Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine’s administration is finally admitting the real reason he wants his taxpayer-financed preschool proposal to be universal — and it has nothing to do with children.
“Public programs for just at-risk students don’t have the broader constituency of support as one that includes all children,” Secretary of Education Tom Morris told a Charlottesville public forum last month.
In other words, it’s all about the politics: The more you expand a program, the more support it will generate — even though it will cost taxpayers a lot more.
Kaine, who spent time as a young missionary helping the poor of Central America, thus appears to be in the odd position of advocating a solution based on the assumption that other Virginians don’t share his better instincts.
The National Institute for Early Education Research notes that more than 78 percent of 4-year-olds from wealthy families making $100,000 a year already attend preschool. Kaine’s concept simply shifts the cost to the rest of the state’s taxpayers, creating a huge new entitlement program certain to drive future tax increases.
The governor’s Start Strong Council cites a number of studies, that clearly show that quality preschool helps at-risk students, and that programs that help prepare them for public school should be improved. But the studies don’t show the same effect for upper and middle-income children.
Kathy Glazer, director of the Governor’s Working Group on Early Childhood Initiatives, agreed that the studies are “focusing on at-risk children.” She suggested that the program needed to include middle- and upper-class kids because quality teachers won’t be attracted to classes of only at-risk children.
But in a world of limited dollars, creating a program for everyone — instead of targeting children who need it most — sets up a competitive situation in which parents who know how to work the system will be most likely to access the resources.
More importantly, Virginia still doesn’t have a handle on existing preschool programs. The Virginia Preschool Initiative for At-Risk Four-Year-Olds has been in existence for more than 10 years. In 2004, its appropriations jumped from $18.9 million to $47.4 million. Only in the last two years, however, has the General Assembly required it to align its outcomes with expectations for incoming kindergarteners. And there’s never been a study of Virginia’s current preschool program to determine whether it’s actually accomplishing what it’s supposed to do.
Kaine’s recommended pilot program doesn’t offer specifics on what to study Glazer says it’s still in its “design phase,” but both she and members of the governor’s staff have indicated that the goal is “not to look at immediate student outcomes, but to test this model of public-private partnership.” In other words, the pilot simply assumes that universal preschool is desperately needed by everyone. Having already decided that, their only question is making it work.
A true pilot would disaggregate student scores and other data by socioeconomic status to see if preschool really makes an impact with middle- and upper-class children, use a control group to assess that impact, and collect long-term data to see why so many studies show a fall-off in student performance after they enter public school.
The governor has also called for creation of a “Quality Ratings System” to assist parents in choosing a preschool program but doesn’t suggest looking at the cost of various quality components.
A report by the National Institute for Early Education Research notes that only Arkansas has achieved at least nine of 10 “quality benchmarks,” but at a cost of more than $7,800 per child — well above Virginia’s current cost of $5,700 per child and a figure that would blow Kaine’s cost estimates out of the water.
The General Assembly has been asked to fund both the pilot program and create the quality ratings system. They would be wrong to reject it out of hand, but more wrong to approve it without insisting on a pilot that actually studies the effectiveness of universal preschool and gives some sense of what this all will cost somewhere down the road.
Chris Braunlich, a former member of the Fairfax County School Board, is vice president of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy.
