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’.

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.

:)

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.