The business of universal preschool

January 7, 2007 1:49 PM by S.M. Oliva | Other posts by S.M. Oliva | Comments (5)

District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty, who took office on January 2, vows to run the nation’s capital “like a business.” At the same time, his top priority is a takeover of the city’s school system, replacing the elected board of education and its superintendent with a mayoral appointee. I guess running the city like a business means running it like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who took over that city’s public schools and put a former antitrust lawyer in charge.

But it gets better. The public schools’ current leaders, along with Fenty’s new deputy mayor for education, a former school board member, want to expand the failing system to include “universal preschool” for all three- and four-year olds. If institutionalizing children by force for 13 years doesn’t work, perhaps institutionalizing them for 15 will do the trick. Again, what business model is Fenty following?

In a detailed article published in the Current, a D.C. community newspaper, D.C. Public Schools Superintendent Clifford Janey said preschool was absolutely necessary because, “We can’t just leave our 3- and 4-year olds to chance.” By chance, he means parents, who historically have raised young children without the state’s intervention.

Janey is distraught that just 70% of four-year olds and 30% of three-year olds in D.C. currently attend preschool. Instead of leaving so many children solely in the hands of parents, Janey wants to “attract teachers with master’s degrees in early childhood development and a special certification to teach reading.” To that end, the superintendent wants to “partner with local universities to develop graduate programs whose students might feed directly into teaching positions within the District’s preschool program.”

And, of course, one would expect these new teachers to join the D.C. teacher’s union, which holds the legal monopoly over providing educational services to the public schools.

But Janey and company won’t stop at age three. The Current said Janey also wants the city to implement “learning programs from birth to age 3.” He’s backed by Robert Bobb, the new president of the elected—for now—board of education. During his campaign, Bobb said that city officials had to be involved with child development from conception. Specifically, he called for “home visits in which parents would learn how to expand their toddler’s language and cognitive skills as the children prepare to enter preschool.” (Would this be pre-preschool?)

Bobb himself is not an expert in early childhood education. Until last year, he was the city administrator for now-former mayor Anthony Williams. Bobb is a career bureaucrat who hopped from city to city before landing in Washington a few years ago. His election to the board of education is viewed by many as a prelude to running for mayor in 2010.

Victor Reinoso, Fenty’s deputy for education, echoed Bobb and Janey’s call for universal preschool. Reinoso argued that the city would spend less on special education if funds were diverted to early childhood programs.

The Current also cited a “nonpartisan” study by the Committee for Economic Development that called for universal preschool. In fact, CED has issued dozens of papers over the past 40 years making similar demands. In the report cited by the Current, CED advocates increased spending by the federal government, as well as higher property and “sin” taxes to finance “high-quality, universal preschool.” CED also said preschool teachers had to be paid the same as elementary school teachers—preschool teachers currently make about $21,000 less per year—and that “a national board should be created to review and report on state preschool standards.”

Sadly, the Current didn’t quote or cite a single source in opposition to universal preschool. So here are just a couple of dissenting views. First, Lisa Snell of the Reason Foundation issued a report last April that concluded,

There is little empirical evidence to demonstrate any lasting educational or socioeconomic benefit of government-run preschool programs for all children. Evidence from performance on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which is considered the nation’s report card, argues against the value of investing in universal preschool. Georgia has had universal preschool open to all children since 1995 and Oklahoma has had a universal program in place since 1998. Yet, the overall performance of these states on the NAEP in terms of reading achievement calls into question the lasting value of universal preschool on academic outcomes. In a recent analysis of the top 10 best and worst state performers, based on the percentage point change in fourth-grade reading tests between 1992 and 2005 on the NAEP, both Georgia and Oklahoma were in the bottom 10 performers. In fact, Oklahoma was the worst performer of all states in terms of gains in fourth-grade reading between 1992 and 2005, actually losing 4 percentage points.

But even if universal preschool doesn’t improve academic performance, surely it must help “socialization,” the common criticism of parent-based education. CED’s report insisted that universal preschool would lower crime rates, reduce welfare rolls, and generally benefit society. But a 2005 study published by Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley found “that children who attended preschool at least 15 hours a week displayed more negative social behaviors as compared with children who stay at home.”

It’s curious that business leaders, like those in CED, would support universal preschool on the premise that it will yield intangible social benefits 15 or 20 years in the future. Few businesses think that way with respect to their own operations. The more likely explanation for business support of “universal” preschool is that it will reduce the demand for corporate subsidies of child daycare—which is all government schooling really is—and enable more parents to remain in the current workforce.

From the parents’ standpoint, more government schooling means more “free” child care. But as Vin Supryowicz said in a recent LewRockwell.com article, “parents want some relief from the expense of child day care for 5-year-olds, which has been made necessary by the fact that both mom and dad now have to work outside the home to fund day-long government day care for 6-to-18-year-olds.”

From government officials, expanding the state’s school monopoly is critical in maintaining the health of the state. War once fulfilled this function, but even with the current buffet of regional military conflicts, war no longer dominates and consumes the nation’s resources as it did during World War II. Schools are The State 2.0. (Global warming hysteria may induce The State 3.0.) There is virtually no government control that cannot be enacted under the pretext of supporting the state’s school system.

Consider D.C. Superintendent Janey’s remarks regarding teacher credentials. It’s not sufficient to recruit teachers who can do their jobs. That’s a free market concept. Janey’s priority is ensuring teachers have a master’s degree from a university whose program is affiliated with—and ultimately controlled by—the state. Janey is afraid that true market competition for teacher services will render credentialism obsolete, since many people are qualified to instruct students without a state-approved master’s degree.

Governments depend on credentials, be they degrees or elections, to maintain the illusion that the state’s authority is based on something other than violence. While credentials may be useful in the market, consumers are free to disregard them. Education is a prime example. The state calls for “high quality” teachers, even though no such thing exists. The most heavily credentialed bureaucrat won’t be able to cajole every child into passing the state’s battery of arbitrary tests and benchmarks. Nor is it necessary that every individual learn the same quantity of information in the same manner. As with all subjective economic preferences, a decentralized market can meet individual demands more efficiently than a single bureaucracy that craves uniformity.