June 8, 2009 10:46AM # Good Reporting Requires a Critical Eye By [Adam B. Schaeffer](https://www.cato.org/people/adam-b-schaeffer) --- SHARE 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.](https://www.cato.org/2008/08/22/pre-k-pushers-don%e2%80%99t-know-and-don%e2%80%99t-care-about-the-evidence/) Yet the *Washington Post* [brings](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/07/AR2009060702116_pf.html) 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. ##### Related Tags [Education](https://www.cato.org/education), [Center for Educational Freedom](https://www.cato.org/center-educational-freedom) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).