We take as an article of faith that children benefit from pre-kindergarten, and have invested in universal pre-k in Georgia since 1995.
A national “preschool for all” campaign led President Barack Obama to propose spending $75 billion to expand preschool to all 4-year-olds.
Is that a wise investment?
The Cato Institute took up that question recently with a panel in Washington that asked: What do we know about the effectiveness of preschool? The disagreement among panelists, all esteemed researchers in the area, underscores the limits to what we definitively know about the value of early childhood education.
A few of the widely cited studies about the lifelong benefits of pre-k followed children who attended hothouse programs that cost more than state-run programs and provided more wraparound services to children and families.
Some studies suggest the effects of preschool on achievement diminish over time, vanishing by third grade. But it’s not clear whether children who attend pre-k lose ground over time, or their peers catch up to them.
David J. Armor, professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason University, said evaluations of the federal Head Start program found only modest impact to children. But the benefits don’t last even through kindergarten. He called for a national demonstration project that followed children at least into third grade.
Deborah A. Phillips, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University, agreed that the impact of preschool seems to erode in elementary school, but said researchers don’t really understand this so-called fade-out. It’s not that learning is lost, she said, but that students tend to converge and experience the same rate of learning whether they attended preschool or not.
That may result because k-12 schools fail to sustain the impact of preschool. Or it’s possible the lasting benefits can’t be seen in elementary school, such as higher school completion and college attendance rates.
Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, said the challenge was to invest in pre-k that “really works rather than one that simply makes us feel good. I think it is very hard to design a pre-k program for 4-year-olds that produces sustained effects.”
Former director of the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education, Whitehurst said he had hoped randomized trials around the country on curriculum interventions would create a list of what works and what doesn’t in pre-k. But the trials found virtually none of the interventions had real impact.
“I don’t how you can come away from that saying we know what to do,” Whitehurst said. “I come away saying I wish we knew what to do, but I don’t think we do.”
He cited Georgia’s universal pre-k program as an example, saying it has not led to sustained student performance over time.
In a Brookings essay, Whitehurst delves into this further, saying, “A study of universal pre-k in Georgia compared changes in Georgia’s 4th grade (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores before and after the implementation of universal pre-k with changes in the NAEP scores of students in other states in comparable periods in which universal pre-k was not introduced. … There was no overall impact on the achievement of Georgia’s 4th graders of their prior access to universal pre-k.’’
While hard to create an impact with pre-k, Whitehurst said it’s not impossible. But the impact is felt most by subgroups of kids — the most economically disadvantaged, and those from non-English speaking families. He supports targeted investments that focus on children with the greatest need, saying, “I would rather spend $10,000 a year on families in need than $5,000 a year on families of every 4-year-old.”
Panelist William T. Gormley, professor of public policy at Georgetown, cautioned that the long-term impact of pre-k has to considered against changes in the students enrolled, pointing out that Georgia’s increase in English language learners has exceeded the national average in recent years.
Gormley said quality pre-k clearly improves school readiness. The single best predictor of early verbal test scores in Tulsa — where Gormley has been tracking pre-k effectiveness — is not race, income or maternal education but whether the child participated in pre-k.
But, he said, researchers “have to roll up their sleeves to figure out why these short-term effects are declining over time.”
