Poor Elijah’s Almanack: The perils of preschool

Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.

Back in 1970 I condemned “Sesame Street.” I’d never actually watched “Sesame Street,” but I was a college sophomore. I condemned thousands of things I knew nothing about.

On this issue, though, I think I was right. I figured 3-year-olds needed a little more experience in the real world before they took on the abstract world of numbers and letters. President Johnson disagreed. He’d already established Head Start, which should’ve been named Catch Up because its purpose was to help poor children – especially poor, urban, minority children – catch up to middle class children more likely to grow up with two parents, better health care, and more books and education.

For nearly 50 years Head Start has provided preschool programs that introduce some numbers and letters while focusing primarily on “social-emotional development,” social services, and “helping kids feel secure and learn to play well with others.” Unfortunately, one study after another has concluded that Head Start “does nothing of lasting value to prepare them to read, write and do arithmetic.” Most data suggest that any “limited cognitive gains … vanish soon after or even before they enter school.” Even the government’s own Head Start Impact Study found that gains “disappear by the end of second grade.”

This is a serious problem if your goal is to help poor children catch up academically, particularly if you’re spending $8 billion, or $10,000 per child per year. That’s close to the cost of sending big kids to real school.

When President Bush proposed targeting “early reading skills” and retraining Head Start teachers to deliver “explicit instruction” in “the basics of literacy,” many preschool practitioners rejected this heightened emphasis on cognitive skills. One boasted that at her school “there are no letters or numbers on the wall to distract from [children’s] focused play.” The “only rule” is “the kids are in control.”

She was talking about 4-year-olds.

Other preschool specialists pointed to the practical obstacles that impede teaching letters and numbers to children “who aren’t potty trained, who don’t know how to sit in a chair.”

President Obama, confronting similar “program quality” issues, declared his intention to “expand access to preschool” for all moderate and low income 4-year-olds, as well as to “Early Head Start” for children “from birth to age three.”

The president claims these expansions won’t increase the federal deficit. He further claims that “every dollar we invest in high quality early education can save more than seven dollars” by “boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime.”

Somewhere there’s undoubtedly a study that computed the $7 figure. But like an equally definitive CDC calculation that a 20-cent tax on six-packs of beer would lower teen gonorrhea rates by “8.9 percent,” the numbers and conclusions are highly speculative. It’s unlikely that teenagers who are thinking of having sex will decide not to because it costs them each an extra dime or because they went to preschool. It’s also unclear how after 50 years of academically ineffective federal initiatives, the president expects to establish significantly expanded, “high-quality” preschool programs without significantly increasing the federal budget for preschool programs.

Proponents perpetually assert that, based on “decades of research,” “everyone” recognizes the “direct correlation” between preschool and “a bright future.” As Gov. Shumlin enthusiastically put it, “There is no question that quality pre-K programs give kids the best start possible.”

Case closed. Or at least it would be if any of the above claims were true.

The author of a 2013 Brookings report, a former high-ranking Department of Education staffer and early childhood education advocate, describes the rhetoric offered on behalf of universal preschool programs as a “thoroughly misleading appeal” to faulty and nonexistent research.

Despite boosters’ glowing testimonials, the National Head Start Impact Study has again confirmed “no differences in elementary school outcomes” between children who attended Head Start and those who didn’t. The data actually show “negative impacts on children” receiving federally funded child care.

The Brookings report focused on a statewide Tennessee program where “quality standards are high” and “in keeping with” the Obama administration’s “Preschool for All” initiative: trained and licensed teachers, small classes, and “an approved and appropriate curriculum.”

Children attending these high quality preschools still “performed somewhat less well on cognitive tasks” and “social-emotional skills” than comparable nonparticipating children. Consistent with the results of previous studies, any gains achieved “are not sustained,” “don’t last even until the end of kindergarten,” and “disappear” by the end of first grade. Despite his wish that “this weren’t so,” the report’s author characterizes these findings as “devastating for advocates of the expansion of state pre-K programs.” He concludes that even “high quality” programs, including those currently being proposed and implemented, don’t “meaningfully increase the academic achievement or social/emotional development” of the low-income children for whom they’re designed.

Don’t expect this evidence to change officials’ minds. One education world constant is the consistency with which policymakers cling to their follies and philosophical preferences.

Preparing children for kindergarten doesn’t require a course in Russian novels. Experts’ suggestions for parents include basics like “Talk with your kids,” and “Read with them every day.” It also helps to “point out familiar letters” and “write their names on things,” and for children to have “writing supplies” like paper and crayons. Advocates contend that these basics exceed the efforts or abilities of many parents, that Head Start, Early Head Start, and universal preschool are necessary to provide poor children “the language and reasoning skills that wealthy families pass on as a matter of course.” They forget that millions of their own poor, immigrant, non-English speaking ancestors somehow managed to advance their families without government preschools.

Turning 3-year-olds into premature intellectuals makes me nervous, and an early childhood gladiatorial arena hardly qualifies as the ideal social environment for infants and toddlers. But the real peril of preschool initiatives lies in assuming the duties of those children’s parents. Compensating for someone else’s irresponsibility is called “enabling.” At least that’s what social services providers call it when they’re talking about addiction. When they’re talking about childrearing, and they’re the ones doing the compensating, they call it a “comprehensive early child care system.”

Schools increasingly care for children from September through summer, from breakfast through dinner, from birth to adulthood. Do we really want to establish a system where parenthood begins and ends with the sex act, and family life takes place in the school’s multipurpose room?

All this comprehensive compensating doesn’t affect just the targeted families. Schools began serving breakfast because some children came to school hungry. But now it isn’t just the hungry children lining up for their morning meal. Other parents quickly concluded, “Why should I cook breakfast if the school will feed my kids for me?” The result is that many families actually became more like the families that were the problem.

Some advocates argue that if society doesn’t step in and raise these children right, nobody will. But it’s even more likely that if society does, their parents won’t.

And that’s an even greater peril than children who don’t know the alphabet.