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: BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog

Passionate about Pre-K

BoardBuzz was happy to see the Pre-K debate simmering over at USA Today. The paper took the pro-Pre-K stance, while Darcy Olsen of the Goldwater Institute stands against it. USA Today puts forth a number of compelling points in favor of providing Pre-Kindergarten education to students.

States have good reasons to aspire to universal preschool, especially high-quality programs with good teachers and low student-to-teacher ratios. Universal preschool can help fill a void: Poor families have access to Head Start. Well-to-do families pay for quality preschools out of their pockets. In between are lower-middle class families whose children badly need the readiness skills that preschool provides. Oklahoma educators credit their decade-old preschool program with pushing up reading and math scores in the lower grades, and with raising achievement by low-income children. Elite preschools ? such as the experimental Perry Preschool in Michigan, where researchers followed the poor and minority children who attended that school well into adulthood ? return more than $16 to society (in the form of lower crime and higher employment) for every dollar invested, according to the non-profit High/Scope Educational Research Foundation. Even decent-quality preschools produce gains in the $4 to $10 range, other researchers found.

On the other hand, a weak argument, without much sense or direction is posed by Olsen.

All but a few parents go to great lengths to seek out the best for their children. The strength of our early education system is that it can respond with as many options as there are children. For families struggling with job loss, single parenting or other challenges, federal and state governments have programs to help in hard times. It's difficult to understand, then, why so many states are pushing to add preschool to their docket of free programs. Last year, California voters overwhelmingly rejected a universal preschool plan. Three-quarters of parents, conservative and liberal, say that one parent at home is the best arrangement for their young children. The abundance of options available to families reflects the best of America. Do we really want lawmakers deciding how every 4-year-old should prepare for school? Rather than take over preschool, governments should lower taxes and adopt policies that increase parents' purchasing power and keep family decisions where they belong.

No one is proposing compulsory Pre-K. In fact, only a handful of states have compulsory kindergarten (in most states, districts have to provide it, but parents don't have to send their children). The argument that universal Pre-K will squash diversity of services is, in our view, utter nonsense. Universal voluntary Pre-K will, however, give low- and middle-income families access to high-quality Pre-K for their children -- something many of them don't have now. And if K-12 benefits by saving money, so be it Sounds like a win-win to us. For more information on the merits of Pre-K education, visit the Center for Public Education's section on Pre-Kindergarten.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on January 30, 2008 (boomark / email).