Posted on 09/16/2009 12:25:06 PM PDT by bs9021
Elusive PreK Successes
by: Bethany Stotts, September 16, 2009
Some have offered up universal pre-kindgergarten as a solution for America’s educational woes, but CATO scholar Adam Schaeffer argues that the educational “benefits” of government-sponsored pre-k would be transitory at best.
“The evidence suggests that the benefits of preschool are limited primarily to low-income children and are likely transitory,” argued Schaeffer in an August CATO Policy Analysis entitled, “The Poverty of Preschool Promises.”
In the analysis, Schaeffer examined the three main studies which pre-k supporters cite as evidence that pre-kindergarten provides long-term academic benefits: “the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project, the Carolina Abecedarian Project, and the Chicago Child-Parent Centers.”
The High/Scope study had an “unusual sample of 58 low-income children with IQs between 70 and 85 compared with a control group of 65 other children,” was “not completely” randomized, had parents home during the day, and its results are statistically significant at “the 90 percent confidence interval rather than the more stringent 95 percent confidence level typically used in this kind of research,” critiqued Schaeffer. He also accused High/Scope researchers of “cherry-pick[ing]” results “by highlighting the small percentage of significant findings while largely ignoring the vast majority of null findings on an array of other dependent variables that were similar or even equivalent.”
In a summary for the 2005 study, “The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40,” Dr. Lawrence J. Schweinhart, President of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, asserted that “Because of the random assignment strategy, children’s preschool experience remains the best explanation for the subsequent group differences in their performance over the years.”...
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
Read to your kids. Get them involved in reading many types of things.
Find something they are INTERESTED in readin and support them.
My own mother got me hooked on the Tom Corbet - Space Cadet series of books.
You are 100% on target. There is nothing they learn in PreK that you cannot teach yourself. Read to them, teach them their numbers, letters and colors (and we did most of that at the grocery story!) And teach them good manners.
I think thats the underling issue here. ‘Parents’ would rather someone else do the parenting while they go off to a job or whatever. Interacting w/ their kids for any length of time is too confining. How their kid turns out is up to someone else. Sort of sad but thats our society today.
You’re right. However, we need to stop acting like they’re doing a good thing by parceling them out as early as possible.
It would certainly help if there were few teenage, unwed mothers and children reared with a real father ...
Hey, if they are gonna swarm all over our country we at least gotta give them a level playing field, right?
Hey, if they are gonna swarm all over our country we at least gotta give them a level playing field, right?
double post DOH!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.