Posted on 04/08/2009 4:58:43 AM PDT by Kaslin
Did you go to preschool? When I was growing up, few kids did. But now there is a new movement that says every child in America should have a chance to start school before kindergarten -- at taxpayer expense.
It's part of President Obama's massive spending plans. His "stimulus" bill includes an Early Learning Challenge Grant to encourage states to "Develop a cutting-edge plan to raise the quality of your early learning programs" (http://tinyurl.com/cv6s23). It's a popular idea. Sixty-seven percent of Americans favor universal pre-K funded by the government. But I doubt that most Americans have thought it through.
Mia Levi has. She told me, "This whole thing is a scam."
Levi runs six preschools. I thought she'd favor the program, since she'd collect easy money from the government.
"I don't want to have to answer to the government," she said in my ABC special "Bailouts and Bull." "Our programs are so far superior."
Universal pre-K would create a single standard for preschools, but why is that a good thing? Why should we think there is one way to do preschool and that government experts know what it is? President Obama doesn't acknowledge what Nobel economist F. A. Hayek taught us: Competition is a discovery process.
Levi has to work hard to improve her schools because she knows that, unlike with government services, parents have options.
"If we didn't do our job, families would go down the street to the next school. Public schools aren't doing their job, and they get to just keep opening their doors. To say that they are the ones to define ... quality is laughable."
As she says, the pre-K movement has the whiff of scam about it. Most American kids already attend preschool. Parents pay for it themselves, and those who can't afford it can get government subsidies or use free programs like Head Start. But under universal pre-K, taxpayers would pay for every child.
"It's a flagrant waste of money," Levi said. "It's as if I went shopping for myself because I needed a dress for a party and I bought a dress for everybody else whether they needed it or not."
But we keep hearing that investment in pre-K will pay off later. Obama says, "For every dollar we invest in these programs, we get nearly $10 back in reduced welfare rolls, fewer health costs and less crime."
Those glowing statistics come from tiny studies (58 children) of places like Michigan's Perry Preschool. But those low-income, low-IQ kids got much more than preschool, including after-school tutoring, and their moms and dads got parenting classes.
Lisa Snell, education director of the Reason Foundation, says you can't expect similar results with middle- and higher income children.
In addition, lots of studies say the preschool effect fades. Head Start is revered for raising test scores, but studies show that by grades 3 or 4 those gains vanish.
"They can't tell the difference between the kids that went to Head Start and the kids who didn't," Snell says. "When they compared them to the kids that are disadvantaged that didn't go to Head Start, they can't tell from their test scores which kids had the treatment of Head Start."
There's still another flaw in the program. Some studies have found that too much school may lead to disruptive and aggressive behavior. Libby Doggett, who leads one of the biggest pre-K advocacy groups, concedes that, but claims that "high-quality" government programs benefit children. She said Oklahoma and Georgia have them already.
But those states, despite spending billions of tax dollars on preschool for the past 10 years, have not shown impressive results. Oklahoma's students lost ground to kids from other states.
Doggett replied: "We don't want to just focus on IQ scores. We want to look at how children are doing in their social and emotional, their non-cognitive development."
Please. When the huge government program fails to raise scores, the central planners promise it will help the kids socially?
Give me a break
Of course. That's already their line on K-12 schooling, and the public buys it. "Well, maybe they can't read or add fractions, but look at their great socialization!"
Did I go to pre-school? Heck, I didn’t even go to kindergarten! The school I went to didn’t have one. I did ok. I don’t think that I missed out at all!
When I entered school not only did we not have Pre-k but kindergarten was just a word we learned. School began with first grade. Amazingly we learned much that is not taught today as evidenced by the fact that most recent college graduates have so little knowledge of history that they couldn’t qualify to ENTER high school if we went back to standards of fifty years ago.
“There’s still another flaw in the program. Some studies have found that too much school may lead to disruptive and aggressive behavior.”
Really? Well Arne Duncan, Obama’s Ed Secretary, told a bunch of Colorado school children yesterday that his goal is for an 11-month school year, six days a week.
Totalitarian societies impose that kind of mandate on its citizens. Keep the kids away from their parents so you can influence them. Wake up America! Don’t fall for this when it comes to a school near you.
Me, neither. I started first grade at the ripe old age of five.
I didn't even go to kindergarten, let alone preschool but my mother was home to take care of us while my father worked. That's a much much better situation than preschool/kindergarten.
Same here. Kindergarten was for the retarded kids.
Momma raised us at home. Dad also worked from home. I was a very privileged kid growing up to have both parents around most of the time.
Not in our family. One grand daughter went, and knew her colors, numbers and letters when she went. After six weeks she had been told so many times she "couldn't know that" that she didn't any more.
No grandchild has gone since.
The reality of these programs is that if taxes are high enough, and inflation bad enough, desperate parents will welcome the free babysitter.
The selfsame Government using the schools to indoctrinate the children is the one which sets national fiscal policies, including taxation and the 'money supply' that affects inflation...
and don’t forget their “high self-esteem”!!!
LOL - I almost put that in, too, but posted a little too quickly.
Government funded pre-K = free daycare for moms. Keep making school days longer so working (or not) moms won’t have to pay for someone to watch the kids.
This is nothing more than one year of “free” daycare.
I couldn’t agree more!
It’s merely the next step in the Marxist push to take over child rearing. In the next election cycle they will be pushing for toddler “schools”.
Of course the true goal of the Marxist is to take children from their mothers’ arms in the delivery room.
Oh...And as children are institutionalized at an earlier and earlier age their reading and math scores will plummet further and dyslexia will rise.
Homeschooling moms have an expression, “Wait until eight!” That is an age when children are neurologically and emotionally ready for formal instruction in reading and arithmetic.
It doesn't matter whether the parents are "desperate" or not. It's natural to welcome "free" anything, especially if one lacks the reasoning skills to evaluate its actual cost.
And then once they're addicted, the costs go up and up, and the demand for services goes up and up. It's not good enough to have "free" preschool and "free" K-12 school: now they "need" "free" college, too!
Government funded pre-school is just ANOTHER step used by the left to have more state control over children.
Wait until the left starts calling for post natal government run programs so newborns are able to “function in a stressless, post womb” world, with the parents attending state classes on how having a child is a punishment and a crime against the environment.
“Really? Well Arne Duncan, Obama’s Ed Secretary, told a bunch of Colorado school children yesterday that his goal is for an 11-month school year, six days a week.”
Well, they can expect my wife’s notice when this happens. The only reason she is in teaching is because of her summers off.
I went to a church run nursery school. I think was to give my mom a break a few mornings a week and that’s fine. I learned absolutely nothing there.
We get asked a lot when our son is going to go to pre-school from moms that work. He’s home with me all day. I feel guilty. Like I should be spending my whole day teaching my kid stuff instead of cleaning and taking care of the house and letting him play. He just turned 3 and knows all his colors, numbers, and letters - he’s known those since he turned 2, but there’s this nagging feeling I should be doing more. That said, I’d never, ever put him in a state-run school. It’s private school or he stays home with me, period.
Same here: Started school at 5 in 1st grade (but I was 6 on 9/30). No K. Graduated at age 17.
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