Last May, just as the academic year was wrapping up, Hillary Clinton stopped by a Miami Beach elementary school to say that she wanted to define school down. "As president, I will establish universal pre-kindergarten education," she promised, so that "every four-year-old child in America" can attend a government-funded preschool.
Her $10 billion proposal essentially would add a whole new grade onto the front end of the K-12 system. It's one of the liberals' hottest policy ideas, pushed by their think tanks and embraced by their politicians. "We expect that all of the presidential candidates will be talking about it," says Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, an advocacy organization. Wealthy foundations, such as the $5.6 billion Pew Charitable Trusts, are bankrolling the concept. Democratic governors also have made it a priority: Eliot Spitzer of New York has promised universal preschool by 2011, and Rod Blagojevich of Illinois wants public preschool not only for four-year-olds but for three-year-olds as well. In the last two years, states have boosted their preschool budgets by more than $1 billion.
The author Robert Fulghum has built a career on the motto "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." Yet the supporters of universal preschool worry that kindergarten comes too late--and believe that shunting children into government-run nursery schools around the time that they're potty training is a key to success in life. They say it leads to academic achievement, economic productivity, and law-abiding lifestyles. "There's a lot of evidence that this saves money over the long run," claimed Senator Clinton on the Today show.
Unfortunately for the nanny-statists, almost none of this is true. There's no doubt that preschool has the potential to help some children, especially poor ones, but its benefits for most kids range from short-term to nonexistent. "The last thing we need is a one-size-fits-all policy," says the Goldwater Institute's Darcy Olsen, who coauthored a comprehensive report on preschool for the Reason Foundation. "Yet we're looking at the biggest expansion of government into education since the creation of public schools."
A generation ago, only a small minority of kids went to preschool: In 1965, just 5 percent of three-year-olds and 16 percent of four-year-olds attended. Since then, preschool has become a booming business. Nowadays, more than 40 percent of three-year-olds and more than two-thirds of four-year-olds are enrolled, according to federal statistics. Although public programs such as Head Start have encouraged this trend, the sector is dominated by private actors: parents who pay out of pocket, YMCAs and churches that run preschools in their basements, and for-profit centers that hope to meet a growing demand.
The cheerleaders of universal preschool aim to capture this thriving market. Ready or not, here they come: Janet Napolitano, the Democratic governor of Arizona, has said that her goal is nothing less than "ensconcing early care and education as a lockstep component of public schooling."
The irony is that early education is already an American strength. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that vast majorities of children enter kindergarten ready to learn: They recognize numbers, they can count to ten, and although most of them aren't literate they grasp a few fundamentals about letters and reading. During the 1990s, even as Americans became less likely to read books, parents actually increased the rate at which they read books to preschoolers.
Perhaps this is one reason that young children perform well when compared with kids in other countries. On recent standardized language tests, fourth graders finished north of the 70th percentile, topping their peers in 26 of 35 countries. They also scored above average in math and science. "There's room for improvement, but this system certainly isn't broken," says Lisa Snell of the Reason Foundation. "It's basically working just fine." Problems set in as these children leave elementary schools and enter middle school. By the time they're in the eighth grade, their achievement is at best average. In the twelfth grade, it's mediocre.
This hardly makes the case for a government takeover of early education. If anything, it's an argument for reform of the upper grades--and probably in the direction of market-based alternatives that weaken government's near monopoly on K-12 schools. Anything else is a misbegotten priority.
The universal preschoolers, however, won't stop overselling their agenda. Senator Clinton has linked nursery-school attendance to lower crime rates. Last year, Isabel Sawhill, a former budget official in the Clinton administration, claimed that the advent of universal preschool would cause the GDP to rise by almost $1 trillion over the next 60 years.
Advocates make these flamboyant claims by taking wisps of data and warping them beyond recognition. Typically, that means focusing on a small-scale experiment conducted under precise circumstances and drawing completely unwarranted extrapolations from it. The most famous of these involves a preschool in Ypsilanti, Mich., in the early 1960s--a test case that universal-preschool partisans and their media handmaidens have gone on to mythologize.
The 123 kids who took part in the Perry Preschool Project weren't at all ordinary: They were black, poor, and had low IQs. Researchers described them as prone to "retarded intellectual development and eventual school failure." About half were sorted into a gold-plated preschool program. The rest were put into a control group. They've been tracked ever since, in a longitudinal study. Those who went to preschool--where they encountered highly trained instructors, low teacher-to-student ratios, and a regime of home visits--appear to have benefited. Over time, they've been more likely to finish college and less likely to be arrested or get pregnant as teenagers. A common interpretation of this result is that a healthy preschool experience put these at-risk kids into the right frame of mind for kindergarten, where they met teachers who responded positively to their readiness, which in turn helped them make a more substantial commitment to their own education.
Whatever the explanation, it's far from obvious that Perry Preschool holds any lessons for large-scale public policy. "Boutique preschools that serve poor children aren't realistic models for everybody else," says Bruce Fuller, a UC-Berkeley education professor who is the author of Standardized Childhood, a thorough survey of preschooling. He points out that the Perry experiment came with a high price tag: more than $15,000 per child in 2000 dollars. That's almost four times the cost of preschool in Oklahoma, which is one of three states to have a government-sponsored universal-preschool program (the others are Florida and Georgia). When the latest assessment of Perry preschoolers came out in 2005, researchers described an ongoing benefit, though not an eye-popping one. As summarized by Fuller, "Exposure to Perry explains less than 3 percent of all the variation in earnings at age forty, and about 4 percent of the variability in school attainment levels."
This is an important finding, though it's difficult to see how attempting to replicate it might add a trillion bucks to national GDP. As it happens, several other experiments have tried to repeat it and failed. One reason may be that the kids in the Perry experiment's control group didn't have an alternative to staying at home because the preschool industry that flourishes today hadn't been born. By contrast, a control group today would have many options. This hasn't stopped universal-preschool advocates from claiming that it takes a Perry Preschool to raise a child, or that all preschools can be Perry Preschools. "It's intellectually dishonest--they're just way out in front of the evidence," says Fuller, who describes himself as "an aging, left-of-center Berkeley academic."
One lesson from Perry and several other studies is that preschool really can help certain kinds of kids--especially those who come from homes where Cartoon Network blares from the television all day and nobody ever opens a copy of Goodnight Moon. The simple act of removing children from bad environments and placing them in better ones for a few hours each week can make a modest difference. For these unlucky kids, preschool may be critical, and public investments have a practical logic.
For the most part, however, universal preschool is an expensive solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Even when preschool appears to have a positive effect on middle-class kids, the benefits wear off shortly after they enter elementary school. "It's a continuing problem," says Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution. And it prompts a question: Why commit resources to universal-preschool schemes when the K-12 system appears unable to leverage them? Darcy Olsen says, "Until we get the next 13 grades right, it just doesn't make sense to add more of the same."
When confronted by hard facts, the leaders of the universal-preschool movement prefer to close their eyes, cover their ears, and utter their talking points. "All children make phenomenal gains," says Pre-K Now's Doggett (who is the wife of Democratic congressman Lloyd Doggett of Texas). What about the research of Fuller and other scholars? "They're wrong," she says.
It would be bad enough if universal preschool merely wasted taxpayer dollars. But its unintended consequences could do more harm. For some children, there's such a thing as too much preschool--there are indications that it leads to increased aggression, especially among middle-class children. Last year, Canada's C. D. Howe Institute published a critique of universal preschool in Quebec. "We studied a wide range of measures of child well-being from anxiety to hyperactivity to social and motor skills," wrote the authors. In almost every instance, they found that kids were "worse off." Boys may present special challenges. As psychologist Leonard Sax points out in Boys Adrift, the initial experience of school is often a bad one for boys because the language centers of their brains don't develop as quickly as they do in girls. Overexposure to preschool could possibly turn them off to education, in a sort of reverse Perry effect.
"What middle-class parents need to understand is that an average or below-average preschool can be worse for their kids than what most of them can provide in their own homes," says one preschool expert. "That's not true for a lot of low-income families, where the parenting skills aren't as good."
Then there's the troubling economics of universal preschool. Teacher unions would enjoy a growth spurt. If government-funded preschools begin to drive out private providers and become a middleclass entitlement, they could reshuffle the most talented teachers, encouraging them to move from existing programs that serve at-risk children to new ones that serve the well off--i.e., they could migrate away from where they're needed to where they aren't.
There would also be a harmful ripple effect on care for infants and toddlers. At many childcare centers, services for the youngest kids function as loss leaders because they require more adults per child. Classrooms of three- and four-year-olds, which require fewer adults per child, actually subsidize them. "If public schools become the primary points of delivery for four-year-olds, the costs of infant and toddler care, already expensive and in short supply, will shoot up," says Eric Karolak of the Early Care and Education Consortium. Parents would foot the bill.
The good news is that efforts to install universal preschool aren't inevitable. In California last year, voters considered Proposition 82, an initiative pushed by moviemaker Rob Reiner. It would have hiked taxes on high earners by $2.4 billion to fund state-run preschools. It failed by a three-to-two margin. "It was complicated, inflexible, and the finances just didn't make sense," says Lisa Snell. She calculated that, because 66 percent of the state's four-year-olds are already in preschool, meeting the initiative's goal of enrolling 70 percent of them would have increased the number of kids in preschool by only 22,000--at a taxpayer cost of $109,000 per child.
As with so many policy matters, this one ultimately boils down to something other than dollars and cents or the findings of social scientists. It's about fundamental philosophies of government and the duties of citizenship. Whose responsibility is it to raise small children? Hillary Clinton has offered her answer. It remains to be seen whether her Republican rivals will present a different vision.
