Pre-school; valuable?

Here is what Mr Obama said in his State of the Union Address:

And that has to start at the earliest possible age. You know, study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. But today, fewer than three in ten 4-year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program. Most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for private preschool. And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives.

So, tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America.

That’s something we should be able to do.

Every dollar we invest in high-quality early childhood education can save more than seven dollars later on, by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime. In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children — like Georgia or Oklahoma — studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, form more stable families of their own. We know this works. So let’s do what works and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind. Let’s give our kids that chance.

The Center for American Progress adds to these claims with:

For the youngest, that means making high-quality preschool available to all children, including those in middle-income families with parents who are challenged to juggle the demands of work and family while covering the cost of preschool. There’s plenty of evidence that attending a quality preschool is linked to greater academic achievement and a reduced chance of ending up as a teenage parent, a high school dropout, or arrested for a violent crime.

That’s a heavy load placed on learning ones colors, ABCs and ability to count to ten.

This is a good example of broad brush political rhetoric aimed only at appealing to the uninformed. The fact is the long-term results of pre-school programs are questionable. Many studies, including government studies, conflict with the President’s statements. In addition, results vary among different groups. Low income children appear to benefit more than others, some studies show both positive and negative emotional and behavioral effects. Many studies show that the academic related positive effects fade after only a few years so that those children with pre-schooling are no further advanced and sometimes less so than their peers.

Why would the President make claims he and his staff must know are at a minimum on shaky ground? Why would he distort facts just to foster a flawed ideology? Is this integrity? Read this for a good balanced analysis. The Shaky Science Behind Obama’s Universal Pre-K

No one is saying pre-school programs are bad, if for no other reason than they put poor children in a better environment for some time each day. They may also help many children especially very low income children.

From a February 15 WSJ article:

Nobel Prize laureate James Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, praised Mr. Obama’s plan and said every $1 invested in quality early-childhood education for low-income children provides a 7% to 10% annual return on investment per child in terms of better education, health and economic outcomes. He said high-quality programs might appear to be expensive, but the costs “are not high in terms of the opportunity costs of not doing the programs.”

Maria Fitzpatrick, professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, in an emailed news release cautioned against any plan that would expand preschool to all 4-year-olds, saying that “results show that only some children gain—disadvantaged children, particularly those in rural areas—and that the effects fade out over time.”

However, engaged parenting has the same or greater positive effects. It takes only modest consistent effort to work with a pre-schooler on basic skills related to reading, spelling, and math and to make learning fun and a positive experience. During his speech the President also said,

And we’ll work to strengthen families by removing the financial deterrents to marriage for low- income couples and do more to encourage fatherhood, because what makes you a man isn’t the ability to conceive a child, it’s having the courage to raise one. And we want to encourage that. We want to help that.

The “courage to raise one,” imagine that, the President of the United States and the federal government must address fatherhood. But you know, poverty and the need for some pre-schooling and “fatherhood” are closely intertwined, especially when you consider Single Motherhood in America. You can also understand Mr Obama’s remarks when you consider that 72% of African American children are raised in a single parent home.

So, it’s pretty clear we do have a problem, not one that providing pre-school for every child in America will solve, but you see that’s the fundamental ideology we contend with. Take an issue that applies in different ways to different groups for different reasons and make some general assumptions (of questionable accuracy) and drop on to that issue a massive new federal initiative. In doing so also be sure the issue fits well with the American psyche of apple pie and motherhood.