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THE PROBLEM WITH PRE-K PROGRAMS: THEY DON'T WORK

Posted on: July 04, 2007

Bryan Fischer, Executive Director

My good friend Barry Peters, a strong advocate for the family and for parental choice in education, has a perceptive column in today’s Idaho Statesman on the subject of state-funded pre-K programs.

The bottom line: pre-K programs don’t work, and thus represent an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars.

Peters shows that results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the “nation’s report card,” actually show that students from states with public preschool programs score more poorly than students from states, like Idaho, who do not have such programs.

While Idaho’s overall score on the NAEP was 1009, the 39 states with public preschool programs averaged just 992.67. If pre-K programs were as essential as proponents argue, the results should have been the reverse.

Even the much vaunted Head Start program, federally funded now for 40 years, reports that its own conclusion, based on the synthesis of over 200 research projects, is that any cognitive gains Head Start students make wash out by the third grade. From that point on, it is impossible academically to distinguish between students who attended pre-K from those who did not.

Efforts will certainly resurface next year to drain taxpayer dollars from the wallets of ordinary Idahoans to fund what has proven to be a fruitless expenditure of scarce resources. Parents continue to make the best early educators of their own children, and what’s even better, they do it for love and not for money.

The IVA will continue to monitor efforts to reintroduce pre-K expansion plans at taxpayer expense, and alert you when it is time to make your voice heard.

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