Posted on 02/14/2013 10:35:20 AM PST by eagleye85
In his State of the Union speech, President Obama proposed “working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America.” This additional preschool access would, of course, be funded through federal and state coffers. President Obama is headed to Georgia today to “formally unveil his proposal for expanding early childhood education,” reports the Washington Post.
You can read the President’s proposal here. It calls for a state-federal partnership guaranteeing that all 4-year olds at families at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line receive access to preschool, as well as entails a “massively expanded Early Head Start program,” according to the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews.
A proposal by the Soros-funded Center for American Progress might give a hint as to how much this expansion may cost. “The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, is calling for universal access to preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, with costs shared between the federal and state governments,” report Michael Alison Chandler, Lyndsey Layton, and Susan Syrluga for the Washington Post. “For infants up to age 3, the center wants an expansion of federal child care subsidies and a doubling of Early Head Start programs.”
“That plan would initially cost $98.4 billion for preschool, $84.2 billion for child-care subsidies and $11.5 billion for Early Head Start, spread over about 10 years. The programs would cost about $25 billion a year to operate” (emphasis added).
However, the question remains whether additional programs would be effective.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Stephanie Banchero points to Heritage Scholar Lindsey Burke, who “called Head Start a failure and said she isn’t ‘optimistic that any federal expansion of preschool will look any different from this failed program.’” The WSJ’s Stephanie Banchero writes, “[Burke] pointed to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start, showing that children in the program made more academic progress than their counterparts who weren’t enrolled, but those gains faded by third grade. The study also found parents of Head Start children reported their children had less aggressive behavior and better social skills.”
The President, and several studies, have indicated that pre-K education lowers crime rates, teenage pregnancy, and may even boost graduate rates. “Poor children who attend quality preschool programs are less likely to end up in the criminal justice system, more likely to be employed and earn higher incomes, and less likely to receive public benefits as adults, when compared to at-risk children who do not attend preschool, several studies have shown,” report Chandler et al.
As this demonstrates, the question about preschool, and Head Start in particular, is often one of socialization skills–less crime, fewer pregnancies, less welfare dependency–not education. It should not be billed as a conversation about the latter.
One of the justifications for universal preschool is the High/Scope Perry Preschool Study. As I reported in September 2009, CATO Scholar Adam Schaeffer asserts that the High/Scope study is methodologically flawed: he says it relies on an unusual sample and considers its results statistically significant at a 90 percent confidence interval rather than the 95 percent confidence interval. (In other words, there’s a 1 in 10 chance that the results are insignificant rather than a 1 in 20 chance.)
President Obama has pointed to Georgia and Oklahoma as model states for the Pre-K overhaul. “In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children, like Georgia or Oklahoma, studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job and form more stable families of their own,” Obama said in his State of the Union address. “We know this works. So let’s do what works and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind. Let’s give our kids that chance.”
“Georgia’s achievement scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress…have consistently tracked below the national average in math and reading in the fourth grade before, during and after the state massively expanded access to, enrollment in, and spending on its universal preschool program,” wrote Schaeffer in his 2009 paper, “The Poverty of Preschool Promises.”
“Oklahoma, where state-funded and largely government-provided preschool has been open to low-income children for 18 years and all children for almost a decade, has slipped below the national average on math and reading scores for the fourth grade since it began expanding its government preschool program in the 1990s,” wrote Schaeffer.
high-quality preschool:
- free babysitting
- teaching kids you don’t want to teach yourself
As it's set up now, it's an overpaid babysitter trying to teach not much of anything. Stats prove the program does not benefit chidren's learning.
I started full time kindergarten at age 4 1/2 circa 1950. Then they changed the cutoff from Feb 1 to whatever. My granddaughter was 2 months short of 6 when she started kindergarten. Ridiculous!!
Get rid of the whole damn program and let the neighbor watch your kid for a few bucks.
Plagiarizing ME from before:
More ways (and more unfair ways)for working Americans to subsidize the BS life style of irresponsible and lazy idiots who want to bear children whether or not they are able to support them.
The will pop their illegitimate brats, dump them on the state and go on with their worthless, lazy, druggie-party lives and ALL on our nickel.
Can you imagine what the next few generations of monsters will be like who have been TOTALLY the spawn of irresponsible and worthless losers who make the ‘sate’ their daddy?
Think there’s social mayhem NOW? Just wait!
Whoever said that we’re becoming a feral society was right!
It’s just another entry point for the Welfare State. Preschool will turn out to consist of feeding and clothing kids and probably parental indoctrination.
My cub did go to Catholic kindergarten at age 5, as did I. When she was four, we still paid a private sitter to care for her while her dad and I worked. We gave the sitter the same books we were teaching our child to read, and she was to spend time on that every day. There is no choice to what a government babysitter teaches your child, and four is too young to be entrusted to unreliable strangers, anyway.
The kids I’ve seen come from those government preschool programs don’t behave, have no manners, and lack the basic reading and other skills that the homeschooled kids have. More than half of the kids out here are either homeschooled or attend the local Christian school.
Before our kids and grandkids hit the education system, they all knew their alphabets, numbers and were reading at levels well above the grade level at which they entered. They knew all those things from us and their parents – at HOME!
Comes now Barack “The Great” Obama with an effort to resurrect the old plan to get 3 year-olds into the government school system with a system of pre-schools.
Let me see if I have this right:
The current schools K thru 12 are turning out hundreds of thousands of kids each year who are barely literate, don’t understand basic math but DO know how to slide a condom over a cucumber.
(As an aside, they must use really small cukes, most of these kids have repeated 6 grades or I should have been eating in the local high school lunchroom all these years.)
The country is essentially broke and here comes Dear Leader with another expensive program. This does, of course, meet his Cloward-Piven, Saul Alinsky Prime Directive to break the bank and drive the America he hates to her knees en-route to third world status.
The pre-school program makes sense to these cunning but delusional leftists: If the current leftist/progressive K thru 12 system is so effective in indoctrinating future voters that government is the solution to every problem and carried a dissembling Marxist into the White Hut, they must be nearly orgasmic at the thought of getting their hands on the kiddies 3 or 4 years SOONER!
We must NOT allow that to happen!
A quote from the sad history of Europe for you to consider:
“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community’.” Adolph Hitler Speech November 1933
Hitler was stopped before he could accomplish his goals. If the few remaining sane adults remaining in America do not wrest control of the government schools from the progressives/leftists/big government statists now running them, we have only ourselves to blame if another Obama – or far, far worse – appears on the scene.
And we are far closer to that point than you may think!
And the saddest element of all of this is that these future Americans won’t even understand that the birthright we took for granted has been snatched from them and their progeny.
A short video for your further consideration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0lR1KQq2-U
Any parent who entrusts their four year old-or any other age-impressionable child to a government school/daycare does not care about that child, or believes that it is someone else’s job to care for and teach that child. I’d prefer to see preschool programs operated by religious and private concerns, and schools either chartered or private-get government out of education, it does not belong there.
Whew!! Talk about overloading the BS meter!! I didn't attend pre-school. I graduated from high school and just earned my third college degree.
But, that's not what is behind this "initiative" by zero. This plan is one that was successfully pushed by very liberal (and Obama sycophant) San Antonio mayor Julian Castro, whom some liberal pundits believe is a Democrat up'n comer. Castro has a 4 year-old kid for whom he doesn't want to pay for pre-school, so he dreamed up this plan that would get the San Antonio residents to pay for it by raising sales tax by 1/8 cent.
And, San Antonians, not being among the sharpest knives in the drawer, went for it!! That's where zero got the idea. Castro called his plan "Pre-K for SA". Obama calls his plan "Another Screw Job for America!"
Julian Castro is a slimy, sneaky snake that has all the charm of a used car salesman. He also has a twin brother, Joaquin, who was recently elected to the House of Representatives. While I don't live in San Antonio, I live close enough and watch these two crooks at work. I don't like either one and wouldn't trust either of them to help the foxes guard the henhouse, much less have any concern for either the foxes or the hens. Julian Castro is about as cold-blooded as they come.
By the by, if you want to know what is in the soul of a leftist, you need look no further than their eyes. They are dead inside and their eyes betray that fact.
Didn’t catch a clue in the comments, sorry if I missed it.
This is about USG indoctrination. The sooner the better for Jungen... Duh.
Be glad that he isn’t seizing children at birth, separating them into groups, indoctrinating those that he wishes into his socialist agenda, and “disposing” of the rest.
I think it’s even worse of a situation than most people realize.
Social Learning - exposing your children to the children of other societal elements from cultures that care nothing about morals, propriety or development - just babysitting.
Additionally, you expose your children to children of illegals who carry who knows what illness or condition. There is a reason why we have increased cases of TB and other, what used to be extinct, diseases.
Education — There is a price to pay for government money. It comes in the form of Government directed learning (brainwashing). They may not learn much useful information, but their minds will be absorbed with the typical government tenets of ‘tolerance’ ‘diversity’ and ‘fairness’.
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