RALEIGH – If the North Carolina General Assembly and the Easley administration made their fiscal decisions on the basis of empirical evidence, they wouldn’t be proposing to spend nearly $400 million on Smart Start and More at Four next year. Instead, they’d spend the money on programs with a reasonable likelihood of boosting educational attainment among at-risk children, such as school choice.
Longtime Raleigh watchers will remember that the biggest selling point for former Gov. Jim Hunt’s Smart Start program was that it would improve readiness to learn among the state’s preschoolers. By attending higher-quality day care centers, they would arrive in kindergarten with better language, math, and social skills than their older siblings had. This up-front investment would pay off in higher academic performance and graduation rates, and consequently lower rates of crime, unemployment, and welfare dependency.
Smart Start went statewide in the mid-1990s. The earliest year that Smart Start participants would show up in the state’s National Assessment of Educational Progress scores would be 2000 (for 4th-graders).
About that time, of course, Gov. Mike Easley was winning election for the first time, and feeling a little rhyme envy. Hunt owned Smart Start. So Easley proposed More at Four. The notion, again, was that spending state dollars up-front on disadvantaged preschoolers would pay off in academic gains later, thus saving taxpayers money in the long run by reducing the deleterious consequences of educational failure.
The bills authorizing both Smart Start and More at Four required the state to contract for research tracking the effectiveness of the programs over time. It was a sound idea, but in both cases appears to have fallen by the wayside. Former participants are not being compared against a control group to see if early gains in readiness to learn are translating into more learning through the K-12 years. The reason? Based on past experience, it is rather unlikely that either Smart Start or More at Four has actually made a lasting impact on student performance. Studies would reveal this well-known fade-out phenomenon in North Carolina. So the studies won’t be done.
Lacking such research, we can at least eyeball the state’s testing trends to see if there is any evidence supporting the original promise of Smart Start. There isn’t. North Carolina posted some of the largest test-score gains in the nation during the early to 1990s, before the state invested heavily in preschool programs. But from 2000 to 2007, North Carolina lagged the national average, particularly among students eligible for free or reduced school lunch. For example, combining the changes in reading, math, and science scores during the period, North Carolina’s 4th-grade scale scores showed a net improvement of 10 points while the nation as a whole improved by 22 points. For poor and low-middle-income students, the disparity was even bigger: North Carolina posted a 12-point gain while the national average improved by 30 points.
Contrary to popular impression, there has never been good evidence for the notion that preschool intervention explains differences in educational attainment. America spends a lot more on preschool education than most industrialized countries do, and our elementary students fare pretty well in international comparisons. But as American students enter secondary education, they fall behind. The so-called “inoculation effect” of preschool is theoretical, not actual. Family background and school quality swamp the effects of preschool programs.
We’d be much better off investing scarce education dollars in programs that generate measurable and lasting improvements in academic performance. School choice is one of them. According to most properly designed studies, private schools and the choice programs that help more students attend them have the effect of boosting test scores and high-school graduation rates. The improvements aren’t massive – choice activists would be well-advised not to overstate their case – but they are both statistically significant and large enough to justify the investment.
The same can’t be said for Smart Start and More and Four. It would be better to spend their combined budget of almost $400 million on tuition tax credits and scholarship assistance to extend educational opportunity to tens of thousands of low and middle-income North Carolina children. For example, Pennsylvania’s educational tax-credit program – which was just expanded by Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell – cost the state less than $40 million last year and helped some 38,000 Pennsylvania children of modest means ($50,000 in household income or less) attend schools of their choice. Wisconsin’s private-school scholarship program cost $120 million last year and helped nearly 19,000 disadvantaged students attend private schools.
North Carolina could do both and have lots of money to spare for child-care subsidies, if lawmakers set better priorities.
If.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.