Good Reporting Requires a Critical Eye

Preschool access and attendance is often presented as an unalloyed good that will bring a huge return on investment. It’s not, and there’s little evidence that the benefits outweigh the costs.


Yet the Washington Post brings us a story about the push for state preschool expansion with nothing but supporters of government finance and controlled preschool and no critical treatment of the supposed evidence offered by those proponents.


I strongly urge the media to talk to some folks who have a critical take of the push for universal preschool when they write an article. What they write might then read like a news story rather than a press release from Pew.