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Pre-School Programs Work, Mr Hood

Post on June 16, 2008 by 3 Comments »

Locke Foundation President, John Hood recently made some outrageous comments regarding pre-school programs. Writing for the Insider on June 16, Hood declared that:

Contrary to popular impression, there has never been good evidence for the notion that preschool intervention explains differences in educational attainment.

Strange this. I was at an Achievement Gap conference held at the Education Testing Service in Princeton recently, and it was made quite clear to me and all present that pre-school programs can not only lift K-12 scholastic performance among those children who went through the programs, but it can be done for net savings to the economy.

In fact, dollar for dollar, pre-school intervention reaps better benefits at less cost than intervening in elementary or high school. This conclusion is based on the best social scientific analysis of existing programs by well respected university-based researchers and professors. The popular impression is well-grounded, it would seem.

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Comments (Closed):3

  1. James
    June 16, 2008 at 7:06 pm

    Scientific analysis? Whoa. You’re gettin’ kinda elitist there, don’t you think?

    :)

    PS I subscribed to the Insider last year and canceled my subscription wholly on account of the frequent JLF sightings. Then I discovered that everything I found there was well covered elsewhere, if not quite as easy to find.

  2. John Hood
    June 17, 2008 at 10:04 am

    Mr. Jackson,

    This illustrates the drawbacks of converting an online column to a newspaper column. You lose the links. In the original piece:

    http://www.carolinajournal.com/jhdailyjournal/display_jhdailyjournal.html?id=4809

    I provide links that explain the argument a bit more. Don’t know how familiar you are with the preschool-intervention literature, but what I’m talking about are the common problems of scaling and fade-out. Yes, experimental programs carefully targeted at disadvantaged preschoolers have generated large enough gains in readiness to persist into later years. But larger-scale programs typically experience a fade-out effect around the middle of elementary school. With regard to Smart Start, for example, there was some evidence of readiness improvement early on, but the gains weren’t very large. They were unlikely to matter much in school performance, and efforts to track the kids seem to have fallen off anyway (one can be more or less cynical about why, doesn’t matter).

    Bottom line: the preschool-intervention research never supported the Smart Start concept anyway, because it was not means-tested and consisted largely of grants to day care centers and other providers, not a Perry Preschool-like intervention. More at Four was more on point, actually, but once again there appears to be no plan to track participants into the school years to see if the program is targeted narrowly enough and designed well enough to yield long-term benefits. That’s unfortunate, to say the least.

    A carefully targeted preschool program, aimed at truly poor children with inadequate parenting, would pass muster with me. That’s not what we have. I’d supplement it with school choice, as argued.

  3. Stephen J
    June 17, 2008 at 11:03 am

    Thanks for your thoughtful post, John.

    I agree that pre-school programs such as More at Four must be evaluated carefully. Cohort tracking would appear to be a responsible tack for any government. The stakes are too high and we should be learning as much as we can.

    Having said that, there are well demonstrated and documented success stories out there of which we should be taking heed. I’d say that is the good evidence that pre-school intervention can improve educational attainment – evidence that you deny exists in your column, yes?

    I’m not sure what you mean by ‘truly poor with inadequate parenting’. The pre-school intervention literature I have read suggests that the number one criteria for targeting is ‘poor’. I’m not sure how we would parse that further to poor with ‘inadequate parenting’ without descending into some pretty contested territory over what is ‘adequate parenting’.