What’s Assumed to be Beneficial for the Kids

What if something that logically should benefit a lot of people turned out not to be beneficial?

Would that something be stopped or at least revisited?

What if the proof that something that was helpful turned out to be very marginal proof, would that proof be revisited and re-examined?

What if that something that was thought to be beneficial cost a lot of money, would the powers that be re-examine the cost/benefit of that something if the benefit was significantly less than advertised?

I would think that the answers to all of the above questions would be would be an easy, “Yes.” Why would something that has marginal or no benefit, and costs a lot of money be continued without at least a cursory re-evaluation? Welcome to California! For here in the Golden State appearance and political correctness take precedence over fact, especially if the actual facts seem to go against what you have been programmed to believe.

The question that I am going to be examining in this two-part series is . . . take a deep breath and hang on . . . “Is Pre-K schooling beneficial?” Is it worth the cost?

Believe It or not, I think I heard that collective audible gasp! In general, the response to what I just said is going to be something like this:

“Of course, Pre-K is beneficial. There have been studies showing that this is a proven fact – at least that’s what I have read. How could it possibly not be beneficial? The more education that a child has, the better. Right? Many states, especially California, have been spending a lot of money providing Pre-K to those children who are in the lower economic levels of society. How can this not be good?”

I could easily assume what you thought about this subject is summarized by the quote above, as this is what I had thought. However, a few months back, I came across Notable and Quotable in the Wall Street Journal which was entitled, “Does Pre-K Help?” This short blurb was from a randomized control trial, involving thousands of children, published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly. After reading this I then googled the lengthy article and read it in its entirety. Before getting into the findings and the conclusion of the randomized study, I was able to discover the origin as to the expected benefits of Pre-K. This expectation derives mainly from longitudinal research that reported positive outcomes on school completion, employment, marriage stability, criminal behavior, and the like for two model programs – Perry Preschool, mounted in the 1960s, and Abecedarian, begun in the 1970s. Both programs served a small number of children in a single location, and neither has been fully replicated in contemporary publicly funded programs.

So it turns out that the actual purported benefit of Pre-K “from studies” is very weak to start with. Are there any other studies proving the long term benefits of Pre-K?

What about Head Start?

The following I taken directly from Early Childhood Research Quarterly: “In this context, the Head Start Impact study (Puma, Bell, Cook, & Heid, 2010; Puma et al., 2012) warrants attention. While not a study of state pre-k, it is the only previous randomized study of a public pre-k program. This study began in 2002 with a national sample of 5000 children who applied to 84 programs expected to have more applicants than spaces. Children were randomly selected for offers of admission with those not selected providing the control group. The 4-year-old children admitted to Head Start made greater gains across the pre-k year than nonparticipating children on measures of language and literacy, although not on math. However, by the end of kindergarten the control children had caught up on most achievement outcomes; subsequent positive effects for Head Start participants were found on only one achievement measure at the end of 1st grade and another at the end of 3rd grade. There were no statistically significant effects on social–emotional measures at the end of the pre-k or kindergarten years. A few positive effects appeared in parent reports at the end of the 1st and 3rd grade years, but teacher and child reports in those years showed either null or negative effects.”

So interestingly the only other study of something quite similar, in fact, did not demonstrate any benefit! The latest study reported in the Early Childhood Research Quarterly is that of the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K program.

State tuned!