IDEOLOGY VS. RESULTS:

Researchers at Vanderbilt University studied 3,000 low-income Tennessee children who had all applied for a pre-K program. Some were accepted and others were not. Both groups were followed from age 3 or 4 until the sixth grade. Earlier results from this cohort were published after the kids completed the third grade. They found that while the pre-K kids scored better on literacy and other measures in kindergarten, those gains quickly eroded, and by grade 3, the non-pre-K kids had caught up and surpassed the pre-K cohort. The results were worrying enough that one of the study's authors cautioned about the national rush to implement universal pre-K. "You have school systems that are pushing pre-K when they have demonstrably failing K-12 systems," Dale Farran warned. "It makes me cringe."

Now Vanderbilt has published the follow-up looking at how the children did up to grade six and the news is even worse. The gap between the pre-K and other kids continues to widen, with the pre-K group scoring worse on reading, writing, and science and also showing higher rates of disciplinary problems.

A lot of the enthusiasm for universal pre-K grew out of two very small studies of extremely high-quality programs, the Perry preschool project in Michigan and the Abecedarian preschool in North Carolina. But those programs were staffed by college graduates, and the kids scored better than controls on a number of measures. There are studies out there finding some salutary effects of various other programs as well. The problem, as I noted in my 2018 book Sex Matters, is that scaling up quality preschool programs is very hard. Decades of research on Head Start has failed to find durable academic benefits. And in Canada's Quebec province, the adoption of universal pre-K in 1997 led to serious negative outcomes when the kids reached adolescence. Teenagers who had been placed in daycare showed marked increases in anxiety, aggression, and dissatisfaction with life compared with those who had spent their early years in parental or other care. Even more worrying was the sharp increase in criminal activity noted among the teenagers who had participated in the program compared with peers in other provinces.

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