Is publically funded pre-school worth more than the alternatives? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    I recently wrote a Teacher's Desk piece in which I said that there is little evidence that pre-school programs have much of a lasting effect on the success of students in later years. Click here to read that piece.

    The article got quite a bit of feedback, almost all from advocates of government supported daycare or pre-school operations.

    In an attempt to foster more productive debate I would offer the following.

    Smart Start, More At Four, Headstart and other publically supported daycare/pre-school programs all share one fatal flaw in terms of whether the taxpayers should support them or not. That is, they are selective and not open to all children. I would contend that either publically supported daycare should be universal or entirely privately funded. (And as for myself, I would opt for privately funded unless and until we can know that taxpayer dollars would produce more from pre-school spending than if that same money were spent on K-14 education.)

    It is an entirely different concept when the government spends tax dollars on students with special needs in addition to spending a lesser amount on non-special needs students in K-12 and offering a government funded service to only a select group of students. That is why some of us supported adding kindergarten for all students several years ago and why it is a good idea. But if public-supported kindergarten is a legitimate use of tax dollars then the same idea should be applied to four year olds just as it is for five year olds. And ultimately the same would apply to three year olds or even younger children. In short, either pre-school is worth public support for all children, or it is not worth public support for a few.

    So our major objection to Smart Start, More At Four and Headstart is that they are not equally accessible to all students. If public funded daycare is worthwhile for four year olds it is worthwhile for all four year olds, not just some. You either believe in universal public education or you don't. It makes no sense to subscribe to it for some but not all.

    Once you wrap your thinking around the idea of universal education you then have to ask the original question we raised: Is money spent on daycare better spent than spending the same amount of money on other facets of education, say making exceptional children's programs more effective for K-5, improving vocational education in 6-12, improving our community college programs or even in improving basic education for K-12 students? The question is: Where is the money best spent?

    The issue is not whether public supported daycare is, as two of the speakers at the recent Tea Party Town Hall meeting advocated, a good idea or not. Rather the issue is whether that is the best use of scarce public resources at this point in time?

    If we had all the money we need then there would be no question in our mind that "high quality pre-school programs" should be offered all students. But the problem is that for every dollar that is spent on pre-school, that is a dollar that cannot be spent on other programs. For example, what sense does it make to cut out the dual enrollment programs (that allow a high school student to graduate with an associate degree) while we add pre-school programs? Ditto exceptional children's programs and vocational education as well as "low wealth funding."

    No, the issue is not whether publically funded pre-school programs are a good thing, but rather the issue is whether that is the most productive way to use scarce resources.

    But to answer that question requires much more solid information about the effectiveness of pre-school education than we now have. Governor Hunt (who is lobbying hard right now to save his Smart Start program) made a terrible mistake when he failed to establish a sound evaluation component in the Smart Start programs, as did Governor Easley with More At Four. Without sound research it is not possible to inform the decision of whether limited resources should be spent on pre-school as opposed to other needs.

    Some of our readers responded to the earlier article by offering a long list of studies supporting the efficacy of pre-school programs. But most of that research is not valid when applied to North Carolina's pre-school programs. Even the empirically based studies are more or less anecdotal and even those don't show very much actual difference in children who attended publically funded daycare, compared to those who did not, by the time those students got to middle school. The actual findings are marginal, at best; and not sufficient to carry the burden of deprivation of other needs in favor of spending on pre-school.

    The fundamental flaw with most of the pre-school studies is that they do not meet the most fundamental test of good research: Is it universally applicable?

    The answer, without becoming too technical here, is that the research is very inconclusive about which models of pre-school work best. For the techies among us, the point can be put another way: There is more variance within the studies than there is between pre-school educated students and those not included. Thus, all that one can really conclude from the research is that "some pre-school programs work well, but not all of them work as well as others."

    So either one of two things, or both, must happen before we can accept the idea of taking more money away from K-12 and putting it in pre-school. First, we must have solid research on all of the students who have been through publically funded pre-school and compare those students' performance at, say the end of middle school, with the 'control group.' Or we need valid research studies replicated across many different settings which rigorously control for validity and reliability, specifically "external validity."

    So again, we don't have sufficient research to make an informed public policy decision on tax payer supported pre-school education. We don't even know which model of pre-school education works best, much less whether it works better than spending more on some other facet of K-14 education. And without that, it is foolish to take money away from existing programs to spend it on pre-school until we know pre-school spending will produce more than those other alternatives.

    So the issue becomes: Do we get more from pre-school than we would get from something else? And the research at this point does not answer that question.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.