RALEIGH – North Carolina is supposedly a “national leader” in early childhood programs. Former Gov. Jim Hunt came up with a catchy name, “Smart Start,” for what has become a $200 million subsidy program for day cares and other service providers. In Charlotte, a program created by the outgoing public school superintendent Eric Smith known as “Bright Beginnings” (again with the alliterative name) has garnered bipartisan support for its attempt to direct resources to intervening early with at-risk preschoolers in the Queen City.
The idea of compelling most taxpayers (including those with their own children to take care of) to subsidize the day-care arrangements of some would not, by itself, have a great deal of political valence. After all, despite mythology to the contrary, most North Carolina families do not make any significant use of paid day care, either in centers or in day-care homes. The vast majority of infants are cared for by mothers, fathers, grandparents, or other relatives; even most older preschoolers are not full-timers in paid care.
In order to sell preschool programs to the general public, you have to argue that “investing” in them will pay off in the future in the form of higher educational achievement, lower welfare spending, lower crimes rates, etc. There are studies that find these kinds of impacts, but unfortunately for preschool advocates they are primarily from laboratory experiments in university settings that have been difficult to replicate out in the real world.
Smart Start, for example, has had some preliminary analysis by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at UNC-Chapel Hill (a friendly evaluator, by the way). You can click on this link here to read my summary of the findings. Basically, the measurable educational gains are nonexistent or so small that it is unlikely they will be sustained over time.
Now we have word, care of a Charlotte Observer story yesterday (click here), that supporters of Bright Beginnings are trying to manipulate the test preparation of third-graders who had spent time in the program in order to claim success. Obviously, if the at-risk children going through Bright Beginnings are identified to teachers, and the latter are encourage to give them extra attention in preparing for standardized tests, any use of such tests to sell the program to politicians would be nothing less than a fraud on taxpayers.
It looks like teachers upset about this practice have spilled the beans. I’ve not previously been a big foe of Bright Beginnings (as least as when comparing it to Smart Start, a program not targeted to at-risk children and not designed to accomplish its purported objective) but the latest news instills no confidence in any future claims of success. North Carolina’s largest school district has money problems to address, and has probably just found a good place to achieve budgetary efficiency.