Posted on 05/28/2007 5:07:56 AM PDT by Kaslin
ast week, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled one of the first big domestic proposals of the 2008 presidential campaign: a $10 billion plan for federally funded “universal pre-kindergarten.” The proposal likely pleases the national teachers’ unions, eager to capture the massive public money becoming available to serve the under-five set. Just as bad, the plan assumes that government money can improve people’s lives—to a much greater degree than history has shown.
Under Clinton’s program, the federal government would match individual states’ funding for voluntary pre-K for four-year-olds, with a $10 billion annual cap on federal dollars by the end of the first five years. To be eligible for the matching funds, states would have to hire teachers with bachelor’s degrees that include training in early-childhood development, maintain low student-teacher ratios, and use some standard curricula.
The plan resembles the Great Society’s Medicaid program, enacted four decades ago as a federal-state partnership to provide health care for the poor. Just as in Medicaid, individual states would decide how to structure early-childhood programs within those few basic rules, and would be responsible for a big part of the bill. Unlike with Medicaid, states could choose not to participate, but it would be awfully hard for them to refuse. Politically, what governor can oppose more education for cute kids, especially when a state’s governor and legislature know that they’ll get “credit” for every dollar of such voter-pleasing spending, while having to come up with only 50 cents of it themselves?
Even with the matching funds, though, the federal requirements likely will prove expensive for the states. For one thing, mandating low student-teacher ratios means hiring more teachers. And in places like New York, New Jersey, and California, the union-friendly states that would embrace the program early on, the proposal will almost surely create a huge new demand for expensive teachers from the ranks of the politically powerful unions.
To be sure, Clinton’s plan doesn’t require states to hire unionized teachers. The nation’s fledgling charter schools, which are usually non-union, could add pre-kindergarten classes to their existing elementary schools with the federal matching funds. But innovative, independent charter schools are still a tiny fraction of public education. Unless they want to build freestanding schools for four-year-olds, most states will send the vast majority of their pre-K classes to unionized elementary schools, adding hundreds of thousands of highly paid union jobs to state budgets.
And don’t think that the teachers’ unions want to stop at four-year-olds. In New York earlier this month, after heavy lobbying by the local United Federation of Teachers, Governor Eliot Spitzer signed an executive order that will allow 50,000 day-care workers who care for toddlers in their own homes to unionize and negotiate for higher pay and benefits.
It’s a slippery slope from encouraging bachelor’s degrees and federally approved curricula to teach four-year-olds to requiring bachelor’s degrees and federally approved curricula to watch two-year-olds. And Clinton has already started down it: her proposal notes ambitiously that “states [could] serve younger children [with federal money] once they have provided pre-K to all four year olds who need it.”
Supporters of universal pre-K and other early-childhood programs often point to the growing evidence that young children develop cognitive skills well before school age. Indeed, study after study has shown that by the time they get to kindergarten, kids from families that don’t provide education at home can’t catch up with peers whose parents, say, read a book to them every day from infancy.
One of the most comprehensive studies done to date, by Georgia State University, found that a sample of below-average pre-schoolers enrolled in Georgia’s universal pre-K program made up their deficits and were average or above average on most measurements by the end of kindergarten two years later. But the racial gap between white and black students actually became more pronounced after pre-K and kindergarten. Whether a student “lived with both parents continuously since birth” made a huge difference in achievement.
It’s only logical that little kids with such barren educational backgrounds that they can’t even do kindergarten work—mostly just coloring, identifying letters and shapes, and exhibiting a healthy vocabulary—will swiftly gain at least basic cognitive and social skills once they finally get the chance to soak them up. It doesn’t follow, however, that a year of pre-school can make up for the next 12 years of poor education and poor family support. A few longer-term studies exist, but they’re often too small to be useful, or suffer from methodological problems.
Worse, for the government to follow the science of cognitive development to its logical conclusion, the feds would need to mandate that local schools force single, poor mothers to enroll their kids at birth in government-funded, full-day education programs, staffed by highly trained professionals. This would ensure that the kids are away from their dysfunctional families and neighborhoods and in a comparatively decent learning environment for as much time as possible.
Thankfully, this idea still sounds ridiculous to most people—though maybe less so every year. And there’s no guarantee that it would work anyway, if the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on anti-poverty programs over the past 40 years are any indication.
Clinton’s plan is an equally absurd half-measure, assuming, as it does, that even more billions in state and federal taxpayer money—much of it funneled through teachers’ unions into schools that already do a crummy job of educating disadvantaged kids ages five through 18—can bridge immense familial and cultural chasms if they just start at age four instead.
This article originally appeared in The City Journal.
Nicole Gelinas is the Searle Freedom Trust Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
More insanity from Hillary “I want to take that money” Clinton.
My little girl wasn't in the public school for a week when she came home and said that her teacher doesn't make a lot of money.
The next year...Catholic school and a fine education!!
Schools in NJ are funded with property taxes.
If you want to send your kid to pre-K, pay for it. Don’t take it from me.
I can just imagine what that would include!
Pre-K is like Day Care for women running day care .
Women who work pay the Day care provider then the day care provider gets to unload the kids on the school system via Pre-K. What a racket.
In our county, Headstart is pretty much a joke, is it different for you all in the close in suburbs? What we have here are kids that can either sit at home with an uneducated parent to go to Headstart and stay there with an equally uneducated parent who is being paid a touch over minimum wage.
Headstart is a joke in this county as well. I’ve read stuff about how by 3rd grade many kids that came from headstart programs are actually behind their classmates in reading level. I have no idea how factual that is, and I don’t remember where I read it, but from what I’ve seen of some 3rd graders, it’s not all that far fetched.
Bump for later. Don’t want to miss this one. ;)
she’s proposing a universal pre-k availble
for all 4yr olds.
our headstart sounds similar to yours. :(
i just dont see how this program of adding more yrs of
time in school addresses the bigger issue. even school
aged kids spend far more time at home than in school.
i think kids would be better supported focusing on
supporting their familes.
In other words, it is set up to fail from the get-go.
Our county is trying to get control of the program and staff it as part of the school system so that they can require all adults working with kids to have degrees (preferably in early-ed)
My wife and I plan to home school but if that does not work out we sure wont be putting them in the public schools. Ill get a second job before that happens..
Her large communist heart beats loud and clear when it comes to our little darlings. She wants us to give our children to the state schools at age 4. If America is stupid enough to throw this country down the sewer and elect her president that age will be lowered to 3.
I wonder what little Chelsee is doing now? Hopefully not barfing up booze in the back of a taxi somewhere.
the underprivileged providing a sound beginning? seems
like a contradiction to me. do those employed have or
get any training?
i’m required to have degrees and continuous training
and the kids i teach are just a year older. sigh!
I’m with you about adding more “in school” time — but I’m at a loss as to any suggestions. Things are different now than they were when we were growing up and there was a parent or other family member home until the kids were of school age.
If you want to put Federal money into pre-school education, why not a voucher system? Then parents could choose which schools their children attend. Maybe their own church, a Montessori, or a Waldorf school.
The article is correct, many students do begin school very far behind their peers - research shows it to be true, and the teachers on the board know this. If there is little conversation at home, if no one reads to the children, if they haven't learned colors or numbers or associated the written word with the spoken word before they begin school, they will certainly be far behind.
Intervention in the home would certainly be preferable, if you could come up with an intervention program that would be effective with teenaged single mothers who are likely uneducated and put little value on education themselves. (Add in the likelihood of substance abuse in the home, and where do you go?)
I know that in some states, such intervention programs exist and serve children and families from birth, but they are voluntary. A young woman of my acquaintance has participated in such a program, but she & her husband are college-educated and would have read to and educated their toddlers at home even without such a program. Do the parents who really need the program, and for whom it is designed, participate? I don't know.
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