President Joe Biden has been pushing universal
preschool
on families and taxpayers for a while. His argument rests on unfounded claims about preschool’s benefits.
Here was Biden’s
State of the Union
preschool pitch.
“Folks, we all know 12 years of education is not enough to win the economic competition of the 21st century.”
“If you want to have the best-educated work force, let’s finish the job by providing access to preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds.”
“Studies show that children who go to preschool are nearly 50% more likely to finish high school and go on to earn a two- or four-year degree, no matter their background they came from.”
Biden has been making this case since coming into
office
. His evidence is pretty thin, though. Preschool children may tend to do better in school, but even if we grant that, Biden would need to demonstrate two more things to justify universal preschool.
First, he would need to show that preschool causes children to do better rather than preschool being correlated with better outcomes in some other way. For instance, it could be that married parents are more likely to put their children in preschool and that parental marriage causes good outcomes.
NO, PRESIDENT BIDEN, IT WASN’T A VIRUS THAT CLOSED SCHOOLS IN 2021. IT WAS THE DEMOCRATS
Second, even if Biden could show that the children currently in preschool benefit from preschool, he would have to show that the children not currently in preschool would benefit from it. For instance, homeowners probably benefit from having a home and a mortgage, but that doesn’t mean every adult in America would benefit from owning a home and having a mortgage.
How to tease out the confounding factors here? Scholars at Vanderbilt used a
randomized controlled trial
.
Nearly 3,000 low-income families applied for a state-supported, top-rated, pre-K program in Tennessee. There weren’t 3,000 openings, so the slots were given out through a lottery. Researchers at Vanderbilt University followed up with both sets of children through sixth grade.
The results were not flattering. “The children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade,” the study concluded. “A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.”
That is worse academics, worse behavior, and worse attendance for the preschool children than for the non-preschool children.
Another
study
, out of MIT, also relied on preschool lotteries and found slightly different results:
“Preschool enrollment boosts college attendance, as well as SAT test-taking and high school graduation. Preschool also decreases high school disciplinary measures including juvenile incarceration, but has no detectable effect on state achievement test scores.” Interestingly, this study also found that the positive effects — discipline, graduation, and college enrollment — were significant only for boys. That is, preschool seemed to have no significant effect on girls’ academic outcomes in this MIT study.
The bottom line: We are nowhere near a consensus that government-funded universal preschool would help children. There’s plenty of reason to doubt it would.
The MIT and Vanderbilt studies looked at very highly rated preschool programs. A big pile of federal money for new preschool programs would likely result in a lower-quality mix of programs.
The bigger point (and a warning against universal anything) is that different communities, different families, and different children have different needs.
Universal preschool appeals to the technocratic mind that demands uniformity and universality in all things and that bristles at the differentiation that comes from a hodgepodge of different early childhood experiences. But those people should be ignored, as should the education bureaucrats and union bosses who see universal preschool as a gravy train.
We should instead care about what’s best for children, and there’s no evidence that universal preschool fits that bill.
