Posted on 12/10/2014 7:12:50 AM PST by HomerBohn
The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round, just like the endless cycles of big, bad government programs to federalize preschool and daycare.
On Wednesday, the White House Summit on Early Education will unveil nearly $1 billion in new "investments" to "expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America" from "birth and continuing to age 5." It's a retread of President Obama's 2013 State of the Union school-spending plan, which was a repackaging of his 2011 Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge program.
Those Obama initiatives are knockoffs of moldy-old Democratic policy chestnuts, such as former Vice President Al Gore's push to fund preschool for all 3-year-olds at a cost to taxpayers of at least $50 billion over 10 years, left-wing actor/director Rob Reiner's "I Am Your Child" campaign for universal preschool and child care, and Hillary Clinton's various "It Takes a Village" schemes to expand Head Start from womb to work. With age comes fiefdom.
How could anybody be against tax-subsidized Pre-K for all, you say? Let me count the ways.
Every one of these Big Babysitter boondoggles rests on "progressive" junk science. The Obama White House asserts that "studies show that for every dollar we invest in early childhood education, we see a rate of return of $7 or more." Balderdash. This discredited claim rests on results of the tiny Perry Preschool Project in Michigan, run at a cost of $19,000 per child more than a half-century ago, and a similar program in North Carolina called the Abecedarian Early Intervention Project.
As David Armor of the libertarian Cato Institute noted in a thorough review of the scientific literature this fall, the "groups studied were very small, they came from single communities several decades ago, and both programs were far more intensive than the programs being contemplated today."
More recent research by the Brookings Institution's Russ Whitehurst found that the vaunted academic benefits of full-time Pre-K in Georgia and Oklahoma "have had, at best, only small impacts on later academic achievement." In fact, Georgia elementary school students' test scores are mediocre, and Oklahoma test scores have been on the decline for the past decade. A 2010 Department of Health and Human Services report, which assessed approximately 5,000 3- and 4-year-olds who were randomly assigned to either a control group or a group that had access to the federal Head Start program, concluded that "at the end of kindergarten and first grade ... the Head Start children and the control group children were at the same level on many of the measures studied."
In 2012, government researchers reported "little evidence of systematic differences in children's elementary school experiences through 3rd grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group." The federal investments in early childhood programs keep ballooning, yet the educational impacts are dubious at best.
Then there's the alarming encroachment of data miners into the lives of parents and their young children. As I've reported previously, Common Core-aligned assessment systems such as Teaching Strategies Gold in Colorado and California's "Desired Results Developmental Profile" are stockpiling massive amounts of information on preschoolers' social, emotional, physical, language and cognitive development. The collection of data and accompanying assessment inevitably dictate the content in the classroom. TS Gold, which integrates its results into the vast network of statewide longitudinal data systems, raked in $30 million in federal Race to the Top subsidies in 2012. The latest round of Obama's "Preschool Development Grants" and "Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership Awards" require applicants to plug into this insatiable data machine, as well as "linking" and "partnering" with a plethora of other government programs.
After attending TS Gold training sessions last year, Cindee Will, principal of the James Irwin Charter Academy in Colorado Springs, calculated that compliance, not including taking and uploading photos of students as required, would soak up at least 16.5 hours of kindergarten class time per week or 640 hours a year of instruction in class. Test administration four times a year for an average of 25 students, she told me, would mean "150 hours per year or 2.5 months: one quarter of our time. And this equation is done with the knowledge that our K program is a half-day program!"
As you might imagine, the administrative and financial burdens on small, privately run part-time preschool programs would be even more onerous. Fatal. And exactly as planned.
Think Obamacare is bad? Well, welcome to TotCare. The goal of the educational central planners, you see, is the elimination of competition. The fact is that the vast majority of Pre-K kids are already happily enrolled in early childhood programs outside of Fed Ed's clutches. The "problem" isn't most families' lack of access to preschool. It's Washington's lack of access to your kids for their institutionalized warehousing, data mining and pedagogical propaganda schemes. The Nanny State's ceaseless quest for control keeps creepily rolling along.
This scheme ensures the children think like liberals and vote for untruthful pandering liberals.
This is to be the 'changed' United States if it is not stopped.
Who reported the findings of these studies to you? Jonathan Gruber?
Too bad that much of that $7 is delivered in the form of government handouts.
To redistribute to his cronies.
Bttt
Just free baby sitting and child care for losers who can’t be bothered to be responsible for their reproductive lives and then pass the bill along to taxpayers. WE can subsidize their BS life style and they’ll NEVER be self supporting.
This way they can keep on bearing children without regard for how they will support or care for them.
MORE irresponsible idiots breeding MMMMMOOOOORE irresponsible losers ... JUST what we need.
What ever happened to waiting until you can support children before HAVING them?
Will they sing “Barack Hussein Obama, mmm mmmm mmm!” every morning?
The Julias of the world will stand up and cheer the additional 2 to 3 years of government-financed babysitting.
Anything to expand the ranks of the Entitlement Army....
It is known as the sweet spot of education where the child is able to read and write but the teen hormones have not kicked in yet.
That sweet spot is where information can be funneled to the child and they will never forget those lessons.
This ability to learn well is the reason why Thomas Jefferson was able to finnish all his pre-college learning, including Greek and Latin needed for entry into college, by the 8th grade.
I have analyzed bad curriculum and have been able to identify the very lessons intended to pervert a child's mind.
One such class is the one featuring the Andes plane crash and the resulting eating of dead bodies.
These kind of lessons are intended to train a child to be amoral, essentially teaching to our children how to be psychopaths.
Common Core and most sex education courses are built to do just this, right under our noses.
The learning from these kind of lessons usually do not manifest until the child is a teenager, well after the child has left the scene of the crime.
If you wonder why a teenager would go into a school and shoot his classmates but no one has a clue, you can thank those secretly integrated lessons designed specifically to produce such results.
His followers are still working on it the democrat party is a big player in it.
Julian Castro got universal pre-K passed here in San Antonio. I was surprised, but probably shouldn’t have been. I’m hoping we can take back a few council seats and the mayor’s office in the next round, but not betting on it.
Disney issued a warning in 1943 about this....WATCH !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l14WDZCnz-w
Sam Blumenfeld has been saying since forever that the goal is mandatory, tax-funded institutionalization of children from birth through age 22. No escaping allowed.
I heard him say it in the mid-eighties.
He was right, except that it looks like they want to extend the upper limit to 26.
At that point, permission for "do what you will" is the end of parental authority.
All they have to do is cull out a few.
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