The Aministration seeks to Educate Your Toddler no Matter the Evidence
President Obama and his technocrats like to claim they're guided by "the science," but then what to make of his State of the Union call for taxpayer-funded preschool for "every child in America"?
A threshold cost-benefit question: if the regular public schools aren't working - the President also proposed a new program "to redesign America's high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy" - does it make sense to layer on another defective education level, except earlier in life? But never mind.
Mr. Obama claimed that "study after study" showed every dollar of pre-Kindergarten "investment" saves seven dollars later on, through better student performance, graduation rates and the like. Keep this man away from a stock portfolio, let alone the social sciences.
In December, Mr. Obama's own Health and Human Services Department released an evaluation of Head Start, the 47-year-old program for low-income toddlers, and concluded that any cognitive gains disappeared by the third grade. HHS had sat on the legally mandated study for more than a year.
Most other academic studies have also found early educational intervention "fade out" and that these programs rarely achieve what they promise. Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution wrote Wednesday that the available studies supporting universal pre-K were "thin empirical gruel." Researches at the Heritage Foundation and the conservative sociologist Charles Murray have come to similiar conclusions. This is about as close to an intellectual policy consensus as Washington gers.
Through Mr. Obama's universal pre-K agenda seemed to emerge from nowhere, it goes back to his 2008 campaign platform that included a "zero-to-five" education plan that "begins at birth." It's further proof that liberals measure government success not by results, but by good intentions and how much government spends.
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