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.
I think HeadStart would be more effective if certified early education teachers were the actual instructors, but that isn’t the case here either.
From what I can tell, the problem with Headstart is that it is just one more governemental program, instead of an educational organization. IF our system manages to wrest control of the program, it would be interesting to see what would happen. I’d be half-interested in working for that age-group. I’ve been thinking for a while I’d like to go low
How did we ever win WW1 and WW2 with all those non pre-kindergarten trained soldiers, sailors and marines? Is that why we can’t even secure our own borders now...because of the enlightened wusses created in the last couple of generations? Total crapola!
Actually, the problem is that the children whose parents would go to the trouble to sign up for vouchers, and research and enroll them in private schools, probably don't need the preschool education anyway. They probably are already being read to at home, and they probably already know their colors, shapes, numbers, and letters.
The children who really need this sort of program unfortunately have parents who don't know how to do sign up for & research private schools and/or can't be bothered to do so....which is probably why the children are so behind educationally to begin with.
Sort of a Catch-22. How do you fix it?
Your mistake is getting into a debate with these left wing commies in the first place,once you do that you lose .
Let the kids be kids .Sending them to school at 5 is soon enough maybe even to soon ,giving them over to government schools pre Kindergarden and left wing indoctrination is insanity ,if you cant prepare your children for school at home you should not have them . I guarantee when you send your impressionable pre kindergarden out to these Brown shirted thugs they will be sending home little Eichmans
You’ve got a point. But I don’t see Hillary’s proposal as a way to fix it.
“The next year...Catholic school and a fine education!!”
They cry even more about money. I know; my sister teaches at a Catholic school.
We already have the voluntary Georgia Pre-K program, and here in N. Fulton county, at least, it is extremely popular. It is difficult to get space in the Pre-K of your choice if you don’t sign up very early. For instance, my sisterinlaw went to sign my nephew up at two locations near home, back in February. She only managed to get him on the waiting lists for both of them, she is spot #2 on her second choice school list, and spot #6 on the first choice. I believe that the families in this area are of a mind that enrolling the children in this program will give them a leg up on the other children in kindergarten, I know that is my SIL’s motivation.
The downside of the pre-k program is that once the children are enrolled, they must stay enrolled in school until they are graduated from high school, they attend school the same number of days and hours as the other public school children and are subject to the same rules as far as attendance (i.e. no more than three days per year absence without a doctor’s note), etc. A typical pre-k requires that the 4 year olds be at school at 7:00 AM until 2:00 PM M-F.
Well, there's the problem in a nutshell.
Too many people having children who shouldn't be.
I would feel secure betting you that NONE of the people reading this article are people whose children would need this program.
That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of children out there who DO need such a program - although such a program might not be enough to help them.
Interesting point. We do have a program around here called “Parents as Teachers.” The only person I know to have participated is a fourth grade teacher and her husband. Having P.A.T. available to pregnant teenagers would probably be more effective than head start. Depending on how it is arranged, it could be done at a much lower cost, especially if the school has onsite daycare.
If you'll notice the Georgia State study referenced in the article, I'll bet that is the reason a lot of middle class families enroll their children - and I bet it's one reason the program seems to exascerbate the achievement gap.
I haven't read the study, but I'd be willing to bet that while the lower-level children improve, those at the top improve more.
Hillary indoctrination for tots. I thought she already had something called “hillary’s royal children”.
You’re probably exactly right. I did make the mistake of putting my oldest child in the public school kindergarten (it has a wonderful reputation, of which I personally would beg to differ!), and because most of her classmates had been through the pre-k program, most of the children were able to read beginner books very early in the year. By halfway through, they were required to take turns (2 kids per day) to read entire books aloud to the rest of the class, and by the end of the year, they had written, illustrated, and bound story books of their own. It was a far cry from the coloring and learning letters and numbers that we had at the same age. Luckily, even though my daughter hadn’t been to “pre-k”, I had “played school” with her at home, complete with and old school desk, and she already knew how to read, spell, and do elementary math before K.
The sad part of the K program was that the children were pushed so hard to work and excel, that they didn’t have any time left for just being kids. Just like in the rest of elementary school, they weren’t allowed to talk to each other except at lunch (and then only to the person on either side of them, quietly) and at recess, which was 15 minutes, and at “centers time” (where they had their choice of a location to go to in the classroom, which could be computer time, reading time, coloring time, etc., where, again, they could speak quietly to the child(ren) right next to them). The rest of the day, they sat in a chair at at a table and did schoolwork. Our daughter’s “energizer bunny” personality didn’t mesh well with all the physical restriction, so we have been homeschooling her ever since (she is entering 8th grade in the fall, and still takes a break to jump on her trampoline or ride her scooter for 10 minutes after every 45 minutes or so of work!).
yes, i agree, early intervention programs would certainly
be more effective if they were educational programs with
certified staff.
i’m just a frustrated kindergarten teacher. :(
programs like the one you’ve described make me so sad. :(
This is for kids who did not get aborted.....
Keep us updated!
Probably not. If it's mandatory, children who don't need extra help will be included, and the gaps will just get wider. If it's voluntary, the children who really need the help the most won't be there, because someone would have to get them up & get them ready.
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