Following the Biden administration’s admission that its Build Back Better Plan is dead, there’s an effort to resurrect parts of this massive social spending bill. One goal is the White House’s proposal for a “transformational investment” – $200 billion – for free universal pre-K for 3 and 4-year-old children.
The plan is modeled on the Head Start program which was launched in 1965 to get kids from low-income families prepped for kindergarten. This push comes despite extensive research showing Head Start’s dismal results including one finding that elementary-school kids who didn’t participate were better prepared in math than those who started the program at age three.
Forget raising kindergarten performance. A long-term study on the state of Tennessee’s pre-K program found that children who attended it fared worse in sixth grade than children from similar backgrounds who didn’t participate.
The state’s program has existed since 2005 and meets 9 of 10 federal benchmarks.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University are following 2990 low-income children. The Wall Street Journal reports that: “The program was oversubscribed, so researchers followed applicants who ended up in the program versus those who were turned away.” So, all kids in the study had parents who were motivated to sign them up for pre-K.
Over time, students who had attended the pre-K program also exhibited more disciplinary infractions and attendance problems, and needed more special education services than those who did not attend.
The findings of this study are reported in the Journal of Developmental Psychology. Its authors say that the Tennessee program doesn’t have any “distinctive characteristics… that are a likely explanation for the disappointing findings.”
Perhaps most three and four-year-olds aren’t ready for “more rigid academic settings.” We really don’t have evidence to show that universal pre-K would be a worthwhile investment.
The Left continues to push government-funded preschools as a way to begin influencing kids early in life. We shouldn’t revive any pieces of the Build Back Better program, including this one.