The Pretense of Preschool Proposals

WorldNetDaily ^ | May 30, 2007 | Roy Moore

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

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Wednesday, May 30, 2007

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The pretense of preschool proposals

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Posted: May 30, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Judge Roy Moore

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© 2007 

Last week, U.S. Sen. and Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton unveiled a new proposal to fund state pre-kindergarten programs for all 4-year-old children in America. Calling the benefits of these pre-kindergarten programs "astonishing," Clinton claimed such programs would not only reduce child behavioral problems, but would also make children less likely to enter special education programs, drop out of school or enter the welfare system.

However, pre-kindergarten programs have been around for many years, and such grandiose claims have been refuted by several studies on the effectiveness of such programs. The truth is government-run pre-kindergarten programs are another huge burden on taxpayers, and, in fact, they are detrimental to children and our country.

Proponents of universal pre-kindergarten offer early childhood education as a remedy for declining test scores and repeated poor showings in academic comparisons to students in other countries. They claim that by starting public education at age 3 or 4 rather than 5 or 6, children will enter kindergarten with better reading, language, math, cognitive and social skills, they score better on standardized tests, and they are more likely to mature into responsible citizens – likelier to be married, with higher education attainment and better-paying jobs.

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Such vivid speculation has been disproved by independent studies that actually find little or no difference between the academic, social and intellectual development of children who attend such programs and those who do not. Even those studies that have measured some positive effects from pre-kindergarten programs did not find that those effects remained beyond the first grade.

A commonly claimed benefit of these programs is that they reduce delinquency, but a comprehensive survey at Yale of the studies done on these programs found a "general lack of positive impacts in this area." As for Mrs. Clinton's claim that these programs reduce school behavioral problems, studies show exactly the opposite: at least two major studies have found children who attended these programs over time actually had more behavioral problems than those who did not attend. One study concluded these programs "seem to have little or no effect on children's intellectual development or school performance, and they might have negative behavioral consequences for young children."

Such survey results should not be surprising. Young children deserve and need more time with their parents at ages 3 and 4. Public schools, which have failed to teach children basic math, reading and analytical skills in the K-12 years, do not need or deserve an extra year or two to reach the same results.

Why, then, do social liberals like Hillary Clinton push so hard for the expansion of preschool programs? Perhaps they understand the truth of Proverbs 22:6 better than most parents: "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." When the mind of a young child is subjected to state control before fundamental concepts and basic beliefs are formulated, the child is much more likely to learn a liberal social and political philosophy with the state as his or her master. Creation and God-given rights are more easily replaced with evolution and government-granted rights. Totalitarian regimes like those of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin knew well the value of a "youth corps." As Hans Schemm, leader of the Nazi Teacher's League, once observed, "Those who have the youth on their side control the future."

The education of our Founding Fathers offers a stark contrast to the state-run education machine of the 21st century. At a time when state schools did not exist, Americans during the 18th century were the most literate and well-informed in history. "The Federalist Papers," a collection of newspapers articles written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay concerning the Constitution that are still studied in colleges today, were read by farmers back in the Revolutionary era. Poetry, science and religion flourished in that time without the support of the state. Even today, children educated at home have shown more academic promise than those taught in government schools. One study found that, on average, homeschoolers out-performed their counterparts in the public schools by 30 to 37 percentile points in all subjects.

Any attempt to extend government-controlled education to pre-kindergarten children is another unjustifiable attempt to indoctrinate our youth. After all, the admonition to train up children was given to parents, not government. More parental involvement rather than more federal intervention will improve American education. It is time for parents to ignore the liberal elites and pay attention to the academic development of their children.

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Judge Roy Moore is the chairman of the Foundation for Moral Law in Montgomery, Ala., and the author of "So Help Me God." He is the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who was removed from office in 2003 for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument he had placed in the Alabama Judicial Building to acknowledge God.

[GovernmentShrinker]

What we need is a study of the effects on welfare class kids only. I suspect those kid DO get a substantial benefit from it. Many of those kids enter kindergarten without ever having heard a complete and grammatically correct sentence, not to mention without knowing a single letter of the alphabet or even having had any exposure whatsoever to the very concept of reading (i.e. never been read to and have never seen an adult reading). Spending the first 5 years of your life cooped up in an apartment with MTV and hip hop and rap blaring day and night, and an everchanging cast of adults shouting at each other in a combination of obscenities and “Ebonics” while they smoke crack and drink booze, has got to be worse than even sitting in a public school classroom with an illiterate unionized teacher.

[EagleUSA]

This is socialism 101 — in the form a typical liberal sham — with the TRUE PURPOSE hidden. Standard operating procedure for the socialist libs — again thinking that ALL of the public is complacent and stupid.

Hitlery wants to socialize our children — she always has and tried it at the high school level back when her partner-in-crime was in the WH doing other women....

They are grifters and criminals. She must be prevented from getting into the WH and having a socialist-dominated Congress to ruin the freedoms of this nation.

[bicyclerepair]

Thompson/Romney PLease God, if you’re listening.........

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

No Romney. He is mister universal healthcare, remember.

[metmom]

Spending the first 5 years of your life cooped up in an apartment with MTV and hip hop and rap blaring day and night, and an everchanging cast of adults shouting at each other in a combination of obscenities and “Ebonics” while they smoke crack and drink booze,

You've seen welfare first hand, too, I take it.

[ClaireSolt]

I am wondering how this fits with Head Start. That program was perverted by hiring the welfare mothers to pose as teachers, so it never achieved the results it promised. Bush advocated making it a reading readiness program, and I haven’t heard any more about that. If he managed to reform it, no wonder Hillary wants something else to keep kids on the plantation.

[joseph20]

Pre-school is nothing more than day-care.

A child is better off at home with Mom.

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

Spending the first 5 years of your life cooped up in an apartment with MTV and hip hop and rap blaring day and night, and an everchanging cast of adults shouting at each other in a combination of obscenities and “Ebonics” while they smoke crack and drink booze, has got to be worse than even sitting in a public school classroom with an illiterate unionized teacher

How about training the parents to be parents instead of instiutionalizing the kids?

People don't really want freedom. They want license, while others suffer the consequences and fund the cures.

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

Regarding Head Start, I don’t know why we should spend thousands of dollars teaching toddlers to recognize the alphabet and colors, and to count. Spend twenty dollars by sending every parent an alphabet book, a counting book, and a book about color with a letter suggesting they read these materials to their children in preparation for kindergarten. I bet the results would be better. These are not difficult things for toddlers to learn. Parents just don’t think about it because they accept that it is the governments job.

[GovernmentShrinker]

Obviously not all households on welfare are that bad, but the perpetual, multi-generation welfare dependents quite often are, and that’s the group of children who would likely be much better off at the government nursery school than at home. I used to have a bunch of welfare families across the street from me in a 4 unit rowhouse building, until the HUD lease ran out and it was sold to a developer. There was one very nice hard-working mother with 3 kids, but the rest were selling drugs out of the house (with buyers pulling up at all hours with obscene rap music blaring from their stopped cars while they went up to the door make a buy), one once pulled a huge butcher knife on a boyfriend out on the street in the wee hours of the morning, kids were either roaming the street unsupervised (even tiny tots) or inside parked in front of the TV, one mother’s preferred mode of calling her kids inside was “Get yo a$$ in here befo I f** you up real good”. It was a rare week when the police didn’t come at least twice, usually in the middle of the night, and often looking for “Maurice”, the father of a couple of the kids who wasn’t supposed to be living at the home but often was (police chased him through my yard once at around 2AM). It wasn’t pretty, and the babies just kept coming and coming . . .

A problem that even the best and earliest-starting public schooling can’t solve, however, is that these kids get very little sleep at home, and so are ill-equipped to take advantage of anything offered at school. Perhaps these welfare class oriented pre-schools ought to be in session overnight, and send the kids home during the daytime, so they can sleep while their adult housemates are passed out from the previous night’s carousing.

[metmom]

There was one very nice hard-working mother with 3 kids,

I've heard rumors of people like that. Never actually met any, though.

The three rental properties we used to live next door to were just like you described, family after family. It was like living an episode of COPS. There are people who don't believe that show is real, but they've never been there.

The only people who support welfare are those who don't really know what it does to people.

[ClaireSolt]

Put those kids in orphanages run by nuns, instead.

[SoftballMominVA]

Nuns? Are nuns still around? No Catholic school in our area has even one nun there.

No one wants these kids - not even their parents and that is sadder than sad.

[luckystarmom]

I put my 3 year old daughter who has brain damage and at the time wasn’t talking into a special ed day class for a few months.

It was a horrible preschool class. It was 4 days a week, and from 11:00-2:30. My daughter was cranky she was missing her nap. She kept on getting sick. Then one day she didn’t want to go inside after recess, and she started crying and having a terrible meltdown. They didn’t call me (and I was 5 minutes away). They just let her cry outside and had the janitor (a strange male) watch her. She never went back.

The thing they also said she couldn’t use scissors, didn’t follow instructions, she never tried to talk, etc.

The next year, she went to a private regular ed preschool for a few mornings 2 days a week. She loved it! She never had tantrums. She participated. She would even try to sing the songs. They graded her, and she knew how to use scissors and could write. They figured out that to find out what she knew they would ask her to point to things. eg. (Point to the A? Point to the yellow block. etc)

We thought we were doing the right thing by putting her in the special ed class. We were hoping it would help her talk. In fact, she went backwards.

The less spent on public education the better.

[Hack]

“...DO get a substantial benefit from it.”

I once thought the same. Then I researched the matter on the Head Start’s own web site. Tested in the third grade, there was NO statistical difference between those in Head Start and those not in Head Start. This is confired over a 20-year period. Getting the information takes some diligent searching on the web site, but this conclusion is finally found buried in a lengthly paragraph.

[luckystarmom]

I think preschool is okay a few days a week. I think preschool is better for a kid than toting them around to run errands. It’s also a lot less stressful on everyone.

The kids go 2 mornings a week, and mom has time alone to go to the grocery store, get her haircut, go clothes shopping, go to doctor’s appointments, etc.

[luckystarmom]

My computer is acting funny and is making it hard for me to type much. The last post has lots of grammatical errors in it. Sorry.

[luckystarmom]

I should add a good private preschool is okay.

[Theo]

Just give me the money and I’ll handle “preschooling” from home.