The World Congress of Families passes along these paragraphs from Darcy Olsen and Jennifer Martin's article, "Assessing Proposals for Preschool and Kindergarten: Essential Information for Parents, Taxpayers, and Policymakers," in Policy Report No. 201, February 8, 2005, Goldwater Institute, Phoenix, Arizona.Although Congress claimed in 1965 that Head Start would reduce juvenile delinquency, poverty, and dependency, the preschool initiative that today costs $7 billion a year has yet to demonstrate any lasting boost to the educational outcomes of at-risk children. Nevertheless, welfare-state advocates are now pushing for public preschool for all children, claiming it will dramatically improve educational achievement. Yet a study by the Goldwater Institute of Arizona warns that the public should not fall for the curve ball this time, finding not only that pre-K programs offer questionable educational value, but also that no crisis even exists to justify such action.
Among the extensive findings pulled together by institute president and early education authority Darcy Olsen, the most riveting is her observation that the huge expansion of early education since 1965 has not yielded rising outcomes of elementary school students. In 1965, only five percent of three-year-olds and 14 percent of four-year-olds were enrolled in pre-K programs. Today, those figures are 39 percent and 66 percent, respectively. Yet statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show how fourth-grade reading, science, and math scores have stagnated since the early 1970s and in some cases fallen, even as the nation has tripled spending in education, increased teachers' salaries, and reduced class sizes. Nevertheless, even in these subject areas, American fourth-graders still outperform their peers in France, Italy, and Germany, countries that have the kind of universal pre-K system that some want here.
In her review of the empirical research, Olsen finds that formal early education at best yields only short-term effects with at-risk students, effects of which "fade out" by grade three, and at worst yields adverse effects with mainstream children. Even where a program might be beneficial, like the often cited Carolina Abecedarian Project, its applicability to the preschool question is limited, as this costly intervention enrolled at-risk children at the age of six months in an all-day, five-days-a-week, and twelve-months-a-year program for four and half years.Nor are conventional preschool programs any more promising. Olsen notes that after ten years and spending $1.15 billion making preschool free for all four-year-olds in the Peach State, scores on the Georgia Kindergarten Assessment Program remain essentially unchanged since 1993 (when the experiment began) and that differences between students (who were in preschool and those who were not) are not statistically significant. She also wonders what crisis initiatives like Georgia's are intended to address, citing studies from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, K Cohort, that reveal-on the basis of the "readiness" standards of Goals 2000-that close to 90 percent of children already start kindergarten well-prepared and with a strong foundation.
These findings lead Olsen to lament that the current debate has little to do with the cost or effectiveness of preschooling: "At heart is the question of in whose hands the responsibility for young children should rest. On that question, plans to entrench the state further into early education cannot be squared with a free society that cherishes the primacy of the family over the state."
