By Mona Charen
Friday, January 03, 2014
"We will restore science to its rightful place ...
" So intoned a "dismissive and derisive" President Barack Obama
in his first inaugural. It's been oft quoted in the five years since
(frequently by me, I'll confess) for its arrogance and condescension, which has
continuing relevance, but before turning to the left's latest departure from
scientific rigor, I cannot resist a fuller quotation. The second part of this
sentence from Obama's first inaugural reads " ... and wield technology's
wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost." Hmm.
In his second inaugural (compared to Abraham Lincoln's
second by Chris Matthews), Obama proposed a vast new program ($150 billion in
combined federal and state funds) for universal preschool serving 4-year-olds.
"Every dollar we invest in high-quality early childhood education can save
more than $7 later on -- by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy,
even reducing violent crime ... We know this works."
Universal preschool is universally popular with
Democrats. Nancy Pelosi has hailed Head Start as "one of our most
effective investments," while the newly minted progressive heartthrob New
York mayor, Bill de Blasio, proclaims, "We will ask the very wealthy to
pay a little more in taxes so that we can offer full-day universal pre-K and
after-school programs for every middle school student."
Before getting to science, let's talk politics. The
federal government already runs a preschool program called Head Start.
Democrats love it because they can claim to be doing something beneficial for
poor children. Republicans decline to oppose it because they fear ads saying
"Rep. X wants to deny education to poor children ... "
Now, let's talk science. Head Start, a product of Lyndon
Johnson's Great Society, has been carefully evaluated by the Administration for
Children and Families within the Department of Health and Human Services. The
study examined 4,667 3- and 4-year-olds across 23 states. It compared children
who had applied for but not been accepted into Head Start to those who had
participated in it. The children were evaluated by their teachers, parents and
outside examiners both before and after. As David Armor and Sonia Sousa relate
in the winter issue of National Affairs, the Head Start Impact Study found
almost no positive effects of the program.
While children in the program showed some positive
results on measures of cognitive skills and social/behavioral ratings while in
the program, those results lasted only so long as the children were enrolled
and did not carry through to kindergarten or early elementary school. The
principle positive effect noted in the HSIS was in social skills for
3-year-olds, but these results were reported only by parents and not replicated
by outside examiners. Teachers, by contrast, noted a negative effect on
social/emotional skills for the 4-year-old cohort.
The point of Head Start is the promise that it offers
poor children a leg up and prepares them for school. It would be nice if it
worked, but it doesn't. It does provide jobs for teachers and federally
subsidized day care. But taxpayers have spent $180 billion since 1965 for a
program that fails to achieve its objectives.
Other studies have examined the effect of preschool more
generally on school performance and have found effects ranging from very small
to none.
What then was Obama referring to when he insisted that
"high-quality" preschool "boosts graduation rates,"
"reduces teen pregnancy" and so forth? In a post titled "Obama's
Preschool Proposal Is Not Based on Sound Research" on the center/left
Brookings Institution website, Russ Whitehurst explains that the studies the
president and other advocates of universal pre-K rely on are flawed. They do
not involve randomized controls (as the HSIS did) but instead employ something
called "age-cutoff regression discontinuity."
Due to state-mandated birthdates for enrollment in
preschool, the studies wind up comparing kids who are actually enrolled in
play-based programs for 3-year-olds with those enrolled in academically
oriented preschool for 4-year-olds. These regression discontinuity studies also
fail to account for dropouts from the program. The Brookings post, to which
Armor also contributed, concludes: "Because 'gold standard' randomized
studies fail to show major impacts of present day pre-K programs, there are
reasons to doubt that we yet know how to design ... a government funded pre-K
program that produces sufficiently large benefits ... "
Armor and Souza suggest in National Affairs that those
truly respectful of science would propose: "A national demonstration
project for pre-K in a selected number of cities and states, accompanied by a
rigorous randomized evaluation that would follow participants at least into the
third grade. This demonstration project should also examine whether 'preschool
for all' closes achievement gaps between rich and poor, since it is possible
that middle-class children will benefit more than disadvantaged children."
This would put science in its "rightful place,"
but don't hold your breath. Many liberal nostrums are impervious to evidence.
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