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    Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut
    Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut
    Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut
    Ebook160 pages1 hour

    Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut

    By Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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    About this ebook

    Chester E. Finn, Jr. outlines the issues that define, animate, and complicate today's contentious pre-kindergarten debate in American education. He examines such topics as: which children really need it; how many aren't getting it; who should provide it and at what expense; what is the right balance between education and child care; and how to know whether it is succeeding.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateJun 1, 2009
    ISBN9780817949938
    Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut
    Author

    Chester E. Finn, Jr.

    Chester E. Finn Jr. is a scholar, educator, and public servant who is Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus of Fordham. His is an educational policy analyst and formally served as the United States Assistant Secretary of Education.

    Read more from Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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      Book preview

      Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut - Chester E. Finn, Jr.

      The Hoover Institution and Education Next Books

      gratefully acknowledge the following individuals

      and foundations for their support of this research on

      education policy and reform.

      LYNDE AND HARRY BRADLEY FOUNDATION

      KORET FOUNDATION

      EDMUND AND JEANNIK LITTLEFIELD FOUNDATION

      BERNARD AND CATHERINE SCHWARTZ FOUNDATION

      WILLIAM E. SIMON FOUNDATION

      BOYD AND JILL SMITH

      TAD AND DIANNE TAUBE FOUNDATION

      JACK AND MARY WHEATLEY

      THE HOOVER INSTITUTION TASK FORCE ON K-12 EDUCATION

      Reroute the

      Preschool Juggernaut

      Chester E. Finn, Jr.

      HOOVER INSTITUTION PRESS

      STANFORD UNIVERSITY

      STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

      The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the thirty-first president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and international affairs. The views expressed in its publications are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.

      www.hoover.org

      An imprint of the Hoover Institution Press

      Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 572

      Copyright © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

      First printing, 2009

      16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09        9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Finn, Chester E., Jr., 1944–

      Reroute the preschool juggernaut / by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8179-4991-4 (hardback : alk. paper)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8179-4993-8 (electronic)

      1. Education, Preschool—Government policy—United States. 2. Education, Preschool—United States—Public opinion. 3. Education, Preschool—Economic aspects—United States. 4. Public opinion—United States. 5. Education and state.

      I. Title.

      LB1140.23.F56 2009

      For Alexandra and Emma, with love

      Contents

      Preface

      The Rolling Juggernaut

      The School-Readiness Challenge

      Preschool or Child Care?

      A Crowded Landscape

      The Quality Conundrum

      Murky Evidence

      The Florida Story

      The Oklahoma Story

      The Problem of Head Start

      Costs and Benefits

      Rival Delivery Systems

      A Better Route to Travel

      Endnotes

      About the Author

      About the Hoover Institution Task Force on K-12 Education

      Index

      Preface

      Pre-kindergarten is one of the hottest topics in American education in 2009: Which children really need it? How many aren’t getting it? Who should provide it—and at whose expense? What’s the right balance between socialization and systematic instruction? Between education and child care? Where does Head Start fit in? What are reliable markers of quality in preschool programs? And much, much more.

      Politics and adult interests loom large here, as always, but so does the country’s earnest, overdue push to boost student learning, reduce vexing achievement gaps and strengthen our international competitiveness. Indeed, mounting attention to preschool seems, in hindsight, to be an inevitable corollary of standards-based reform of the primary-secondary grades.

      If you find school reform a complicated challenge, however, wait until you wade into the turbid waters of preschool! And if you don’t want to wade alone, by all means join me for a wetting in the pages that follow. We won’t get much more than knee-deep—it’s a fairly brief treatment of a large topic—but you may emerge with a basic understanding of the pre-K debate and the issues that drive and complicate it.

      Although I’ve written what feels like a lot of books about education, this is my first sustained look at preschool. (As you will see, this domain is similar to K–12 in some ways but very differentin others.) Fortunately, I’ve had plenty of assistance, beginning with my colleagues on the Task Force on K–12 Education at Stanford’s Hoover Institution; they helped me get my mind around this subject and emboldened me to ask tough questions rather than succumb to the sentimental thinking that so often afflicts discussions of policy issues involving little kids.¹ As I proceeded, many others lent their hands, sending me studies, books, and articles, commenting on drafts, correcting my thinking (and sometimes my facts), and explaining mysteries. None, however, is responsible for whatever errors of fact or judgment may remain.

      I owe particular thanks to Douglas Besharov, Bruce Fuller, Shan Goff, Marci Kanstoroom, Michael Petrilli, Robert C. Pianta, and Nina Rees, as well as Task Force members John Chubb, Eric Hanushek, Paul Hill, Caroline Hoxby, Tom Loveless, Terry Moe, Paul Peterson, Diane Ravitch, and Herbert Walberg.

      The Hoover Institution generously provided all manner of support and encouragement, not least the publication of this monograph. I’m particularly grateful to director John Raisian and senior associate director Richard Sousa.

      At my home base, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, I benefited hugely from the patient precision of staff assistants Ali Clark and Mickey Muldoon, the cheerful willingness of my colleagues (especially Eric Osberg, Mike Petrilli and Terry Ryan) to pick up the slack while I labored on this project, and the continued forbearance of Fordham’s board as I devote considerable chunks of time to such endeavors.

      In the forbearance department, however, nobody surpasses my wife, Renu Virmani, recently joined in my affections (and her own) by two little pre-school granddaughters who don’t yet have a lot of forbearance but who serve as a constant reminder of why this topic matters.

      CHESTER E. FINN, JR.

      Washington, D.C.

      March 2009

      The Rolling Juggernaut

      The campaign for universal preschool education in the United States has gained great momentum. Precisely as its strategists intend, many Americans are coming to believe that pre-kindergarten is a good and necessary thing for government to provide; indeed, that not providing it will cruelly deprive our youngest residents of their birthrights, blight their educational futures, and dim their life prospects.

      The 2008 Democratic Party platform promised to make quality, affordable early childhood care and education available to every American child from the day he or she is born, in effect offering a universal, entitlement-style program to the families of some twenty million youngsters under the age of five.

      Twice during the presidential-campaign debates, Barack Obama termed early-childhood education one of his highest priorities, and even before serious planning got underway for an anti-recession stimulus package, he had pledged to this priority an additional $10 billion in annual federal funding. Sam Dillon of the New York Times termed Obama’s offer the largest new federal initiative for young children since Head Start began in 1965.² Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, is also a strong booster of pre-K education; as CEO of the Chicago schools, he set out to double the number of that city’s preschool slots from 33,000 to 60,000 in response to unmet demand.³ (Duncan’s—and Obama’s—Chicago contains about 40,000 four-year-olds.) During his confirmation hearing in January 2009, Duncan restated the key elements of the new administration’s Zero-to-Five proposal, including voluntary universal preschool quality enhancement—whatever that may turn out to mean.

      Congress is busy on this front, too. In June 2008, for example, just months after completing the belated Head Start reauthorization, the House education committee approved a new, $2.5 billion measure to assist states in elevating the quality of their preschool programs. The first few days of the 111th Congress brought a flurry of bills that ranged from child-care tax credits to state grants for additional pre-K programs, home visitation services, and more. The whopping economic-stimulus package enacted in February included $2.1 billion more for Head Start and $2 billion more for child care as well as additional funding for disabled pre-schoolers and some $54 billion in assistance to state and local education budgets.

      In state capitals, meanwhile, many governors have embraced preschool in the early 21st Century with something like the fervor they brought to K–12 education reform during the late 20th Century. (Some say they’ve turned to the former because the latter has proved exasperating, expensive, and unproductive.⁴) Pre-K and kindergarten-expansion proposals topped their priorities in myriad state of the state messages in 2008. The previous year, thirty governors called for increased pre-K spending. The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) hailed 2007 as a banner year, a time of important milestones in expanding access to state-funded preschool education, and declared that thirty-eight states now had such programs and that thirty of these had boosted their enrollments. In Washington and statehouses across the country, wrote a Wall Street Journal reporter in August 2007, preschool is moving to the head of the class. She termed the spread of free preschool education one of the most significant expansions in public education in the 90 years since World War I, when kindergarten first became standard in American schools.

      Preschool also looms large in the thinking of prominent education analysts and others who are alarmed by America’s long-standing achievement gaps and doubtful that K–12 schooling alone can accomplish much gap-closing due to other powerful forces in the lives of children and families. In this view, school-centric initiatives such as the federal No Child Left Behind act (NCLB) are destined to fail because they don’t start young enough and don’t address those outside forces. Instead, they urge a broader, bolder approach that includes sharply increased investment in developmentally appropriate and high-quality early childhood, preschool, and kindergarten education.⁵ Arne Duncan was among many who put their names on a recent manifesto that argued this case.

      This widening enthusiasm for universal or near-universal pre-K education is no accident. In the background, plenty of strings are being tugged and dollars spent. The Journal reporter quoted above ascribed much of the push to a well-orchestrated campaign that she traced to three individuals: the research director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, a billionaire Oklahoma oil man and a foundation executive in Philadelphia.

      The third person on that list is Susan Urahn of the $6-billion Pew Charitable Trusts, underwriter of much of the burgeoning advocacy work now underway in this field. Pew has made universal pre-kindergarten one of its top priorities, investing $50 million in this effort as of 2006. Plenty of other foundations and individual

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