By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, May 11, 2021
Joe Biden has a New Deal for America’s kids.
He wants to spend more than $225 billion on child
care for infants and toddlers, and $200 billion for free, universal
preschool for three- and four-year-olds.
This is being hailed as a social revolution that will
finally bring the United States in line with other advanced democracies.
In reality, it’s a program that shows a pronounced class
bias. And since it is heedless of the experience of other such mass programs in
the United States and around the world, the Biden approach is also likely to
fail to achieve its goals.
It’s just not true, as the Biden program assumes, that
parents of young children are eager to shuttle them off to industrialized
day care or pre-K programs.
An extensive survey for the populist think tank American
Compass found a stark class divide in how couples think about child care. The
survey asked couples whether they preferred to have one parent working full
time while the other parent provides child care in the home, or to have both
parents working and using child care full time. One parent working was the
preference of strong majorities of working-class (68 percent) and lower-class
couples (58 percent), with a plurality of middle-class couples (38 percent)
agreeing. Only a plurality of upper-class couples preferred the child-care
option (44 percent).
So Biden is talking about using taxpayer dollars to
create a default arrangement that most parents would rather avoid.
Then there are outcomes. In a paper earlier this year for
the Manhattan Institute, researcher Max Eden reviewed the literature.
The programs that have produced the most remarkable
positive outcomes over the years tend to be small, expensive, and very
difficult to replicate.
On the other side of the ledger, there’s the Quebec
Family Policy. The Canadian province developed a crash program in the late
1990s that rapidly expanded child care, with generally deleterious effects.
Researchers found increased behavioral, social, and health problems for the
kids, and interestingly, worse outcomes for parents, too. The results were, in
the words of one authoritative study, “striking in their consistent indication
of a substantial negative impact of universal child care on children in
two-parent families.”
The exception in Quebec, per another study, was children
from single-parent families, where positive results were “particularly large
for individuals at the very bottom of the distribution.”
The Quebec outcomes, as Eden notes, accord with what has
been found elsewhere — child care is best for disadvantaged children and worst
for children from two-parent families.
As for pre-K, the largest study of Head Start, the
federal program for low-income children, found that any early benefits faded by
the third grade. Other research has been more encouraging. But a rigorous,
randomized control study of low-income kids in an extensive pre-K program in
Tennessee showed initial gains washed away; and then, over time, participants
had worse academic and behavioral outcomes.
The research of James Heckman, a Nobel Prize–winning
economist at the University of Chicago who studied one of the most successful
programs, is often cited by advocates of the Biden plan. In an interview last
year, though, Heckman stipulated that he has never supported universal pre-K.
He said the benefits of a loving, engaged family have never been adequately
measured.
“Public preschool programs can potentially compensate
for the home environments of disadvantaged children,” Heckman said. “No public
preschool program can provide the environments and the parental love and care
of a functioning family and the lifetime benefits that ensue.”
All of this would suggest taking a cautious approach
focused on the least-advantaged kids rather than moving full speed ahead on a
massive federal expenditure to get as many kids into day care and pre-K as
possible, probably through the existing structure of public schools.
But, in a desperate rush to spend another $4 trillion,
Joe Biden wants his New Deal for kids — whether it’s good for them or not.
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