Yet proponents of universal preschool want that same federal government that can’t manage a website update to begin providing early childhood education to millions of children across the country.
On April 10, the U.S. Senate’s Joint Economic Committee convened a hearing on “Building Blocks for Success: Investing in Early Childhood Education.” Even though we were witnesses in that hearing, we’re baffled that anyone who sees how badly the federal government has botched financial aid for college students would think, “Let’s get the feds more involved in early childhood education.”
Beyond incompetence, there are plenty of reasons for the federal government to shy away from preschool. For starters, the rhetoric does not match reality when it comes to the effects of early childhood education. Most of the claimed positive effects come from two extremely small programs that enrolled fewer than 60 children in the 1960s and 1970s.
Advocates who support taxpayer spending on early childhood education have extrapolated the results from those tiny programs, nearly seven decades old, to make fantastic claims about the benefits of preschool.
But larger‐scale programs haven’t replicated those results. While some show initial positive gains for students as they move from pre‐kindergarten to kindergarten, those results fade within the first few years.
Even so‐called “gold standard” preschool programs have produced worse results for participants. For example, in January 2022, researchers from Vanderbilt University released a study of Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre‑K initiative, which found children who participated in the program experienced significant negative effects on academic achievement and behavior compared with children in the control group.
Harms included worse academic performance and a higher likelihood of having discipline issues and being referred for special education services. The results shocked Dale Farran, one of the lead researchers. “At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing,” she told The Hechinger Report.
Unfortunately, Congress always wants to do “something.” Rep. Katie Porter (D‑Calif.), after claiming that the absence of federally funded universal preschool was evidence of “structural sexism” in Congress, asserted that spending other people’s money is “the function of Congress.” But unlike national defense, which Ms. Porter invoked to make her argument, preschool is not an enumerated power of the federal government. And the results of Washington’s efforts to date on the pre‑k front show why that’s the case.