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the high schools: by the late 1980s, 21 percent of U.S.

college freshmen were taking remedial writing courses and

16 percent were taking remedial reading courses.  And a

recent survey of 200 major corporations found that 22 per-

cent of them teach employees reading and 41 percent teach

writing.28

In addition, the poor quality of public schools has

been faulted as a primary reason for the growing disparity

between "haves" and "have-nots."  As Cato's executive vice

president David Boaz argues in Liberating Schools:

Education in the Inner City,

Education used to be a poor child's ticket out

of the slums; now it is part of the system that

traps people in the underclass.  In a modern

society a child who never learns to read ade-

quately--much less to add and subtract, to write,

to think logically and creatively--will never be

able to lead a fully human life.  He or she will

be left behind by the rest of society.  Our huge

school systems, controlled by politics and

bureaucracies, are increasingly unable to meet

the needs of individual children.  Too many

children leave school uneducated, unprepared, and

unnoticed by the bureaucracy.29

Given the relentless failure of the public school

system to educate child after child, year after year, the

downward extension of public schooling to three- and four-

year-olds is ill-conceived and exceedingly irresponsible.30

What Advocates Claim and What Research Shows

Interest in universal preschool has been increasing

for several reasons.  One reason is that public preschool

is seen as a solution to the so-called child-care crisis.

But the notion of a child-care crisis ignores research that

shows that affordable, high-quality child care is widely

available for families of all socioeconomic levels.31

A second reason is that advocates claim that pre-

school will provide the experiences and environment neces-

sary to promote the healthy development of children, which

parents themselves and many preschool and child-care set-

tings fail to do.  Yet there is no scientific consensus on

what constitutes quality child care, nor have any

researchers examined the long-term effects on children of

various child-care arrangements.32  In fact, the National

Institute of Child Health and Human Development argues