On Preschooling, Universal and Otherwise: No Hope?
Seeing as it appears to be Say Controversial Things About Public Education Week, I want to make a couple of remarks about state-sponsored preschool programs, by way of a column I wrote for Culture11 late last year.
That column grew out of what was, and still remains, a deep frustration with the ways that advocates for “universal” preschool have drawn on the work of Chicago economist James Heckman, whose research on the social and economic benefits of preschool programs is frequently put forward in support of the claim that federal and state governments need to make publicly-funded preschooling available to all. That Heckman’s work would be used to this end isn’t initially very surprising: he’s a Nobel laureate, after all, and his research into the economic benefits of preschool has turned up some tremendously encouraging results. But as I wrote in my column, Heckman’s case for preschool simply isn’t a case for universal preschool, and using his work to such an end requires ignoring a number of his own convictions:
[Heckman] is much more careful than many of those who appeal to his work to distinguish between the sorts of targeted preschool programs that have actually been found to work and huge, multibillion-dollar boondoggles like the Obama-Biden “Zero to Five” plan. While Heckman does speak and write passionately about the value of intensive early intervention in the lives of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, enlisting him as an advocate for a federally-sponsored universal preschool program requires severe distortions of his actual views: for example, a 2006 essay that Heckman wrote for the Wall Street Journal closes with the observation that there is “little basis for providing universal programs at zero cost,” and “no reason for [early childhood] interventions to be conducted in public centers.”
“Vouchers,” Heckman continues, “that can be used in privately run programs would promote competition and efficiency in the provision of early enrichment programs. They would allow parents to choose the venues and values offered in the programs that enrich their child’s earliest years.” Appropriately targeted, means-tested, and choice-driven ventures are one thing; but to spend public dollars in such a way as to “try to substitute for what the middle-class and upper-middle-class parents are already doing,” as he put it in a 2005 interview, is “foolish.”
So what gives? What I wrote at the time, and still think is basically right, was that Heckman has been able to be enlisted on the side of universal preschool largely because opponents of such policies have failed to claim the moral high ground in anything like the way that they’ve – arguably, anyway – claimed it so successfully in the “school choice” approach to primary and secondary education. And again, there’s a reason for this: the kind of programs that Heckman’s research has found to work haven’t been ones like Head Start; they’re far more expensive than a universal program ever could be, and involve quite a lot more time and effort than preschool usually does. When Heckman cautions against universality as in the quotes above, or concludes a paper (gated, I guess) that discusses the famed Perry Preschool Program by saying that “[i]nvesting in disadvantaged (my emphasis – JS) young children is a rare public policy initiative that promotes fairness and social justice and at the same time promotes productivity in the economy and in society at large”, he means exactly what he says: every dollar spent on taxpayer-funded daycare for rich and middle-class kids is a dollar not spent on having teachers come, as they did in the Perry Program, to visit the homes of kids who are worse off. But as it is, there’s no real constituency for spending tens of thousands of dollars a head only on the lower-class kids who’d really stand – and need – to benefit.
All of which is just to say that politics is a drag, isn’t it? On one team you’ve got a group that supports the educational lobby and so favors universality; on the other you’ve got the group that screams “Socialism!” and “Statism!” at the faintest whiffs of redistribution or government intervention; and over on the sidelines you’ve got a rag-tag group, clinging tightly to the data showing that they’ve got an idea that just might work, watching the ongoing battle with horror and occasionally spitting into the wind. I think I need a beer.
I’ll put another twist on the political angle.
After years of debate, our local school district has decided to offer a free, public pre-k program. I am happy about this on three counts:
1) The only other pre-k program in our area was run by the catholic church, and while I really really really like the teacher, and was happy to have our daughter in the program, I chafed a little at the religious indoctrination. You know how some people get squirley about talking to their kids about sex? That’s how I felt talking to my 4 year old about the trinity. I’m glad I won’t have to go through that with our second daughter.
2) We have a substantial, mostly racially/ethnically defined underclass, most of whose children do not attend the private pre-k. The kindergarden teachers are of the opinion that this is to these children’s disadvantage, and I am of the opinion that it is factor contributes to segregation in our community. (The most important being language.) I sorely do not want to see our town further divided into a white overclass and a brown underclass, so I’m in favor of anything that promotes more socializing.
3) It’ll save my family about $5000.
So there, we’re spending the money on universal (so far as our district is concerned) pre-k; a decision made at the ultra-local level, the very model of the conservative utopia of local control.
But wait.
Do you think for a minute that me and my townsfolk are now going to oppose national universal pre-k if it means we can get a little some some from the fed for something we’ve already decided we’re going to do? Do you see me and my townsfolk voting to pay for some kids somewhere else to get special pre-school when we decided to dig deep and pay for it ourselves? I don’t see that happening, even if in my heart of hearts I’d rather see more money spent where it can (maybe) do more good.
Loop it back around and I arrive at my passionate belief that public education is like water and sewer, that we owe it to ourselves to maximize the intellect potential of our citizens so that they’ll have the “substrate” to make sophisticated, forward thinking choices.
Of course that might mean that in a time of national crisis and grief, when our leader told us, “Go shopping” we might tell them to go to hell. Maybe this Kobayashi Maru is all a part of a sinister plan.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 10:26 PM · #
Yes, but the problem is that unless you’re pretty seriously disadvantaged, preschool doesn’t seem to do much of anything to your kids’ potential. Sure makes for great daycare, though.
In any case you’re spot-on with the politics. I wrote about my own family’s much-less-happy relationship to preschooling here, by the way.
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 10:38 PM · #
If only we could find an ideology that told the rich to help the poor AND the poor to improve themselves, and that especially emphasized the value of children. There certainly isn’t any ideology like that prevalent in academia or the White House, I’m afraid.
— y81 · May 7, 10:40 PM · #
“Yes, but the problem is that unless you’re pretty seriously disadvantaged, preschool doesn’t seem to do much of anything to your kids’ potential. Sure makes for great daycare, though.”
Well that’s sort of my point. I didn’t say I was passionate about universal pre-school, I said I was passionate about free, quality, public education. I’m pleased with the decisions that our community has made about pre-k for the reasons outlined above, but don’t know enough about the issue to have a national opinion. Obviously we are in a time when it is especially important that we make prudent choices and I have no doubt that we won’t.
But for the sake of argument, I’ll take your position as the correct opinion, and in that light, I want well-educated fellow citizens so that “I need day care ego universal pre-school must improve scholastic achievement” gets a slightly more critical examination than “I’m scared and angry, so Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11” or “This teaser rate ARM lets me juke the debt ratio formulas, so housing prices will always rise and of course I’ll be able to refi before the real rate that I can’t afford kicks in.”
To hear Ms. Chan tell it, I’m hoping for too much. But I hope she’s wrong. High schoolers are now running sub four minute miles , a pace that at one point was thought of as perhaps being beyond the limits of even the most elite human substrate.
Also, and purely personally, I don’t really care about pre-k’s effect on raising my daughter’s potential (whatever the hell that means, something to do with Baby Mozart I suppose,) and we don’t need the day care. We sent our first because we thought she would really enjoy it, which she did; and that’s the reason we’ll send our second. That’s not an argument that’s going to win a lot of votes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good reason, maybe even the best reason of all.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 11:50 PM · #
And also also, and having read your other post, I think early childhood daycare is insane. When I say pre-k, I mean a program of fake school for 4 years old, not daycare for 2 and 3 year olds.
I mean seriously, did they really need to do a study to figure out that going to “school” for more than six hours a day was not as good for toddlers as spending that with their mom and/or dad? What’s the phrase I’m looking for? Oh right. No shit, Sherlock.
I would not worry yourself about keeping your kids out of school; either delaying their entry or taking them out to do more interesting things. Most of school is logistics and moving bodies. Absent that, everything you need to do with them to “keep up” can be accomplished in about 2 hours, leaving the rest of the day for swimming, gardening, and watching DVDs.
— Tony Comstock · May 8, 12:11 AM · #
Part of the problem with widespread education reforms is that in education, scalability is an enormous factor; there have been many new techniques in education (like certain KIPP principles) that have produced major gains in (relatively) small situations but have much less success when applied on a broader scale. So in order to really test something like vouchers, or the efficacy of universal pre-K, you’ve got to essentially make the switch the test. You can’t look at a smattering of test results and data and assume that the results will apply when spread out against the various diversities of the United States writ large.
Another reason that we should approach vouchers with trepidation, no matter what our inclinations towards them, is that a great deal of the flexibility and lack of bureaucracy that are attributed to private schools comes precisely because private schools don’t usually have to participate in state mandated standardized testing. That’s what people mean when they say that private education “cuts red tape”. But since we’re talking about an enormous public expenditure, and one that would essentially be a trial run of a new educational paradigm, that’s unsatisfying.
Add that in to the fact that private educators would face great financial pressure to fudge or outright falsify the student performance data, and as currently constituted have essentially the honor system as the only check against such a thing… and you can understand the need for caution.
— Freddie · May 8, 01:26 AM · #
y81: bullshit. What I would like is for the so-called conservative movement to back up their high-minded rhetoric with action just for once. You want to claim that you value kids? Or equality of opportunity, meritocracy, etc.? Then you better fucking support UNIVERSAL, equal public education. Put your money where your mouth is or shut the fuck up.
Tony Comstock: frankly, for a lot of those kids, and poor kids especially, the less time they spend with their parents the better. Actually that’s what I always thought early childhood education/universal daycare was good for—a way to intervene in the lives of poor kids as soon as possible, before they’ve been irredeemably screwed up.
— raft · May 8, 01:31 AM · #
But that's exactly what I'm not after, since the universality - i.e., billions of dollars spent on day care for kids who don't need/won't benefit from it - is exactly what makes it impossible to perform targeted interventions in cost- and time-intensive ways that are really helpful.
— John Schwenkler · May 8, 01:59 AM · #
Yeah, but as a political thing surely the only way to get non-poor people to buy in is to make the program universal, no? I mean you could make the argument that we ought to just redirect education tax money from rich school districts to poor ones. But politically that’s not going to fly, so you push for what you can get. Universal daycare will disproportionately benefit the poor even if it’s not restricted to them.
— raft · May 8, 03:19 AM · #
I’ll have something more substantive to say later. For now, I’ll link to a policy paper I did not California’s Proposition 82, the “Universal Pre-K” initiative.
http://jamesfelliott.blogspot.com/2007/08/policy-analysis-101.html
— James F. Elliott · May 8, 03:22 AM · #
“…did ON…” WTF, brain?
— James F. Elliott · May 8, 03:24 AM · #
raft: You’re basically right about the politics. But again, the point is that a universal program may ultimately be no better than doing nothing at all: preschooling for middle- and upper-class kids has next to no benefits; and if tons of money is being spent on them it will be doubly hard to get the necessary funds for intensive programs for the disadvantaged – both because of the amount that’s already been spent, and because of the political difficulty in arguing that a certain class of children needs to be placed in a markedly different and much more expensive program than the others. So it’s just not true, or at least it’s not likely, that universal pre-K will “disproportionately benefit the poor”, because the only preschool programs that have been shown to have real benefits for disadvantaged kids are the very costly ones that universality will get in the way of. With a universal program, the rich get subsidized daycare, and the poor get Head Start. No one, in other words, gets anything – except the taxpayers, who get downright screwed.
— John Schwenkler · May 8, 03:32 AM · #
The problem is the reasoning. It seems that many conservatives don’t care that something works if it is going to increase the size of government. And many moderates (especially middle class ones) just like the idea of someone else paying for their day care. They don’t care that it isn’t really cost effective. They want to shift the burden of paying for their kids to the group instead of the individuals that had them. And many liberals that really claim to want to help the poor are so afraid of discriminating against someone that they will water down the program until it doesn’t do any good for the ones that really could be helped. Classic problem that ends up with a program that is too expensive and doesn’t do what we want it to.
What I really want to see is a new class of conservative that honestly looks at data to see if there is long term benefit to a government program and doesn’t protest every time there is an increase that would result in a long term cost savings.
— Adam S · May 8, 03:58 AM · #
I disagree about the politics. Look at Choosing Justice.
If it was appropriately marketed, I’m pretty sure a targeted intervention policy would sell. Those not receiving the benefits will consider it a status thing; those receiving the benefits will work twice as hard to get out from under it.
Or so the experiments suggest.
— Sargent · May 8, 04:13 AM · #
C’mon, raft. Where are your principles?
You want to claim that you value kids? Or equality of opportunity, meritocracy, etc.? Then you better support UNIVERSAL, equal residential orphanages to get the kids who most need help out of their screwed-up households.
John’s nailed it: “With a universal program, the rich get subsidized daycare, and the poor get Head Start.”
And quit acting like an asshole.
— Matt Frost · May 8, 04:28 AM · #
Adam S: Here I am! And Sargent: I haven’t read Choosing Justice, but now I may. I’d certainly like to think you’re right about the politics.
— John Schwenkler · May 8, 04:31 AM · #
So are you explicitly opposed to universally available funding? What if we just offered funding to whoever requested it but made it so you had to opt in? Or what if we means-tested it?
— Freddie · May 8, 11:57 AM · #
I like both the opt-in provision and the means testing, although I suppose the kids who most need state-provided surrogate family (which is what we’re discussing here) would have parents less likely to opt in.
— Matt Frost · May 8, 11:59 AM · #
Freddie: Yes, I’m opposed to universal availability (which is what talk of “universality” means in practice), both because I think there are plenty of families who don’t need the money and because, as I’ve written before, the line between universal access and de facto mandates may not exist in the real world.
Means-testing is okay, so long as the bar were set somewhere around the poverty line, or at whatever SES level it is where preschool actually starts to do some good; the key point is that preschooling be paid for by the taxpayers only in the case where it's genuinely formative - working parents can handle their own damn day care, and I think they get tax breaks for it anyway. So maybe we should just means-test in this sort of way and call it “universal” …
— John Schwenkler · May 8, 01:36 PM · #
John Schwenkler’s last comment is right on.
This seems as good a place as any to answer Freddie’s ubiquitous and citation-free complaint that nothing will fix education until poverty is gone, because poverty causes poor educational outcomes.
As usual, this view may sound plausible, but it’s always a good idea to look the scholarly literature. A huge complication in almost all studies of this topic is that parents are related to their children, and live in the same neighborhoods, and share the same home environment, and so forth, all of which makes it hard to untangle the supposed effect of poverty in and of itself. I’m aware, however, of one study from the Quarterly Journal of Economics, that analyzed “Korean American adoptees who were quasirandomly assigned to adoptive families.” (Hint: you don’t often find random assignment of children to families.) Despite the author’s best efforts, he couldn’t find any association of income and educational attainment:
Just thought I’d point that out, for future reference. Anyone know of similar adoptee studies with conflicting findings?
— Stuart Buck · May 10, 02:08 AM · #