that Obama was “taking on the unions” in his speech. Mr. Obama deserves some credit; he’s perhaps the only president, or major politician, to ever call for actually firing a school teacher in a major education speech. But at the same time, it is much easier to criticize current teaching practices after you have saved thousands of union jobs with billions of new dollars that will strengthen the status quo.

If you follow Obama’s spending patterns, and his legislation, the teachers’ unions have little to worry about because the reforms that he talks about don’t seem to have any actual force behind them.

The majority of federal education spending will continue to go to ineffective programs. And thanks to the stimulus package, local school districts are receiving loads of money to prop up district budgets, ensuring that incompetent teachers will never be laid off or terminated even during these tough economic times.

Obama’s education plan also champions expanding access to preschool. He calls for new grants to incentivize states to develop state-run preschool programs - despite the fact that 70 percent of four-year-olds are already enrolled in preschool and that states with long-running universal preschool programs continue to score below average on the National Assessment of Education Progress tests. If implemented universal pre-k programs will most likely crowd-out existing preschool options and move the system toward a lower-quality, government-run monopoly.

The president has also increased Pell grants and made expanding college access a priority without detailing what results the increased spending will deliver. Higher education costs continue to rise, in part because of subsidized tuition. Federal loans, Pell Grants, and other tuition assistance programs create more demand for college. As a result, costs rise. According to data from the College Board, college federal aid grew by 77 percent in inflation adjusted dollars between 1997 and 2007. Tuition prices rose almost 30 percent at private colleges and 41 percent at public colleges during that time. Despite the aid, only about half of U.S. college students graduate within six years.

The education system is looking at receiving billions in extra funding but is being asked to make very few concessions or reforms. Most of the reform policies that Obama mentions, from charter schools to performance pay, are completely missing from the actual legislative agenda.

Charter schools received almost no funding from the stimulus package and there was no requirement for states to remove destructive charter school caps in exchange for billions. Similarly, while he plans to fund a few teacher incentive pilot programs, President Obama missed the opportunity to tie the billions in new federal education dollars to outcomes that could result in serious personnel reform.

Mr. Obama has also remained silent about the children who have escaped Washington, DC,’s failing public schools and used vouchers to attend higher performing private schools. At the very moment, he was giving his speech on how to fix America’s schools, Senate Democrats voted to effectively kill the DC voucher program and prevent more poor kids from fleeing failing schools.

Obama’s staff has hinted they’ll try to preserve the voucher program, at least for the kids already in it.

"I don't think it makes sense to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. "I think those kids need to stay in their school."

And Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that “it wouldn't make sense to disrupt the education of those that are in that system, and I think we'll work with Congress to ensure that a disruption like that doesn't take place.”

We’ll see if the administration follows through. Right now the president’s education plan is rife with inconsistencies. He is willing to spend more on Pell Grants (vouchers) for adults to attend college, but opposes them for children. He calls for professionalizing the teaching profession, yet effectively gives the unions huge amounts of new money to preserve the current rigid staffing models. He says the education system is failing, but wants that failing education system expanded to include universal preschool.

President Obama often talks about challenging the status quo. Education offers him the chance to do just that. Unfortunately, right now it looks like we’re just throwing more money at that status quo.

Lisa Snell is director of education at Reason Foundation.

House Democrats Seek to End DC Voucher Program

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:11:00 EST

Last week the House Democrats passed a spending bill that would end the DC Scholarship program after the 2009-2010 school year. The Washington Post examines the Democrats real motives in defunding a tiny program that provides higher quality education choice for students in low-performing public schools during a time when spending billions is almost passe:

But the debate unfolding on Capitol Hill isn't about facts. It's about politics and the stranglehold the teachers unions have on the Democratic Party. Why else has so much time and effort gone into trying to kill off what, in the grand scheme of government spending, is a tiny program? Why wouldn't Congress want to get the results of a carefully calibrated scientific study before pulling the plug on a program that has proved to be enormously popular? Could the real fear be that school vouchers might actually be shown to be effective in leveling the academic playing field?

The bottom line is that this is a purely political. There is no solid academic or economic reason to kill the tiny school voucher program. The Democrats could easily leave those families alone. The only thing they have to lose is that the voucher program might actually provide the kids with a better education. The irony continues to be that none of those House Democrats or Obama would sacrifice their child's education to the future of the DC public school system.

As Alexander Russo reports at This Week in Education, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who oversees schools that are directley competing with the school voucher program, was the one Democrat still willing to stand up for parental choice.

“I don’t think vouchers are going to solve all the ills of public education, but parents who are zoned to schools that are failing kids should have options to do better by their kids.”

I wrote about the olden days when some Democrats were for Education Reform here.

Finally, I have to agree with Jay P. Greene today:

Vouchers have made the world safe for charters. And the moment that vouchers really do stall, the enemies of school choice will redirect their fire at charters, strangling them with regulation and repealing charter gains. To say that vouchers haven’t really done much of anything politically because charters are really where the action is to ignore how much charters owe their political strength to the credible threat of new and expanded voucher programs.

Preschool's Failures

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT

This year governors have continued to expand state-run preschool programs. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, signed a program to fund preschool for every 4-year-old in Louisiana by 2013. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, signed Massachusetts' universal preschool program into law; another Democrat, Jennifer Granholm, boosted funding for Michigan's pre-K program by $10 million. Across the United States, current state spending on state-run preschool programs is close to $4 billion a year.

Tennessee's program is considered the gold standard. It meets nine out of 10 criteria for a high-quality program set by the National Institute for Early Education Research, including instructors with teaching credentials, small class size, and comprehensive early learning standards. Yet an interim study for the state Comptroller's Office, conducted by the Ohio-based Strategic Research Group, finds that the advantages of participating in the program disappear by the time students reach second grade. In every case, in every subject, there was no statistical difference between the children who attended preschool and those who did not. Nor was there any advantage for low- or middle-income children in particular.

This study adds to the growing evidence that students who participate in early education programs do not have lasting academic gains. In Oklahoma and Georgia, which both have decade-long universal preschool programs with high standards, students score below the national average on the National Assessment of Education Progress, the nation's benchmark for student achievement. In Oklahoma, where state-funded pre-kindergarten has been in place for 18 years-and offered universally for nearly a decade-students slipped below the national average on math and reading scores for both the fourth and eighth grades after the state began expanding its preschool program.

Lisa Snell is director of education at Reason Foundation.

Universal Preschool Isn't the Silver Bullet

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Los Angeles (October 23, 2008) - Despite the massive $700 billion bailout and record deficits, many are calling on the federal government to spend tens of billions of dollars on a new universal preschool bureaucracy. To make matters worse, according to a new Reason.tv video, those billions would be spent on the same types of programs that have failed to produce better students or lasting gains on standardized tests.

The Reason.tv video says government-run preschools in Georgia and Oklahoma, the two states with the longest-running universal preschool programs, successfully prepare children for kindergarten. Unfortunately, these short-term gains completely 'fade out' by the fourth grade, at which point there is no difference in the test scores of students who did or didn't attend preschool.

"In these tough fiscal times we need to make smart decisions and really focus our limited education resources on programs that deliver results," said Lisa Snell, director of education at Reason Foundation. "We don't need an expansive new universal preschool system that gives 'free' preschool to rich kids. The children who truly benefit from preschool are low-income and disadvantaged. Those are the kids that preschool advocates should be targeting by fixing Head Start, which has failed miserably, and partnering with successful private programs and charter schools."

The video says universal preschool would put private daycare centers and preschools out of business, eliminating the diverse early childhood education options that most parents have today. In addition to stifling choice and competition, expanding K-12 education to include universal preschool would bring mandated curriculums; require preschool teachers to be credentialed so unions can be expanded; and would guarantee more money for the flawed public school system.

"Universal preschool isn't the silver bullet for our failing schools," said Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason.tv. "The one-size-fits-all, government-run education system clearly isn't working. We need more choices and competition, not less."

Full Video Online

The Reason.tv Drew Carey video, Universal Preschool, is online at http://reason.tv/video/show/576.html. An archive of Reason.tv's feature videos is online at http://reason.tv/featuredvids/.

About Reason.tv

Reason.tv is an online community showcasing the best libertarian ideas and videos on the Internet. For more information, please visit www.reason.tv.

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Universal Preschool Hasn't Delivered Results

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT

San Francisco Chronicle

Early education advocates want you to believe that the case for universal preschool is so airtight that raising any questions about it is an act of heresy. But there is a strong and growing body of literature showing that preschool produces virtually no lasting benefits for the majority of kids.

Proponents of universal preschool claim that when kids attend quality preschools, they grow up to be smarter, richer and more law-abiding. But this is a fairy tale not based on research.

More kids who attend preschool enter kindergarten knowing their ABCs and counting their numbers than their stay-at-home peers, it is true. But these gains fade, as study after study has shown.

Consider Oklahoma and Georgia, two states that have spent billions implementing universal preschool. Georgia's fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading score in 1992, when it embraced universal preschool, was 212 - three points below the national average. Last year, after years of universal preschool, it was 219 - still one point below the national average. Its math score was three points below the average in 1992. Last year, it was 235 - four points below the national average.

And that's the good news.

Oklahoma's fourth-grade NAEP reading score in 1998, when it adopted universal preschool, was 219 - six points above the national average. Last year, it had dropped to 217 - three points below the national average. Similarly, its math score was at par with the national average in 2000. Last year, it had dropped two points below. Since employing universal preschool, not only is Oklahoma doing worse compared with the nation - but also its own prior performance.

The latest bit of bad news for universal preschool comes from Tennessee, which poured $250 million into expanding a state preschool program three years ago. A comprehensive study last month - commissioned by the government itself - concluded that, barring at-risk kids, there was "no statistically significant difference" between the educational performance of second-graders who attended preschool and those who did not. Activists cannot blame this on 'poor quality' preschool, given that the Tennessee program is regarded as the gold standard of preschool - meeting 9 of the 10 criteria for a high-quality program set by the National Institute for Early Education Research.

Meanwhile, research on Head Start, the federal preschool program for poor kids, also shows few gains. Studies show minor initial cognitive gains - but a near-complete fade out after kids begin elementary school. "By the second or third grade, there is no difference between the test scores of children who attended most preschool programs, including Head Start, and those who did not," Ron Haskins of the liberal Brookings Institution concluded.

Universal preschool activists brush away these uncomfortable findings and tout the results of boutique programs such as Michigan's 1962 Perry Preschool Program. The positive effect on high-school graduation rates, adult crime, earnings and welfare-dependence of Perry participants has given this program mythical status. But Perry had a grand total of 58 low-IQ kids in its treatment sample, all from extremely disadvantaged, minority backgrounds. Its results have little bearing for other kids.

In fact, University of Chicago Nobel Prize-winner James Heckman, who has extensively studied Perry, has cautioned against generalizing its findings to promote universal preschool. In a June 2005 interview with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, when asked whether public funding should go for universal programs or at-risk kids, Heckman responded: "It is foolish to try to substitute for what the middle-class and upper-middle-class parents are already doing."

Likewise, in the latest issue of Education Next, Craig Ramey, director of the Center on Health and Education at Georgetown University, a universal preschool supporter, chastises activists for using Perry to create "unrealistic expectations" about the benefits of pre-kindergarten schooling for regular kids.

What's more, a joint analysis that Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley professor, conducted with Stanford University researchers found extended preschool may actually emotionally harm mainstream kids. He found that kindergartners with 15 or more hours of preschool every week were less motivated and more aggressive in class. Likewise, Canada's C.D. Howe Institute found a higher incidence of anxiety, hyperactivity and poor social skills among kids in Quebec after universal preschool.

All of this suggests that we are very far from having the degree of confidence needed to justify billions of dollars in taxpayer spending on universal preschool. Preschool advocates might want to will away such inconvenient facts. But politicians ought to look beyond the cherry-picked data advocates cite before foisting preschool on all American toddlers.

More Evidence that Universal Preschool Doesn't Offer Lasting Benefits

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EDT

This summer, governors across the country have continued to expand universal preschool programs and state-run preschool. This week, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) signed into law a universal preschool program that will fund preschool for every four year old in Louisiana by 2013. Earlier, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) signed Massachusetts' universal preschool program into law, and Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-MI) signed legislation that will boost funding for Michigan's pre-K program by $10 million.

In the United States current state spending on state-run preschool programs is close to $4 billion a year. In the 2008 report "Leadership Matters: Governors' Pre-K Proposals Fiscal Year 2009," the universal preschool advocacy group "Pre-K Now" triumphantly reports that "for fiscal year 2009, 16 governors and the Mayor of the District of Columbia acted boldly to protect and grow high-quality, voluntary pre-kindergarten programs. Their proposals total $261 million in increased funding for pre-K and would make early childhood programs available to 60,000 more children." And presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is proposing a $10 billion federal investment in early education.

The Pre-K Now report praises Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (D), calling him "among the nation's leaders in high quality pre-K innovation and funding." They note that Gov. Bredesen's pre-K investments have increased by more than 200 percent since fiscal year 2006 and he's recommended another 31 percent funding increase for fiscal year 2009.

The Tennessee program is considered a gold-standard. It meets 9 out of 10 criteria for a high-quality program set by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER)--such as preschool teachers with teaching credentials, small class-size, and comprehensive early-learning standards.

Yet, despite this extremely high quality program, an interim study on the program's progress done for the Tennessee Comptroller's Office finds no lasting academic value for Tennessee students who participated in the public pre-kindergarten program.

Two groups of students participated in the study. The first consisted of pre-K students who were identified in assessment records and then individually matched to the second group - other students with the same demographics who did not attend preschool. As the study's authors note "this rigorous precision matching technique was employed to construct a random sample of non-pre-K students that matched the pre-K group as closely as possible in all possible respects given the data available for the analysis."

The report conducted by Ohio-based Strategic Research Group finds that the advantages of participating in Tennessee's public pre-kindergarten program disappear by the time students reach the second grade.

The study shows that children who attended pre-K performed better in reading, language and math in kindergarten and in the first grade than students who did not attend pre-school. However, by the second grade, there was no statistically significant difference between those who went to pre-K and those who did not.

The report measured student achievement using the results of standardized tests given in three academic years between 2004 and 2007. As the study authors conclude, "…although Pre-K students initially demonstrated an advantage on these assessments over peers who did not participate in pre-k, by the second grade there was no statistically significant difference in these groups."

In addition, the students who participated in pre-K did not outscore their peers in the third through fifth grade either. In every case, in every subject, there was no statistical difference between the children who attended preschool and those who did not. There was no advantage for low-income children or middle-income children.

This study adds to the growing evidence that students who participate in early education programs do not have lasting academic gains.

In Oklahoma and Georgia, which both have decade-long universal preschool programs with high quality standards, students score below the national average on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), the nation's benchmark for student achievement. For example, Oklahoma, where state-funded pre-kindergarten has been in place for 18 years - and offered universally for nearly a decade, has slipped below the national average on math and reading scores for both the fourth and eighth grades since it began expanding government preschool.

Oklahoma scores fell from one point above the national average in fourth grade math in 1992 to two points behind in 2007. They also slipped behind in eighth grade math, from one point ahead before the pre-K program to five points behind the national average after pre-K was implemented. In reading eighth grade scores slipped from four points ahead in 1998 to one point behind. And Oklahoma's fourth grade reading scores plummeted during the 1990's at the very same time the state was aggressively expanding preschool access, increasing attendance, and building a system that the NIEER rates as a 9 out of 10 on quality.

If preschool advocates are selling large investments in state-run preschool programs as the silver bullet to raise student achievement in public schools and lower the dropout rate, mounting evidence finds little support for these optimistic claims. The failures of the nation's K-12 public schools erase any benefits that pre-kindergarten might offer. Soon after they leave kindergarten, students who attend state-run preschool programs are performing no better than those students who did not enroll. Universal preschool is an over-hyped solution to the difficult, important work of reforming the K-12 education system. By diverting scarce resources away from actually fixing the K-12 public school system, universal preschool isn't part of the solution to our education problems.

Protect Our Kids from Preschool

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EDT

The Wall Street Journal

Barack Obama says he believes in universal preschool and if he's elected president he'll pump "billions of dollars into early childhood education." Universal preschool is now second only to universal health care on the liberal policy wish list. Democratic governors across the country -- including in Illinois, Arizona, Massachusetts and Virginia -- have made a major push to fund universal preschool in their states.

But is strapping a backpack on all 4-year-olds and sending them to preschool good for them? Not according to available evidence.

"Advocates and supporters of universal preschool often use existing research for purely political purposes," says James Heckman, a University of Chicago Noble laureate in economics whose work Mr. Obama and preschool activists routinely cite. "But the solid evidence for the effectiveness of early interventions is limited to those conducted on disadvantaged populations."

Mr. Obama asserted in the Las Vegas debate on Jan. 15 that every dollar spent on preschool will produce a 10-fold return by improving academic performance, which will supposedly lower juvenile delinquency and welfare use -- and raise wages and tax contributions. Such claims are wildly exaggerated at best.

In the last half-century, U.S. preschool attendance has gone up to nearly 70% from 16%. But fourth-grade reading, science, and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) -- the nation's report card -- have remained virtually stagnant since the early 1970s.

Preschool activists at the Pew Charitable Trust and Pre-K Now -- two major organizations pushing universal preschool -- refuse to take this evidence seriously. The private preschool market, they insist, is just glorified day care. Not so with quality, government-funded preschools with credentialed teachers and standardized curriculum. But the results from Oklahoma and Georgia -- both of which implemented universal preschool a decade or more ago -- paint an equally dismal picture.

A 2006 analysis by Education Week found that Oklahoma and Georgia were among the 10 states that had made the least progress on NAEP. Oklahoma, in fact, lost ground after it embraced universal preschool: In 1992 its fourth and eighth graders tested one point above the national average in math. Now they are several points below. Ditto for reading. Georgia's universal preschool program has made virtually no difference to its fourth-grade reading scores. And a study of Tennessee's preschool program released just this week by the nonpartisan Strategic Research Group found no statistical difference in the performance of preschool versus nonpreschool kids on any subject after the first grade.

What about Head Start, the 40-year-old, federal preschool program for low-income kids? Studies by the Department of Health and Human Services have repeatedly found that although Head Start kids post initial gains on IQ and other cognitive measures, in later years they become indistinguishable from non-Head Start kids.

Why don't preschool gains stick? Possibly because the K-12 system is too dysfunctional to maintain them. More likely, because early education in general is not so crucial to the long-term intellectual growth of children. Finland offers strong evidence for this view. Its kids consistently outperform their global peers in reading, math and science on international assessments even though they don't begin formal education until they are 7. Subsidized preschool is available for parents who opt for it, but only when their kids turn 6.

If anything, preschool may do lasting damage to many children. A 2005 analysis by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that kindergartners with 15 or more hours of preschool every week were less motivated and more aggressive in class. Likewise, Canada's C.D. Howe Institute found a higher incidence of anxiety, hyperactivity and poor social skills among kids in Quebec after universal preschool.

The only preschool programs that seem to do more good than harm are very intense interventions targeted toward severely disadvantaged kids. A 1960s program in Ypsilanti, Mich., a 1970s program in Chapel Hill, N.C., and a 1980s program in Chicago, Ill., all report a net positive effect on adult crime, earnings, wealth and welfare dependence for participants. But the kids in the Michigan program had low IQs and all came from very poor families, often with parents who were drug addicts and neglectful.

Even so, the economic gains of these programs are grossly exaggerated. For instance, Prof. Heckman calculated that the Michigan program produced a 16-cent return on every dollar spent -- not even remotely close to the $10 return that Mr. Obama and his fellow advocates bandy about.

Our understanding of the effects of preschool is still very much in its infancy. But one inescapable conclusion from the existing research is that it is not for everyone. Kids with loving and attentive parents -- the vast majority -- might well be better off spending more time at home than away in their formative years. The last thing that public policy should do is spend vast new sums of taxpayer dollars to incentivize a premature separation between toddlers and parents.

Yet that is precisely what Mr. Obama would do. His "Zero-to-Five" plan would increase federal outlays for early education by $10 billion -- about 50% of total government spending on preschool -- and hand block grants to states to implement universal preschool. This will make the government the dominant source of funding in the early education marketplace, vastly outpacing private spending.

If Mr. Obama is serious about helping children, he should begin by fixing what is clearly broken: the K-12 system. The best way of doing that is by building on programs with a proven record of success. Many of these involve giving parents control over their own education dollars so that they have options other than dysfunctional public schools. The Obamas send their daughters to a private school whose annual fee in middle school runs around $20,000. Other parents deserve such choices too -- not promises of subsidized preschool that they may not want and that may be bad for their kids.

Failing Public Schools Wipe Out Any Preschools Gains

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

In Sen. Barack Obama's June 3rd victory speech, after wrapping up the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, he told Americans that "we owe it to our children to invest in early childhood education." Obama promises a preschool agenda that begins at birth. His early education plan includes a major role for the federal government in spreading universal preschool to all states. He calls for a total federal expenditure of $10 billion a year to promote early education. And a central component of his plan would offer grants as incentives to states to accelerate the trend toward "universal preschool for all."

At a 2008 Democratic Party debate in Las Vegas, Obama talked about the payoffs of early education to disadvantaged children:

"What you see consistently are children at a very early age are starting school already behind. That's why I've said that I'm going to put billions of dollars into early childhood education that makes sure that our African-American youth, Latino youth, poor youth of every race, are getting the kind of help that they need so that they know their numbers, their colors, their letters. Every dollar that we spend in early childhood education, we get $10 back in reduced dropout rates, and improved reading scores."

Obama is right about looking for ways to help poor, disadvantaged kids learn their numbers, colors, and letters in preschool and preparing them for elementary school, but he should re-examine his priority list. Yes, several studies that show preschoolers enrolled in universal preschool make modest gains in kindergarten and the early grades. For example, a 2007 study of five state preschool programs, by the National Institute for Early Education, found that children entering kindergarten who went through a universal preschool program made significant gains in early language, literacy, and math.

Unfortunately, these gains have not translated into lasting, higher academic achievement for the states who have invested heavily in universal preschool. The overlying problem: our broken, under-performing public school system can't maintain any gains that early education may provide. By the fourth grade all of the gains are washed away. So until we fix the public schools, universal preschool is a waste of precious education resources.

This is illustrated by the experiences of disadvantaged fourth graders in Oklahoma and Georgia, the two U.S. states that have had universal preschool for over a decade. Despite a fully implemented universal preschool system, students in Oklahoma and Georgia have not improved significantly on the National Assessment of Education Progress, the nation's report card for reading and math proficiency.

Oklahoma is considered the current U.S. leader on the universal preschool front. The state has received rave reviews for its program and is the model that many states aspire to become. Oklahoma enrolls more than 70 percent of four-year-olds in preschool and is considered a "high quality" program by the National Institute for Early Education at Rutgers University and national preschool advocacy groups such as Preschool Now. Oklahoma's program has strong curriculum, public school provision, and utilizes teachers with teaching credentials.

Yet, the picture is not so rosy when one considers overall academic achievement in Oklahoma. After a decade of universal preschool, Oklahoma has not made gains on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) fourth grade reading test.

The NAEP is the most objective test of academic performance for Oklahoma students because it serves as a quality benchmark for proficiency in reading and math. And it is a test against which all states can be evenly compared. The American Institutes for Research recently showed that the NAEP's definition of proficiency was also very similar to the standard used in international tests, giving the NAEP a "world class" standing. As long as the NAEP standard is employed, proficiency in the United States has roughly the same meaning as in Europe and Asia.

In reading, Oklahoma students remain below the national average and have actually lost ground since universal preschool was implemented. Today, Oklahoma students have lower reading scores than they did when universal preschool was enacted in 1998. In 1992, Oklahoma's fourth graders had an average scale score of 220, on a 0-to-500 scale, on the fourth grade reading test. By 2007, after years of universal preschool, that reading score had fallen slightly to 217.

In 1998, 19 percent of disadvantaged kids were proficient in reading on the NAEP. In 2007, after years off giving low-income children access to preschool, still only 19 percent were proficient in reading. For non-disadvantaged kids the news is worse. In 1998, 42 percent were proficient in reading, but in 2007 only 36 percent were.

In addition, the reading achievement gap between Hispanics and whites in Oklahoma is higher now than it was before universal preschool was enacted. In 1992, fourth grade Hispanic students had an average reading scale score of 207 (on a 0 to 500 scale). In 2007, that score had fallen to 198. The achievement gap between Hispanic and white students was 16 points 1992 and grew to 25 points in 2007.

Clearly any academic gains that preschool gives to low-income and minority students disappear once they enter our failing public schools. And Oklahoma isn't alone.

In Georgia, reading scores for fourth graders have remained flat despite a large investment, starting in 1995, in a universal preschool system that enrolls 60 percent of the state's kids.

Another telling indicator of the weakness of Georgia and Oklahoma's academic standards is revealed in the Summer 2008 issue of Education Next, which analyzes which states have "world class" standards and which do not. Scholars Paul E. Peterson and Frederick M. Hess compare how students do on each state's own assessment test versus how they perform on the national NAEP tests. By comparing the percentage of students deemed proficient on each, it is possible to determine whether states are setting expectations higher, lower, or equal to the NAEP standard. If the percentages are identical (or roughly so), then state proficiency standards can be fairly labeled as "world-class."

In Oklahoma, an impressive 90 percent of fourth graders were proficient on the Oklahoma Core Curriculum Test. But a miserable 22 percent of Oklahoma's fourth graders were actually proficient on the NAEP. Similarly, Georgia declared 88 percent of its eighth graders proficient in reading, even though just 26 percent scored at or above the proficiency level on the NAEP. Georgia joined Oklahoma and Tennessee as the only three states to earn an "F" in comparison to the NAEP for their state standards.

To date, early education has not been a silver bullet for Georgia or Oklahoma. Clearly universal preschool isn't entirely to blame. For that, we need to focus on the public school system that is failing our kids. These states do not have "world class" schools or academic standards that can deliver the long-term gains Sen. Obama is looking for.

Obama has said, "It is a sense of urgency that we've got to restore if we're going to be able to remain competitive in this new global economy. We've got to improve early childhood education, because that's the area where we can probably most effectively achieve the achievement gap that exists right now."

Without high quality K-12 education, no amount of investment in early education can close the achievement gap or make the United States globally competitive. To his credit, Obama seems to recognize that the government doesn't have unlimited resources to tackle this challenge, stating, "If you're a progressive, you've got to be worried about how the federal government is spending its revenue, because we don't have enough money to spend on things like early childhood education that are so important."

To that end, he has signed Reason Foundation's "Oath of Presidential Transparency," promising the most transparent and fiscally accountable executive branch in history. He's also wisely argued in favor of merit pay for teachers and charter schools, telling Politico, "I've consistently said, we need to support charter schools. I think it is important to experiment, by looking at how we can reward excellence in the classroom."

Some of Obama's instincts on education issues, like that stance on charters, break from traditional Democratic Party positions and can seriously help reform our public schools. For the best results, and to truly help disadvantaged kids, Obama should shift from pushing universal preschool to calling for meaningful reforms in our K-12 public schools.

Preschool Reality Check in New Jersey

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 13:39:00 EDT

The Record, NJ

In New Jersey the promises made about the benefits of universal preschool in the Abbott districts have reached unparalleled heights. Recently, Record Columnist Mary Ellen Schoonmaker explained why preschool is "a new front in the nation's war on poverty."

Yet, in the United States preschool enrollment has increased from 16 to 70 percent since 1965. This massive growth in preschool attendance and time spent in the classroom has not resulted in increased student achievement, with U.S. test scores rising only very slightly since 1970 when standardized national testing of fourth-, eighth- and 12th- graders began on the National Assessment of Education Progress.

A vast majority of research on the benefits of preschool shows that disadvantaged children who attend preschool are more prepared for kindergarten than non-preschoolers. However, these early advantages often fade away as the children move through school.

New Jersey is no exception.

Despite the most recent report from the National Institute for Early Education Research that children who went through the Abbott preschool program do better in kindergarten, current academic achievement for third- and fourth-graders in the Abbott districts remains flat or declining. These findings are consistent with a large body of research that shows preschool helps disadvantaged children in the early grades, but that the advantages diminish as the children move through the public school system.

The data from New Jersey standardized tests and NAEP show that, to date, large investments in Abbott districts, and in preschool in particular, have had little effect on the overall performance of New Jersey students.

An analysis of test scores for each Abbott district at Greatschools.net examining results from the state's ASK language arts test between 2005 and 2006 show scores are flat or declining for third- and fourth-graders. In third grade, 20 of the 31 Abbott districts have lower proficiency rates in language arts in 2006 than in 2005.

This trend is worse in fourth grade -- with 28 of the 31 Abbott districts having lower proficiency rates on the fourth-grade language arts ASK test in 2006 than in 2005.

For example, in Passaic, 60 percent of fourth- graders were proficient in language arts in 2005, but only 51 percent were proficient in 2006. In Paterson, 61 percent of fourth-graders were proficient on fourth-grade language arts in 2005, and only 53 percent were proficient in 2006.

Similarly, the NAEP, considered the federal benchmark and nation's report card for student achievement, shows flat or declining scores for New Jersey students. In fact more New Jersey children score below basic (which means they cannot read) on the NAEP fourth-grade reading test in 2005 than in 2003 or 1992.

The percentage of fourth-grade students in New Jersey proficient or higher was 39 percent in 2003 and 37 percent in 2005. In 1992, 31 percent of all students scored below basic in New Jersey and by 2005 32 percent of all fourth graders scored below basic in reading.

However, the news is worse for low-income New Jersey children who qualify for the free- and reduced-lunch program. A higher percentage of the very children who should have seen some improvement from the various investments in the Abbott districts are scoring below basic.

In the case of disadvantaged students who qualify for the free lunch program, 52 percent scored below basic in 1992, 54 percent scored below basic in 2003, and 55 percent scored below basic in 2005 in fourth-grade reading.

Preschool advocates need a reality check. They are making huge promises about future long-term benefits for preschool and calling for ever larger public investments in early education. The history and uneven quality of kindergarten, Head Start, and the public schools call into question the claims that large-scale education for 3- and 4-year-olds will be the great equalizer.

This doesn't mean that preschool has no value, but it is hardly a stellar outcome from an $11,000-per-child investment or much of a surge in the "war on poverty."

Indiana's Full-Day Kindergarten: A Wise Choice for Education Dollars?

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST

Indianapolis Star

Gov. Mitch Daniels proposed a full-day kindergarten plan in his State of the State address and the House Education Committee recently approved a bill that would make full-day kindergarten available to all of Indiana's children this fall.

When fully implemented the price tag for full-day kindergarten could reach $285 million per year, depending on how many parents choose to enroll their kids.

Daniels declared, "After years of study, debate, and failed attempts, let's make an irrevocable commitment to full-day kindergarten for every family that wants it."

Although the Governor considers the debate to be over, there is serious doubt about the results produced by full-day kindergarten and even bigger questions about whether it is the best use of limited education resources.

California-based RAND Corporation's December 2006 report, School Readiness, Full Day Kindergarten, and Student Achievement, examined data from a nationally representative sample of almost 7,900 students and found "that full-day kindergarten programs may actually be detrimental to mathematics performance and nonacademic readiness skills."

The study established that "children who had attended a full-day program at kindergarten showed poorer mathematics performance in fifth grade than did children who had attended a part-day kindergarten program."

Closer to home, a 2004 policy brief, The Effects of Full Day versus Half Day Kindergarten, by the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy (CEEP) at Indiana University did its best to praise full-day kindergarten but could only go so far as to say "there are no negative outcomes commonly associated with full day kindergarten, and that – at worst – full day kindergarten and half day kindergarten have similar effects."

One of the CEEP studies looked at 1,830 kindergartners in a "large urban school district in Indiana" and then analyzed their third grade test scores on the I-Step in math and language. In that case researchers found "evidence that the differences between full and half day students are negligible."

Negligible? Not exactly the results you want in exchange for $280 million a year.

Nearly all the research on kindergarten shows that children in full-day kindergarten are afforded a modest academic edge over children in half-day kindergarten when measured at the end of their kindergarten year. However, that initial advantage completely disappears by third grade.

Indiana's expensive, "irrevocable commitment" to full-day kindergarten is especially questionable when you consider the kinds of school performance issues that plague the state. Indiana does not have a significant performance problem in the elementary schools. Instead, the two most acute problems are high school dropouts and declining test scores as students move on to high school.

While Indiana has an overall high school graduation rate of 76 percent, several districts suffer from a much higher concentration of school dropouts. Indianapolis Public Schools, for example, calculated its 2005-06 graduation rate at just 48 percent. Under the district's calculations, only 1,227 of the 2,565 students who started as high school freshmen in 2002, and stayed at their schools, received a diploma from the district.

Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress-Plus scores show a stair-step pattern, with elementary scores at the top and high school scores at the bottom. In 2006 about 64 percent of third-graders passed both parts of the test, while only 57 percent of 10th-graders did. This pattern is confirmed by the federal benchmark for academic progress, where Indiana scores slightly above the national average for percentage of students proficient in fourth grade reading on the National Assessment of Education Progress but scores below the national average for the percentage of eighth graders proficient in reading.

While full-day kindergarten may be politically popular, it is no silver bullet to fix the academic performance issues that plague the state. Indiana is considering investing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars each year in a program whose benefits disappear by third grade to solve education problems that come after the third grade. Shouldn't policymakers be focusing scarce education resources on programs that can make a lasting difference?

Universal Preschool Benefits Miscalculated and Overstated

info@reason.org (Chris Cardiff) info@reason.org (Edward Stringham) — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EDT

On June 6th, California voters will decide whether to enact Proposition 82, the Preschool for All initiative. The $2.3 billion annual cost of the program will be added to the $3 billion California already spends on preschool programs. Most of the $2.3 billion will go to middle- and high-income families who are already paying for preschool in the private market. Less than 10% of the funds will go to low-income families.

Over the last decade, the California Legislature has been unable to justify the additional spending for universal preschool. So what is the new justification for bypassing normal legislative procedures in order to enormously expand spending?

An economic rationale for universal preschool was provided by a widely heralded cost-benefit analysis performed by the RAND Corporation in 2005. The RAND study concluded with the headline-grabbing claim that taxpayers could get "$2 to $4 of benefits for every dollar spent" on preschool.

But universal preschool won't produce anywhere near that return for taxpayers. That's because, in RAND's own words, their projections are "sensitive to assumptions" about the benefits, and our investigation shows that RAND's assumptions are widely off base.

The RAND study arrives at its optimistic conclusion by significantly overstating the benefits of such a program and ignoring enormous costs. We looked at their analysis in depth in our new study - An Assessment of Rand Corporation's Analysis and Proposals for California - and found that the RAND report has a number of problems.

Even if we take their numbers at face value, it is quite easy to show that if we alter any one of their unrealistic assumptions, universal preschool generates net losses from 25 to 30 cents on every dollar. Most telling is that we did not have to go far to find these assumptions — the RAND study documented these alternatives themselves but chose not to use them when making their forecast.

First, the RAND study estimates benefits for California based on selectively chosen studies from cities in other states that do not resemble California in the slightest. They base estimates on small-scale pilot programs aimed at low-income, high-risk populations and they assume the results will scale to all California preschoolers. Other studies have shown that these programs had little measurable long-term benefits but the advocates of this new bureaucratic program simply ignore these facts.

Second, RAND and advocates of universal preschool assume that children from low-income families currently attending government-run preschools will receive, at a minimum, twice the benefits they currently get from preschool. That is, by transferring from their current government-run preschool to a new, universal government-run preschool, these children will be much more successful in life.

Does it make any sense to expand a system that in many ways is already failing low-income families in both the K-12 arena and in preschool? And is it at all believable to expect the new government-run system to be, at a minimum, twice as effective as the existing one? Who has ever heard of a new government program replacing an old one that achieves results of this magnitude?

Third, RAND's benefits argument assumes that children of middle- and upper-income families who already attend private preschool will receive net benefits by transferring to government run universal preschools. Imagine a proposal that plans to put all private restaurants out of business and replace them with government-run cafeterias. Would anyone believe that consumers who were forced out of those private restaurants would be better off once they were closed?

The rosy arguments attempting to justify tax increases and a massive bureaucratic program rely on heroic and unbelievable assumptions belied by the real-world evidence.

The fatal flaws in the arguments for universal preschool suggest we will lose money for every dollar spent on universal preschool and end up with another massive government program that hurts taxpayers, parents, and children.

Christopher Cardiff and Edward Stringham are economics professors at San Jose State University and are the authors of the study An Assessment of Rand Corporation's Analysis and Proposals for California. Reason Foundation's other universal preschool research and commentary is here.

Professors Find Preschool Benefits Grossly Exaggerated

Tue, 30 May 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Los Angeles (May 30, 2006) — A Rand Corporation study that claims universal preschool will deliver $2.62 in benefits for every dollar spent by California taxpayers has been thoroughly discredited by two San Jose State University economics professors who show the Rand preschool study "cherry-picked" data, based its claims on "unbelievable assumptions that bias the results," and omitted numerous costs and other factors that significantly lower the alleged benefits of universal preschool.

The review of the Rand report, published by the Reason Foundation, uses Rand's own data and methodology and finds that California would actually lose 25 to 30 cents for every dollar spent on universal preschool when just a few of the Rand report's most glaring mistakes are corrected. And the Reason study concludes those losses would be even greater if many of the proposed preschool program's costs, wrongly excluded from Rand's calculations, were included in the analysis.

"On the surface the Rand study looks like a credible, thoroughly research document," said Chris Cardiff, who teaches economics at San Jose State University and is co-author of the analysis of Rand's universal preschool study. "But upon review we found the Rand study fails to pass even the basic benchmarks of what can be considered a reasonable economic analysis."

"Nearly every time there is a choice on how to calculate the benefits of preschool, Rand chooses the rosiest — and most unlikely — scenario," stated Edward Stringham, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics at San Jose State and co-author of the review. "When it comes to the costs of universal preschool, Rand completely ignores some costs and dramatically underestimates others. Frankly, if one of my students turned in Rand's cost-benefit analysis on preschool it would get an 'F.'"

Reason's examination of the Rand report discovers that Rand offers no real evidence showing how or why upper- and middle-income children who already attend preschool would benefit simply by moving from their current private preschools to government-run preschools under the universal preschool program. The Rand study actually cites evidence to the contrary, showing that middle- and upper-income kids get no long-term gain from preschool participation. And yet, despite this evidence, when conducting its cost-benefit analysis Rand curiously, and wrongly, assumes the opposite — projecting that middle- and upper-income students would in fact somehow benefit from California's proposed universal preschool program.

The Reason study shows that by using all of Rand's calculations and assumptions, ignoring how overly optimistic many are, and simply eliminating upper- and middle-class children from Rand's societal benefits forecast, the alleged benefits of universal preschool plummet from $2.62 for every dollar spent to $1.95 for every dollar spent.

Likewise, the Rand study claims that low-income students who already attend government-run preschools will suddenly receive an extraordinary boost in the quality of their education when they are in the same government-run preschools under the universal preschool plan, presumably because the teachers would be required to have bachelor's degrees. However, the Reason Foundation study finds that if we take a much more realistic approach and assume that government-run preschools under the universal preschool program would produce results similar to those of today's government-run preschools, the supposed benefits nose-dive even further.

When the benefits to low-income children who already attend government-run preschools are sensibly reduced while using the rest of Rand's analysis, the benefits fall to 82 cents for every dollar invested — meaning Californian taxpayers actually lose 18 cents on every dollar they invest in universal preschool.

The benefits plunge even more when the San Jose State professors remove Rand's "fudged" numbers from the cost-benefit projections. At one point, Rand acknowledges some kids would go on to earn more money and pay more taxes even if they never attended preschool. Thus, in a credible cost-benefit analysis, 25 percent of the earnings and taxes paid are not due to preschool. However, after specifically noting this fact, Rand concludes that some mysterious unquantified benefits should cancel out this recommended 25 percent reduction. And so, Rand actually throws an extra 25 percent worth of unquantified benefits into its calculations.

If this "fudged" 25 percent is removed, the benefits of universal preschool — using RAND's own approach — would fall to 71 cents for every dollar invested in preschool — a loss of 29 cents on every dollar for California taxpayers.

The Reason study finds several other major problems and faulty assumptions in the Rand report as well. The Rand study:

Unreliably speculates about universal preschool benefits based on very small-scale studies;
Ignores strong evidence from major studies that bring their conclusions into doubt;
Underestimates the costs of creating a whole new state preschool bureaucracy;
Significantly underestimates the economic consequences of increasing taxes in California;
Fails to consider the existing K-12 teacher shortage;
Fails to consider the impact a new statewide preschool program would have on teacher salaries;
And ignores many intangible or difficult to measure costs related to universal preschool.

"It turns out the emperor has no clothes," said Lisa Snell, director of education at Reason Foundation and the review's project director. "The oft-cited Rand study doesn't stand up to basic scrutiny and universal preschool can't deliver on the overly optimistic promises that Rand and others have made. Instead of spending billions each year and naively hoping universal preschool will deliver a miracle, we need to fix our state's broken educational system."

Full Report Online

The full study, An Assessment of Rand Corporation's Analysis and Proposals for California, is available online at http://www.reason.org/ps345_universalpreschool.pdf. A compilation of Reason's universal preschool resources, including op-eds published by The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, and others, can be found at http://www.reason.org/education/.

About Reason

Reason Foundation is a nonprofit think tank dedicated to advancing free minds and free markets. Reason produces respected public policy research on a variety of issues and publishes the critically acclaimed monthly magazine, Reason. For more information, please visit www.reason.org.

Contacts

Edward Stringham, Ph.D., San Jose State University, (408) 924-5419
Chris Cardiff, San Jose State University, (408) 924-1369
Lisa Snell, Director of Education, Reason Foundation, (951) 218-1171
Chris Mitchell, Media Relations, Reason Foundation, (310) 367-6109

Preschool For All? Don't Feed the Beast

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Thu, 25 May 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Orange County Register

"Preschool for All" supporters keep moving the goalposts in the debate over universal preschool, desperately searching for an argument that can actually hold up to scrutiny.

First, it was important to get all kids into preschool. But it turns out two-thirds of California's kids are already in preschool, and taxpayers would be paying over $2.4 billion a year just to inch that total up to 70 percent.

Now supporters say universal preschool will improve California's dismal national reading performance. In a new report, "Building Blocks of Reading," advocates of Proposition 82, the "Preschool for All" initiative pushed by actor/director Rob Reiner, argue that universal preschool will help to prevent reading difficulties in young children. Half of all the state's fourth-graders are failing basic reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a nationwide test of reading achievement. And California fourth-graders perform significantly worse than students in 44 other states, so we certainly need to improve.

Unfortunately, we're going to need to find another way to fix our schools and reading scores because the data clearly shows preschool is not a silver bullet that improves reading achievement.

U.S. preschool enrollment has increased dramatically, jumping from 16 percent in 1965 to 66 percent today. But getting kids into school earlier has not translated into higher test scores. "Student achievement has stagnated or fallen in most subjects since 1970. That is the verdict of the five most reliable sources of evidence," the report's author, education researcher Andrew Coulson, reports.

Georgia and Oklahoma in the 1990s became the first two states to implement universal preschool. We see disappointing results from both states, especially in reading.

Oklahoma and Georgia, both with universal preschool now in place for years, scored below the national average in fourth-grade reading on the standard National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests in 2005. In fact, Georgia and Oklahoma ranked in the bottom 10 of states for increasing fourth-grade reading scores from 1992 to 2005.

Oklahoma is often hailed as the national model for universal preschool. Yet, it was the worst performer of all states in terms of making gains in fourth-grade reading during the years 1992 to 2005, actually losing 4 percentage points.

Thirty-three percent of Oklahoma's fourth-graders were reading at a level below "basic" in 1992. By 2005, that number was 40 percent. While the number of kids reading below the basic level was increasing, the number of fourth-graders reading at a basic level was falling. In 1992, 38 percent of Oklahoma fourth-graders scored basic in reading but by 2005 the number had slipped to 35 percent.

These reading scores fell despite the fact that all the children that took the 2005 reading tests were eligible for universal preschool. One would probably assume that Oklahoma's large, statewide investment in universal preschool, including highly paid, credentialed teachers and a high-quality curriculum, would have a positive effect on fourth-grade reading scores. Clearly, it did not.

Meanwhile, none of the states that made the biggest improvements in fourth-grade reading scores on the NAEP tests during 1992-2005 had implemented universal preschool.

One factor behind preschool's failure to boost reading scores is "fade out." A UC Santa Barbara study this year found preschoolers were more prepared for kindergarten than nonpreschoolers, but that those advantages faded away by the third grade, and thus preschool had "limited use as a long-term strategy for improving the achievement gap." This "fade out" phenomenon has been replicated in many large-scale preschool studies.

After years of so-called reform efforts aimed at improving subpar reading performance in California schools, universal preschool has become the latest panacea. Universal preschool is not a silver bullet. California test scores since 1970 and, more recently, Georgia and Oklahoma's universal preschool results, clearly show universal preschool is not a "Building Block for Reading."

Miserable reading scores are just one example of our broken educational system. Adding a new $2.4 billion-per-year preschool layer to the existing failing bureaucracy won't help. As Ronald Reagan would say: Don't feed the beast.

Lisa Snell is director of education at Reason Foundation and the author of several studies on universal preschool. An archive of her work is here and Reason's education research and commentary is here.

Study Finds Preschool Programs Fail to Demonstrate Lasting, Positive Impact

Thu, 11 May 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Los Angeles (May 11, 2006) — Preschool programs often fail to improve student achievement, offering short-lived educational benefits at best according to a new Reason Foundation study.

The Reason study shows that preschool enrollment has increased from 16 to 66 percent since 1965. And yet this massive growth in preschool attendance and time spent in the classroom has not resulted in increased student achievement, with U.S. test scores rising only very slightly since 1970 when standardized national testing of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders began.

The Reason study says one factor behind preschools' failure to boost educational outcomes is "fade out." A 2006 UC Santa Barbara study found preschoolers were more prepared for kindergarten than non-preschoolers, but that those advantages faded away by the third grade and thus preschool had "limited use as a long-term strategy for improving the achievement gap."

"We're seeing that early schooling may be immaterial to a child's later school performance, or that the current school system, as it is structured and functioning, is unable to sustain any early gains that preschoolers might get," said Lisa Snell, director of education at Reason Foundation and co-author of the report. "There is little factual evidence to backup claims that preschool will boost long-term learning. In fact, we are starting to see some evidence that universal preschool can be detrimental to some kids."

A study of more than 33,000 children who took part in Quebec's universal preschool program between 1994 and 2002 found: "Several measures we looked at suggest that children were worse off in the years following the introduction of the universal childcare program. We studied a wide range of measures of child well-being from anxiety and hyperactivity to social and motor skills. For almost every measure, we find that the increased use of childcare was associated with a decrease in their well-being relative to other children."

Like Quebec, Georgia and Oklahoma, the first two states to implement universal preschool, have gotten very little return on their heavy investment in early education. With universal preschool now firmly in place for years, both states scored below the national average in fourth grade reading on National Assessment of Education Progress tests in 2005. In fact, Georgia and Oklahoma ranked in the nation's bottom 10 when it came to increasing fourth grade reading scores from 1992 to 2005.

"Our education system is failing on so many levels that people have started to grasp for magic bullets," said Darcy Olsen, co-author of the Reason study and president of the Goldwater Institute. "Whether it's Oklahoma, Georgia, or Quebec, universal preschool has proven time and time again that it's no magic bullet. Instead of pouring billions of dollars into preschool, we should focus on fixing our K-12 system."

Full Report Online

The full study, Assessing Proposals for Preschool and Kindergarten: Essential Information for Parents, Taxpayers and Policymakers, is available online at www.reason.org/ps344_universalpreschool.pdf. A compilation of Reason's universal preschool resources, including op-eds published by The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, and others, can be found at http://www.reason.org/education/.

About Reason

Contacts

Lisa Snell, Director of Education, Reason Foundation, (951) 218-1171
Darcy Olsen, President, Goldwater Institute, (602) 462-5000 ext. 234
Chris Mitchell, Media Relations, Reason Foundation, (310) 367-6109

Assessing Proposals for Preschool and Kindergarten

info@reason.org (Darcy Olsen) lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Mon, 01 May 2006 18:00:00 EDT

Executive Summary

Proposals for universal preschool and all-day kindergarten are an increasingly popular policy solution for everything from low academic achievement, to reducing crime, to lowering the dropout rate. In summer 2005, a national task force co-chaired by Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano called for $8 billion annually in federal support for preschool. Similarly, in his 2006 response to President Bush’s State of the Union Speech, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine acknowledged universal preschool as a silver bullet to help create a better future for the United States. Kaine said, “There’s a Better way… Many states are working to make high quality Pre-Kindergarten accessible to every family.”

States are moving quickly to expand access to state-run preschool. According to Libby Doggett, Pre-K Now’s executive director, states cumulatively have committed more than $14 billion to early education. Arizona, New Mexico, Washington, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia are all considering various models of universal preschool, and Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich recently announced plans to make Illinois the first state in the nation to offer universal preschool to both three-and four-year-olds. California has a universal preschool initiative on the June 2006 ballot. Nationwide, at least 40 states provide state funding for preschool programs, and at least 28 considered legislation to expand state-funded preschool programs in 2005. Three states—Georgia, Oklahoma, and Florida—offer universal preschool.

The movement toward all-day kindergarten is also gaining popularity in the states. Currently nine states mandate full-day kindergarten and seven states offer school districts financial incentives to offer full-day kindergarten. Governors in Arizona, Indiana, and Massachusetts have made full-day kindergarten a top legislative priority in 2006 and many other state legislatures are considering full-day kindergarten proposals. For example, California is considering legislation that would make it mandatory for all California school districts to offer full-day kindergarten by 2010. According to the Education Commission of the States approximately 66 percent of kindergartners already attend full-day kindergarten.

California and Arizona are leading the charge toward universal preschool and full-day kindergarten. California may become the national prototype for universal preschool. Hollywood director Rob Reiner is promoting “Preschool for All,” a June 2006 ballot initiative, calling it “a broad-based, multi-year, non-partisan advocacy campaign to achieve voluntary preschool for all four-year-olds in California.”

While universal preschool for all children sounds like a laudable goal, the Preschool for All Act represents a de-facto institutionalization of preschool in California by creating a new, governmentmanaged $2.5 billion a year entitlement program that subsidizes the preschool choices of middleclass and wealthy families. Although it is a voluntary program, it would change the structure of the current mixed-provider preschool market into a state-controlled monopoly.

Similarly, Arizona’s Governor Napolitano is representative of the national sentiment to incorporate preschool education and full-day kindergarten into the current K-12 public school system. In 2004 Governor Napolitano released a School Readiness Action Plan that included the widely discussed proposal for state-funded all-day kindergarten and a lesser-discussed plan for “state-supported preschool.” Speaking before the National Task Force on Public Education, the governor said her aim was “ensconcing early care and education as a lockstep component of public schooling.” She considers the plan a “starting point” for the state’s role in the “development of Arizona’s youngest children.”

Universal preschool advocates like Rob Reiner and Governor Napolitano argue that early schooling improves academic achievement and offers children long-term academic and economic benefits. Yet this study finds the evidence supporting those claims to be unfounded, at best.

To help determine the efficacy of early education programs, we examine the results of some of the programs considered to be early education models—including, Perry Preschool, Chicago Child Parent Studies, Abecedarian, and Head Start—and find the research to be flawed and therefore of questionable value. We also review information from the National Center for Education Statistics, which reports no lasting reading, math, or science achievement differences between children who attend half-day and full-day kindergarten. We also examine the results of the National Assessment of Education Progress in Georgia and Oklahoma, where universal preschool has been fully implemented without quantifiable benefit. We find the widespread adoption of preschool and fullday kindergarten is unlikely to improve student achievement.

America’s flexible approach to early education gives children a strong foundation. Skills assessment at kindergarten entry and reports by kindergarten teachers show a large and increasing majority of preschoolers are prepared for kindergarten. The effectiveness of the current system is also evident in early test scores. At age 10, U.S. children have higher reading, math, and science scores than their European peers who attend the government preschools cited by advocates as models for the United States. To the degree that the state remains involved in financing early education, we recommend measures for transparency, program assessment, and improved flexibility through individual student funding.

Is Universal Preschool Beneficial? An Assessment of RAND Corporation's Analysis and the Proposals for California

Mon, 01 May 2006 18:00:00 EDT

Executive Summary

Almost two-thirds of California families currently choose to send their 4-year-olds to preschool. Of those who do, almost half choose a preschool program operated by the state of California, while the other half choose a privately operated preschool. If Proposition 82, an initiative on the June ballot, is implemented those figures will radically change. Most family- and other privatelyowned preschools will vanish, replaced by government-run, taxpayer-funded preschools.

Proposition 82 would entrench a $2.3 billion per year government-run universal preschool program into state law. The Proposition 82 effort was launched on the heels of the RAND Corporation’s March 2005 study, The Economics of Investing in Universal Preschool Education in California. The RAND study paints an extremely optimistic and rosy picture about how government-run preschools would benefit society, concluding that they would generate “between $2 and $4 in benefits for every dollar expended.”

This report assesses RAND Corporation’s cost benefit analysis and finds that it significantly overestimates the upsides and drastically underestimates the downsides of universal preschool and the California proposal. Using RAND's own data and alternative assumptions based on the studies they reference, it is easy to demonstrate that universal preschool generates losses of 25 to 30 cents for every dollar spent. And these losses are calculated before including any of the additional universal preschool program costs that RAND ignored in its analysis.

Proposition 82, even according to RAND Corporation’s low estimates, would cost California taxpayers $2.3 billion each year in perpetuity.2 With those annual operating expenses, only the brightest—and unlikeliest—scenarios would produce benefits that outweigh the costs of universal preschool. In its analysis, the RAND study ignores numerous costs that will add billions to the preschool bill for California taxpayers and will thus make RAND’s predictions even more improbable.

Where today’s non-government preschools, many of them family-owned and operated, constitute 45 percent of the market, the RAND study predicts that most private providers will disappear if the government assumes responsibility for preschool. The vast variety of preschools found in communities across the state would be replaced by a monolithic, one-size-fits-all system designed, controlled, and funded by a statewide bureaucracy—the same bureaucracy that already fails students at the K-12 level. The options available in the private preschool market would wither, with almost 90 percent of children going to state-operated facilities and 10 percent going to private schools, mostly catering to the elite.

Given the California government’s track record in running a universal K-12 education system— with struggling performance, low standardized test scores, a shortage of qualified teachers, and high administrative costs, just to name a few of the current problems—there seems to be little reason to expect the state would achieve a new and unprecedented level of success at creating and providing high-performing preschools for all students across California. How often is it true that the best way to fix a troubled system is to expand it? As it stands, California’s current government-run preschools meet only four out of ten quality standards for preschools.

This is especially true in inner-city schools, populated by low-income families, where the state government has consistently failed to provide a quality education. Advocates of California’s proposal tout government-run universal preschool as a benefit for these low-income, high-risk children. In reality, only about 8 percent of Proposition 82’s funding would go to these families. As the RAND study makes clear, the vast majority of taxpayers’ money would be spent on middle- and high-income families who are already paying for private preschool for their children.

In the public policy debate, many of the justifications for the proposed preschool program rest on conclusions from the RAND study, so before voters unwittingly accept its policy prescriptions, we should investigate the soundness of the analysis.

On its surface the RAND study appears thoroughly researched. However, close inspection reveals the study is deeply and fatally flawed. The assumptions underlying universal preschool’s alleged benefits are unwarranted at times, leading to gross inflation of the benefits. And even more troubling, most of the downsides of the California proposal are completely ignored. To this end, the RAND study devotes more than 80 percent of its pages to estimating tangible and intangible gains to various parts of society, while it devotes less than 5 percent of its pages to addressing the costs. The flaws in the RAND cost benefit analysis of government-run universal preschool are numerous and those addressed in this analysis include:

The RAND study unreliably conjectures benefits based on small-scale studies that are unlikely to scale statewide;
RAND questionably assumes benefits will double for children already in government preschool programs;
RAND questionably assumes that government preschools will provide additional benefits for children already in high quality private preschool programs;
RAND questionably estimates costs of universal government preschool based on an unseen “forthcoming” study, leaving evaluators with little ability to evaluate their underlying figures;
RAND completely ignores the cost of creating a whole new government bureaucracy;
RAND all but ignores intangible and difficult to measure costs of the proposed program;
RAND underestimates the economic consequences of further increasing taxes in California;
RAND underestimates the costs of the program by ignoring the already existing teacher shortage and failing to consider the necessary industry-wide changes in teacher wages that would accompany the program;
RAND ignores countervailing evidence from alternative studies that bring into serious question many of their conclusions.

The RAND study fails to pass the benchmark of what can be considered a reasonable economic analysis. If the RAND study was submitted in our San Jose State University classrooms, it would get an “F”. The bottom line is: The RAND study significantly overestimates the benefits of government-provided universal preschool and significantly underestimates the program’s costs. As a result, the study’s conclusions about the benefits of universal preschool are blatantly overstated and incorrect.

Hands Off My Fridge, Meathead

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:00:00 EST

The Wall Street Journal

Hollywood film director turned political activist Rob Reiner believes that he ought to be exempt from accountability because of his good intentions. That was the clear message from his press conference on Tuesday, called to address accusations that he violated a state ban when he diverted taxpayer dollars from First 5 — an unelected commission to promote children's health that he's headed for six years — to run an ad campaign promoting his latest ballot initiative called Preschool for All. A bipartisan group of senators has ordered an audit of the commission's funds. Mr. Reiner, who first rose to fame when he played Meathead, Archie Bunker's liberal son-in-law on "All in the Family," vowed not to resign, because he wants to do "right by the four-year-olds."

This is not the commission's only questionable contract. First 5 has received to date $800 million — about 20% — of the tobacco proceeds that Mr. Reiner convinced California voters to impose on themselves in a 1998 referendum. Of this, the commission has awarded contracts totaling about $230 million to firms or individuals known to Mr. Reiner — some of them without competitive bidding. Meanwhile, the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office is mulling whether to launch its own investigation to determine if there was any cronyism involved in awarding the ad campaign contract to a firm with long-standing ties to Mr. Reiner.

Mr. Reiner is unfazed by all of this. The commission's ad campaign, he says, was perfectly legitimate because it was merely informing parents of the benefits of preschool — not telling them how to vote on his new initiative. No doubt this is the kind of creative thinking that has made him such a successful Hollywood director. If state authorities buy this logic, however, they will effectively legitimize a scheme to leverage the tax proceeds from one referendum to support another involving still more taxes.

But now that Mr. Reiner has succeeded in putting his Preschool for All initiative on the ballot, the most immediate issue for voters is not how he financed it, but what he is selling them. The initiative sounds like a great bargain: By imposing a 1.7% tax on couples making over $800,000 ($400,000 for individuals), it seeks to generate $2.4 billion to fund three hours of free preschool every day for California's four-year-olds.

Yet even the Reiner folks don't expect to enroll all four-year-olds in the program — just 70% of them. However, 66% of California's four-year-olds already attend some form of preschool. This means that $2.4 billion will fund 22,000 new kids — about $109,000 per new preschooler, according to a recent analysis by the Reason Foundation. For this kind of money, a lot of poor parents could put their kids through a good state college and graduate school and still have some change left for a family field trip to the Galapagos.

Mr. Reiner's spokesman Nathan James disputes Reason's cost estimate on grounds that although 66% of four-year-olds currently get preschool, only about 25% get "quality" preschool. "It could be baby-sitting or throwing a kid in front of a TV set," he told the New York Sun. The proof of the pudding, however, is in the eating — and what's coming out of Oklahoma and Georgia, two states that implemented universal preschool over a decade ago — is not particularly appetizing. Last year, the gains in reading scores of fourth graders in both states ranked among the bottom 10 on the National Assessment of Education Progress tests — the premier benchmark for comparing student performance across states. Even more stunning, not one of the 10 best performing states had universal preschool programs.

Even before Mr. Reiner went on the offensive this Tuesday, some California Democrats were beginning to wonder about the wisdom of his scheme. Two of them, Tom Torlakson of Antioch and Don Perata of Oakland, have publicly withdrawn support from his initiative, citing concerns that it would only subsidize kids who already have preschool, not those who most need it. Indeed, because universal preschool programs are by definition not means-tested, they help not the poor so much as middle-income or wealthy families who are better at negotiating the system. In Quebec, for instance, which implemented the most ambitious universal preschool program eight years ago, about half of the government-funded day care spots are taken up by families in the top 30% income bracket who can well afford to pay out-of-pocket.

But this is not the only way that Mr. Reiner's attempt to play Robin Hood would end up back-firing on the poor. An analysis by LECG, an economic consulting firm in California, has found that the Reiner tax-hike would actually result in more than $4 billion in general fund losses over the first five years as rich taxpayers either flee the state or report less taxable income. This would either mean cuts in health, welfare and other programs for the poor — or an even bigger fiscal deficit. There is a better way to help poor parents without soaking taxpayers or jinxing the budget. California already spends $3 billion on preschool. It would make far more sense to hand this money to lower- and middle-income families in the form of targeted preschool tax credits.

Mr. Reiner's ad campaign mentions neither the indifferent results of universal preschool nor its budgetary consequences. This, in itself, would not be a problem, because a democracy counts not on any one person's script, but many partial ones from numerous interested parties, to get the full story across to voters. But there is a problem when someone has unfair access to taxpayer dollars to bankroll his script over others. This is why California authorities need to give close scrutiny to Mr. Reiner's tactics — and California voters to his grand taxing plans. As Archie Bunker would say: Hands off my fridge, Meathead.

Ms. Dalmia is a senior analyst and Ms. Snell the director of education policy at the Reason Foundation.

The Case Against Universal Preschool in California

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:00:00 EST

Introduction

On August 23rd, 2005, the Institute for American’s Future and the Center for American Progress called for $325 billion of added federal education spending over the next decade, including more than $9 billion a year to create a nationwide, universal preschool program.1 Although the coalition has not released a specific plan, typical universal preschool proposals call for replacing the private parentdriven preschool system with a taxpayer-funded system that would likely add one or two years of “voluntary” preschool for all children onto the current K-12 public education system. Nationwide, at least 40 states provide funding for preschool programs, and at least 28 considered legislation to expand state-funded preschool programs in 2005.2 Three states— Georgia, Oklahoma, and Florida—offer universal preschool.

California may become the national model for universal preschool. The California Preschool for All Act, filed with the state attorney general on June 20, 2005, calls for a voluntary, half-day preschool program that would be offered free of charge to California’s four-year olds. While this sounds like a laudable goal, this voluntary program would change the current structure of the mixed-provider market that includes a diverse group of public and private preschools into a statecontrolled monopoly. Universal preschool will expand government provision of education, destroy the private market of preschool, and expand the power of teachers’ unions. Taxpayers would be forced to subsidize not only the poor but also the middle class and wealthy.

According to California’s “Preschool for All” supporters, universal preschool would enroll 70 percent of the 550,000 four year olds in California every year when fully implemented. That would be 385,000 preschoolers. According to California’s Legislative Analyst Office, 66 percent of California four year olds are already enrolled in preschool. That is 363,000 preschoolers. If California’s $2.4 billion Preschool for All initiative meets its goal of 70 percent enrollment, just 22,000 new four-year-olds would enroll, meaning it wouldcost taxpayers a whopping $109,000 per new preschooler.

There is little empirical evidence to demonstrate any lasting educational or socioeconomic benefit of government- run preschool programs. In addition, it’s clear that state-run schools are already failing to manage their existing programs. Supporters radically underestimate the net cost of this new program, which would require mandatory credentialing under the auspices of the bureaucracy of the county superintendents of schools. And high costs are only the beginning. The current private preschool market offers an array of choices. Government preschool is a formulated, one-size-fits-all approach to education that institutionalizes young children at their most impressionable ages. This is a move backwards that should be avoided.

California’s Preschool for All initiative would be financed by a 1.7 percent tax increase on individuals who earn over $400,000 (or couples earning over $800,000), pushing the tax rate on upper income families to a national high of 12 percent.5 This new tax represents an 18 percent tax increase on wealthy Californians. With wealthy Californians already leaving the state in search of lower tax rates in states like Nevada, Texas, and Washington, adding an additional tax burden will exacerbate the problem. The last time California raised income tax to this level, it contributed to a five-year recession.

California currently spends more than $3 billion a year on subsidized preschool for low-income children.7 A recent report by the District Attorney in charge of welfare fraud in California reports that rampant fraud is costing California taxpayers as much as $1.5 billion a year—half of the welfare money it pays to needy families for child care.8 In Los Angeles, for example, officials estimate Los Angeles County loses 40 to 50 percent of its $600 million-a-year child-care allocation to fraud. Perhaps we should reform the $3 billion we already spend on child care to direct more resources to serve disadvantaged children.

In light of the resources we already spend on early childhood education and the competing demands for scarce resources from children’s health insurance, transportation, local government, and K-12 education, it is a very difficult position to argue that more public dollars should replace private spending for preschool.