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?

In previous blog posts I’ve pointed out that federal pre‑K programs have proven ineffective for half a century and that the claims of large returns-on-investment due to pre‑K stem almost exclusively from just three small-scale programs—out of hundreds of such programs operating around the nation for decades. Naturally, if we confine ourselves to talking about the tiny minority of programs that appear to have worked, we’ll find, well, that they worked. Pretending that their results are representative is not scientifically-based policymaking, it’s willful self-delusion—particularly when they have never successfully been scaled-up.

Those few among the advocates of universal government preschool who comtemplate such facts usually point, in their defense, to Georgia and Oklahoma. These two states have long had universal state-funded preschool programs deemed, by their advocates, to be “high quality.” Even if we could magically wave our policy wands and ensure that these programs could be faithfully replicated by the U.S. Congress, we might not want to. Here is why, in pictures:

Several things are evident from these charts. First, neither state has seen a very large move in its scores relative to the national average; Second, while Georgia shows improvement Oklahoma shows decline; and Third, Oklahoma’s declines are larger than Georgia’s improvements. These are the results in putatively “high quality” pre‑K states. Would anyone without ulterior political motives see them as an argument for borrowing and spending tens of billions of additional federal tax dollars every year?

If taxpayers in certain states around the country think they can improve upon Georgia’s results and avoid falling prey to Oklahoma’s, more power to them. But there is no empirical basis that could justify a federal government role in preK even if the Constitution allowed it one.

Most of the commentary on President Obama’s Tuesday evening State-of-the-Union Address has focused on the seemingly endless list of policy proposals he put forward – education, green energy, manufacturing hubs, minimum wage, and on and on. And understandably so, because that’s the minutia that Congress, the administration, and Washington more broadly obsess over day in and day out.

But if you step back, as I did yesterday in a piece at Forbes, you see a “national industrial policy” not unlike that of Obama’s mentor, Franklin Roosevelt, that is at once, as with Roosevelt, indifferent to constitutional limits and oblivious to economic principles. It’s really quite striking from that perspective. Have a look.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights — the same one where I testified regarding campaign finance post-Citizens United last summer — held a hearing, titled “Proposals to Reduce Gun Violence: Protecting Our Communities While Respecting the Second Amendment.” In the lead-up to the hearing, the subcommittee’s new ranking member, Sen. Ted Cruz (R‑TX), solicited written testimony from Cato on the subject. He got it in spades. Here are the Cato-affiliated scholars who submitted materials:

• Associate policy analyst David Kopel provided an excellent summary of his decades of research on firearms law and policy.
• Senior fellow Randy Barnett outlined the constitutional considerations that must attend any discussion of gun regulation.
• Chairman Bob Levy attached a short cover letter to his timely National Law Journal article that critiques the current state of play.
• I sent in an essay about the right to keep and bear arms generally that incorporates two blogposts and five op-eds by Kopel, Levy, Trevor Burrus, and myself.

If anyone else on Capitol Hill needs a full-court press on an issue ahead of a hearing, you know where to find Cato.

Economic research has only a tenuous relationship to economic policymaking in Washington. President Obama’s new proposal to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00 is a case in point. It would bad for workers and the economy, but the administration seems to be ignoring the large body of theory and evidence on the issue.

Labor economist Mark Wilson discusses the economics of the minimum wage in an essay on Downsizing Government. Here are a few highlights:

There is no free lunch when the government mandates a minimum wage. If the government requires that certain workers be paid higher wages, then businesses make adjustments to pay for the added costs, such as reducing hiring, cutting employee work hours, reducing benefits, and charging higher prices.

…

The main finding of economic theory and empirical research over the past 70 years is that minimum wage increases tend to reduce employment. The higher the minimum wage relative to competitive-market wage levels, the greater the employment loss that occurs. While minimum wages ostensibly aim to improve the economic well-being of the working poor, the disemployment effects of a minimum wages have been found to fall disproportionately on the least skilled and on the most disadvantaged individuals, including the disabled, youth, lower-skilled workers, immigrants, and ethnic minorities.

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Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman observed: ‘The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.’

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In the American economy, low wages are usually paid to entry-level workers, but those workers usually do not earn these wages for extended periods of time. Indeed, research indicates that nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers move above that wage within one year.

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While they are often low-paid, entry-level jobs are vitally important for young and low-skill workers because they allow people to establish a track record, to learn skills, and to advance over time to a better-paying job. Thus, in trying to fix a perceived problem with minimum wage laws, policymakers cause collateral damage by reducing the number of entry-level jobs.

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As Milton Friedman noted, ‘The minimum wage law is most properly described as a law saying employers must discriminate against people who have low skills.’

For more, see here.

Cato Institute scholars Michael Tanner, Julian Sanchez, Alex Nowrasteh, Simon Lester, John Samples, Pat Michaels, Jagadeesh Gokhale, Michael F. Cannon, Jim Harper, Malou Innocent, Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Ilya Shapiro, Trevor Burrus and Neal McCluskey respond to President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union Address.

Video produced by Caleb O. Brown, Austin Bragg and Lester Romero.

Act 2, scene 1 of Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore is marked by a lot Gypsy blacksmiths wailing away on their anvils. Sensibly enough, this has come to be called the “Anvil Chorus.” There is an equally clamorous chorus calling for universal federally-funded preschooling—one that president Obama may join this evening in his State of the Union address. It should be called the Anvil Chorus, too, because if it is successful it will tie an anvil ’round the neck of early education and American taxpayers.

The trouble with federal-government-funded preschooling is that we have 47 years of experience with it … and it doesn’t work. The federal Head Start pre‑K program was created in 1965, and despite decades of concerted efforts to refine and improve it it has virtually no measurable effects that last to the end of the third grade—or even the first. And of the very few and modest effects that have been found at the end of the third grade, some are actually negative. That is what federal government pre‑K has accomplished with $200 billion and half a century of effort. Is that a sensible basis for expanding federal government pre‑K?

Those large-scale randomized studies of Head Start are not the only indication that federal government spending on pre‑K (and K‑12) programs is ineffective. We can also look at the performance gap, at the end of high school, between the children of high school dropouts and those of college graduates. This is the key gap—between children in advantaged and disadvantaged families—that federal compensatory education programs set out to close in 1965. Below is a chart I prepared just a few years ago, documenting that gap using the reading section of the best national data set available (the “Long Term Trends” series of the National Assessment of Educational Progress). The results are equally disappointing in math and science (see Figure 20.5, here).

Nor should we be surprised by the failure of federal pre-K-through-12 programs to narrow this gap—they have failed just as badly in their other aim of improving overall student achievement, as the following chart of federal spending and student achievement at the end of high-school reveals.

Overcome by the sound of their own chorus, universal federal pre‑K advocates are deaf to this evidence. For the sake of the children they seek, ineffectually, to help, let’s hope they are unable to fasten their anchor around the necks of current and future generations of taxpayers.