If U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan is going to talk as if he’s from an alternate universe, shouldn’t he have to grow a beard like Spock from the classic Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror”?

The following is cross-posted from the National Journal’s Education Experts blog:

This week’s introduction says that, when it comes to President Obama’s preschool proposal, “the only problem, as always, is that these investments cost money.” These proposals certainly would cost money – dollars Washington doesn’t have – but even discussing cost is seriously jumping the gun. The fact is that right now, regardless of cost, there is almost no meaningful evidence to support massive expansion of federal pre-school efforts. Indeed, the evidence calls much more loudly for the opposite.

Start with the biggest federal pre‑K initiative, Head Start. It costs about $8 billion per year, and what are its lasting effects? According to the latest random-assignment, federal assessments, there essentially aren’t any. The program has demonstrated no meaningful, lasting benefits, and is therefore a failure.

How about Early Head Start, which involves children ages 0 to 3? It is a much newer program than its big brother, but it, too, provides no evidence of overall, lasting benefits. As a 2010 random-assignment, federal study concludes:

The impact analyses show that for the overall sample, the positive effects of Early Head Start for children and parents did not continue when children were in fifth grade…. It appears that the modest impacts across multiple domains that were observed in earlier waves of follow-up did not persist by the time children were in fifth grade.

There were, to be fair, some lasting positive effects found for some subgroups, but there were also negative effects. And for the “highest-risk” children – the ones the program is most supposed to help – the outcomes were awful:

Finally, for children in the highest-risk group, six impacts were statistically significant, all of which were at the child level and all of which favored the control group. Children in the program group scored significantly lower than children in the control group on the PPVT-III (ES = −0.21, p < .10) and the mathematics test (ES = −0.33, p < .05) and had lower scores on the academic success index (ES = −0.29, p< .05). Parents reports indicated that chronic absenteeism was higher in the program group than the control group (ES = 0.37, p < .10). Children in the program group also scored higher on the cumulative risk index (ES = 0.35, p < .10) and lower on the cumulative success index (ES = −0.31, p < .05) than children in the control group. There were no significant impacts on parenting and family-level outcomes in the highest-risk group.

The federal government, quite simply, has demonstrated no ability to scale-up pre‑k programs and achieve positive, lasting effects. Knowing that, it is impossible to convincingly argue that the current efforts should even be maintained, much less greatly expanded.

What about state programs? The evidence is hardly conclusive that even highly-touted programs such as those in Oklahoma or New Jersey are effective. The quality of the research – which is rarely random-assignment – isn’t what it needs to be to confidently conclude that the programs work. Indeed, pre‑K advocate James Heckman said that in a Washington Post interview:

Dylan Matthews: The Abecedarian and Perry experiments provide pretty definitive evidence that individual preschool programs have strong effects, but Obama’s been touting certain statewide programs like Oklahoma’s. What’s the evidence for those like?

James Heckman: I would be cautious. I’m instinctively cautious because I’m an academic. The Perry and ABC (Abecedarian) and some others, the nurse-family partnership, have not only had randomized trials, but have also followed people up for decades. The Perry people are now 50 years old. The ABC people, now they’re close to 40. We actually can follow them in a way that the other programs don’t follow their participants. The state programs have relatively short-term evaluation plans. And I think, you’re right, they’re not randomized controlled trials, so I’m a little cautious. I don’t find them as convincing. As far as I know they’re not of the same quality. I have not personally relied on them. That’s not to say they’re bad programs, they just haven’t been evaluated as thoroughly.

So state programs haven’t been adequately evaluated to demonstrate their effectiveness, yet some act like it is obvious that the federal government – which has demonstrated an inability to run effective pre‑K programs – should scale all this up. Illogical. What they should be insisting is that Washington follow the Constitution and stay out of this, letting states experiment to see what works and what doesn’t, and replicate programs on their own – or do nothing – if they think the evidence justifies it.

When you get down to it, there are only two or three pre‑K programs that have solid enough research bases that advocates can confidently say they had lasting, positive effects. As Dylan Matthews’ question makes clear, the two most prominent are the Abecedarian and Perry Preschool programs. But here’s what you need to know: Both were hyper-intensive programs with very dedicated staff. Indeed, Abecedarian treated just 57 children at a price of about $17,700 per child, and Perry worked with 58 kids at roughly $12,500 per child. For all intents and purposes there is no way any government is going to scale those up and get the same effects, much less the bloated, ineffectual federal government.

It is much too early to say the only reason not to expand federal per‑K is the lack of funds. Before anyone gets even close to that, they need to address the huge dearth of evidence that big pre‑K – especially federal – would be anything other than a failure.

In her budget address before the legislature last Thursday, New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan pledged to repeal the nascent Opportunity Scholarship Act (OSA). The law grants tax credits to businesses that help low- and middle-income students afford independent and home schooling.

If the governor’s goal is saving money, as she claims, then she should oppose the repeal. The fiscal note prepared by the governor’s own Department of Education states that repealing the OSA would actually cost the state half a million dollars over the next biennium.

The OSA was designed to aid low- and middle-income families while saving money. The maximum average scholarship size is only $2,500, significantly lower than the more than $4,300 that the state allocates for each public school student, and vastly lower than the total public school spending figure of $15,758 per pupil. Moreover, businesses receive tax credits for only 85 percent of their donations, so even assuming the maximum average scholarship size, the state saves nearly $2,200 whenever a student switches out of the public school system—and the savings for local taxpayers are far larger. 

The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy estimates that the OSA would save the state $8.3 million over the next four years. A repeal would eliminate those savings and increase costs.

High-income families already have school choice. They can afford to live in communities that have high-performing public schools or to send their children to independent schools. Low-income families have few, if any, choices besides their assigned local public school.

On the 2011 New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) mathematics exam, eighth grade public school students in Bedford and Windham scored 84 percent and 89 percent proficient and above respectively compared to 55 percent in Claremont and 42 percent in Stratford. Unsurprisingly, the median household income is $121,452 in Windham and $114,681 in Bedford compared to $41,721 in Claremont and $33,571 in Stratford.

But even in high-performing districts, we should not expect that any one school is capable of meeting all the diverse needs of all the students who happen to live nearby. Not all children thrive in the traditional classroom environment. Some students need extra support academically, socially or emotionally. Traditional public schools may work well for most children, but there is no school that is right for all children.

The overwhelming consensus of randomized controlled studies, the gold standard of social science research, have demonstrated that students attending schools of their choice perform as well or better than their public school peers. Moreover, a study of Florida’s scholarship tax credit program also found a modest improvement in the academic performance of public school students in response to the increased competition.

Gov. Hassan also errs in her claim that the OSA “diverts taxpayer money” because she confuses private donations with government expenditures. In response to a challenge to Arizona’s scholarship tax credit law, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that contributions to charitable organizations are private funds, whether or not they qualify for a tax credit or deduction.

The Court held that the plaintiffs’ argument improperly “assumes that income should be treated as if it were government property even if it has not come into the tax collector’s hands.” Every state court to consider a challenge to similar scholarship tax credit laws has ruled likewise. 

Accepting the governor’s reasoning would require holding that the federal deduction for charitable contributions “diverts taxpayer money” to churches and non-profits. As the Arizona Supreme Court noted, this tortured logic implies that “all taxpayer income could be viewed as belonging to the state because it is subject to taxation by the legislature.”

The Opportunity Scholarship Act empowers low-income families to choose the education that best meets the individual needs of their children. In the process, the state of New Hampshire saves money. If passed, the governor’s hasty and ill-considered repeal would harm low-income children and taxpayers. It’s hard to say whose interests the governor thinks she’s serving, but it’s certainly not going to help those kids and taxpayers to take away this promising and entirely voluntary option.

Nation writer Rick Perlstein suffered paroxysms last week over my dismissal of the evidence for universal pre‑K, which he defended as “Nobel Prize-winning research.” Perlstein is mistaken. Though James Heckman, a leading preschool advocate, is indeed a Nobel laureate, he was awarded the prize for brilliant but unrelated work on statistical methods.

Far from being “Nobel Prize-winning,” the empirical case for universal government pre‑K collapses under mild scrutiny. The central claim, as voiced by President Obama in his SOTU speech, is that “every dollar we invest in high-quality early childhood education can save more than seven dollars later on.” This sweeping statement does not in fact refer to the typical return from federal or state pre‑K programs. It refers to the findings from a single intensive 1960s early childhood experiment that served 58 children in Ypsilanti, Michigan—the High/​Scope Perry preschool program. Out of the literally hundreds of preschool studies conducted in the past half-century, the Perry results are not representative and have never been reproduced on a national or even a state level. In fact, an earnest experimental effort to reproduce them for just a few hundred children at eight locations failed despite an annual investment of $32,000 per child, adjusted for inflation—far more than the President currently contemplates spending.

The president’s case for universal government pre‑K singles out the unusually large positive effects of one tiny study—sometimes two or three—from scores of others that show little benefit, no benefit, or even significant harm to participating students. That sea of inferior results, moreover, is drawn in large part from …the federally-funded pre‑K efforts of the past 47 years. Indeed the largest, best designed, most recent studies of federal pre‑K efforts were published by the Obama administration itself: the Head Start Impact Studies. These studies find little or no net lasting benefit to federal pre‑K. The Obama administration was apparently so worried about these findings that the most recent study was released on the Friday before Christmas—despite a publication date on its title page of October 2012.

What we have here, in other words, is a monumental act of cherry picking rather than an example of scientifically grounded policymaking.

Grover “Russ” Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution has spent decades studying early childhood education. Last month he offered a review of the evidence on the federal “Head Start” program targeted at low-income children and another on universal government Pre‑K programs.

Like most people who have chosen to work in this field, he is keen to find ways of improving educational outcomes for all children, and of helping disadvantaged children to catch up with their peers. Like only a very few, this goal has not lowered his standards of evidence. If there is a convincing rebuttal to Whitehurst’s essays, I haven’t seen it. And given the evidence as it exists today, I don’t expect to see such a rebuttal anytime soon.

People used to laugh nervously about the federal government taking over their lives “from cradle to grave.” But at least since the passage of Obamacare—not to mention the two-dimensional Utopia of Julia—that has seemed a much more concrete prospect. And with President Obama’s new proposals to expand federal pre-kindergarten programs going all the way to age zero, the cradle is now fully in play.

We’ve heard a lot about pre‑K for years, but focused mainly on the age 3‑to‑5 set. For the federal government that means Head Start, an $8 billion program that has been shown again and again to have essentially no lasting benefits. But since the mid-1990s Washington has also run something called Early Head Start aimed at infants and toddlers.

It’s probably safe to say that few people know much about Early Head Start, which is too bad because, if the debate goes anything like that for overall pre‑K, there will be many deceptive claims suggesting it has nearly miraculous effects. Indeed, yesterday Washington Post “Wonkblog” contributor Dylan Matthews wrote that Early Head Start has “proven very effective in randomized controlled trials.” To back the claim he linked to “The Promising Practices Network” which, citing three studies, did indeed designate the program “proven.”

But is it? The answer is emphatically “no,” just like regular Head Start. The positive effects disappear by, at the latest, fifth grade, meaning recipients would have ultimately been as well off had they not gone through the program. As the authors write in the conclusion to the third study cited by the Promising Practices Network:

The impact analyses show that for the overall sample, the positive effects of Early Head Start for children and parents did not continue when children were in fifth grade…. It appears that the modest impacts across multiple domains that were observed in earlier waves of follow-up did not persist by the time children were in fifth grade.

That is not the only bad news for Early Head Start. While some lasting, positive effects were found for some subgroups, so were many negative effects. And for the families and children designated “highest risk”-–-those who needed help the most-–-the effects of Early Head Start were awful:

Finally, for children in the highest-risk group, six impacts were statistically significant, all of which were at the child level and all of which favored the control group. Children in the program group scored significantly lower than children in the control group on the PPVT-III (ES = −0.21, p < .10) and the mathematics test (ES = −0.33, p < .05) and had lower scores on the academic success index (ES = −0.29, p< .05). Parents reports indicated that chronic absenteeism was higher in the program group than the control group (ES = 0.37, p < .10). Children in the program group also scored higher on the cumulative risk index (ES = 0.35, p < .10) and lower on the cumulative success index (ES = −0.31, p < .05) than children in the control group. There were no significant impacts on parenting and family-level outcomes in the highest-risk group.

The highest-risk kids, it seems, would have been significantly better off staying out of Early Head Start.

“Proven,” Early Head Start absolutely is not. Just like its ineffectual big brother.

After my previous post showing the lackluster overall achievement trends in states with purportedly “high quality” universal pre‑K programs, one response was that this might miss better results among minority students. Well, I’ve had a chance now to chart the results for African American kids and… they’re slightly worse. See below. Can we now, finally, stop for a moment and reflect before lavishing tens of billions of dollars we don’t have on a federal expansion of such programs?