West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin first killed President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in December. As he explained it, he could not support legislation that contributed to “inflation taxes that are real and harmful to every hard-working American.”
Manchin killed Build Back Better again in January when he told reporters that Washington first needs to “get [its] financial house in order, get this inflation down” before any Build Back Better agenda items can be considered.
And now, a new study out of Tennessee has killed Build Back Better a third time by completely dismantling one of Biden’s key claims about the benefits of government spending on preschool education.
Tennessee first created its voluntary state-funded preschool program for 4-year-olds more than 15 years ago, in 2005. This has given researchers at Vanderbilt University a golden opportunity to conduct large, long-term, randomized studies on the value of government investments in early childhood education.
Preliminary results from preschool students in the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years were mixed but not encouraging. Now, the results are in as this cohort reaches the sixth grade. The outcomes are significant and negative.
Specifically, by sixth grade, those children randomly selected for the government-funded preschool program were more likely to be referred to special education services and more likely to have discipline problems. They also performed worse on academic tests than students who never attended a state-funded preschool.
“At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing,” Vanderbilt research professor Dale Farran told education reporters. “The kinds of pre-K that our poor children are going into are not good for them long term.”
This research echoes similar work done on Quebec’s government-run daycare program, which found that participants “had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life.” It also follows the Department of Health and Human Services’s definitive report on Head Start, which found no benefit from government-funded preschool programs by the end of primary school.
You won’t read any of these studies in the White House talking points on Build Back Better though. The Biden administration claims that “every $1 invested in high-quality early childhood care and education can yield $3 to $7 over the long run, as they do better in school, are more likely to graduate high school and college, and earn more as adults.”
And yes, there are older, smaller, isolated studies that show this. But the larger, more recent, better-designed studies say the exact opposite. They universally show either negative or nonexistent effects from government-funded preschool programs.
All Biden’s Build Back Better agenda would have done is make existing preschool options insanely expensive for parents. In order to qualify for any federal money from the new program, even the smallest neighborhood schools would have to upgrade their facilities to comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Act, pay all preschool staff equivalent salaries to elementary school staff, and ensure that all preschool teachers had at least a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education.
All of these new regulations would have driven the price of preschool through the roof.
Religious schools would also have been forbidden from receiving grants to upgrade their facilities and would have been forced to hire any qualified teacher who applied, even if that teacher didn’t believe in the school’s religious mission.
There are plenty of other good reasons for anyone to oppose Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Manchin’s focus on inflation is sound, in line with voters’ top priorities. But the last thing struggling parents need right now is an ineffective government-run preschool program that will sharply drive up the cost of care for everyone else.
