RALEIGH – Three months ago, I wrote a column arguing that North Carolina should direct its educational dollars towards parental-choice programs rather than large-scale preschool interventions, if the goal is to maximize return on our tax dollars.
I knew that dogged defenders of Gov. Jim Hunt’s Smart Start and Gov. Mike Easley’s More at Four would cry foul. They did. After the syndicated version of my column appeared in newspapers across the state, I got far more – and more heated – reader comments than in the typical week. Some accused me of ignoring studies of the famous Perry Preschool and Abecedarian experiments. That’s incorrect – I questioned why these studies, involving a few dozen severely disadvantaged children, should be thought to outweigh the preponderance of empirical evidence showing the lack of long-term benefits from government programs serving tens or hundreds of thousands of students.
Others simply argued that I was “against children” or “against teachers” or other such garbage. As the parent of children and the child of public schoolteachers, I don’t feel the need to restate the obvious every time I express an opinion on how to improve educational outcomes.
I’ve said many times that I believe there is a case for a state role in preschool intervention. But it should be a limited role, focused on assisting the severely disadvantaged preschoolers for which an Abecedarian-like program might have significant long-term benefits. Such a program – call it “Much More At Four, But For Fewer” – would cost far less than $400 million a year, allowing the state to shift money into parental-choice programs with a better chance of success.
Readers who want to learn more about the preschool-intervention debate would be well-advised to check out a forum in the latest edition of the journal EducationNext. It’s a Q&A with two leading voices in the debate: Doug Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute and Craig Ramey, a Georgetown professor and a founding director of the Abecedarian Project in Chapel Hill. While the two disagreed on a number of points, I found their points of agreement to be of even-greater interest.
Both, for example, criticized politicians and activists for exaggerating the benefits likely to be obtained from state preschool programs. Besharov observed that even the cost-benefit numbers often cited from Perry and Abecedarian are inflated by errors of reporting and classification. Ramey, while not directly answering Besharov’s charge, suggested that advocates promise something like $1.40 in benefits for every $1 spent on targeted preschool programs – Smart Start was sold during Hunt’s third term with preposterous promises of many times that payoff per dollar – and then added that “a similarly high rate of return is unlikely for most current and proposed pre-K programs because many of the children being served have relatively low levels of risk for school failure, placement in special education, later criminal behavior, or failure to become economically self-sufficient in adulthood.”
Such children would include my own, who attended a day care center receiving Smart Start grants and (fingers crossed) should never have been considered at-risk. As I’ve also said before, at least Easley had the good sense to means-test his preschool program.
The other point of agreement, or at least non-disagreement, between Besharov and Ramey involved the method of delivery. The former argued that preschool programs need not occur overwhelmingly in public schools or be run as local government monopolies. Lack of quality control is a key reason why state preschool interventions don’t deliver on their promise, and it stands to reason that when only one provider is authorized to deliver preschool services in a given area, there’s not a lot of pressure on it to maintain high performance.
Ramey didn’t try to defend the status quo. “I favor competitive market-driven approaches alongside publicly funded initiatives, as long as all of these are held publicly accountable using the same standards and measures of performance and benefits,” he said, going on to mention options such as “adequately funded vouchers, substantial tax credits, public-private partnership programs, and parent participatory contributions to early childhood programs.” Sounds good to me.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.