Archive for the ‘Education and Child Policy’ Category
Obama Ringing the Pell
As part of his ill-considered credentialing-to-compete initiative, President Obama wants to greatly increase both the size and availablity of Pell Grants. Under his proposed FY 2011 budget, the total pot of Pell aid would rise from $28.2 billion in 2009 to $34.8 billion in 2011; the maximum award would go from $5,350 to $5,710; and the number of students served would rise by around 1 million.
A critical question, of course, is whether increasing Pell will ultimately make college more affordable or self-defeatingly fuel further tuition inflation. The New York Times took that up in yesterday’s Room for Debate blog.
Economist Richard Vedder has long educated people about the inflationary effect of student aid, and does so again with great clarity. It’s higher-ed analyst Art Hauptman, however, whom I think best captures what likely occurs when Pell is combined with all the cheap loans and other aid furnished by Washington, states, and schools themselves:
Read the rest of this post »
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy
Charters No Substitute for Private Innovation
I wrote about this private school in South Carolina last year. The Voice for School Choice has a new video highlighting the great work of the Eagle Military Academy, which works with many kids the public schools cannot or will not educate.
There’s a lot of talk lately about the transformative power of some charter schools, and it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that many secular and religious private schools have been saving kids all along with no public funds and little or no recognition from the elite opinion class.
We need to open up choice to these schools as well, not just public charter schools that cannot provide the breadth and depth of experiences offered by private schools.
Public charter schools are no substitute for full school choice through education tax credits.
The College Earnings Premium — Why It’s Meaningless
The WSJ reports today on the average lifetime earnings advantage conferred by a college degree. This statistic is probably worse than useless. “College” isn’t a single thing, and its benefits will not likely be enjoyed equally by every single student, even those pursuing precisely the same degrees.
For a college earnings premium figure to be of any value to policymakers or prospective college students, it would be necessary to break it down by field and by student characteristics. What’s the premium difference, for instance, between workers who majored in engineering, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, economics, etc., compared to those who majored in communications, art history, social work, multicultural studies, etc.? A similar breakdown of interest would be by SAT score.
These breakdowns would help people to make better informed decisions. An overall earnings premium estimate may well be worse than nothing: leading to great over- or underestimates for the value of a particular college degree to a particular student.
Politicians Are SO Predictable!
The big vote-buy is on!
Today, the Obama administration will release its FY 2011 budget proposal, and while the administration would supposedly freeze discretionary spending in all areas except defense, homeland security, and veteran’s affairs, education is slated to get a huge boost in “investment.” (Politicians love the term “investment” when discussing education spending, by the way, because it suggests a big payoff to come. That we’ve never actually realized said payoff doesn’t seem to bother them.) The proposal is expected to include a $3 billion increase for No Child Left Behind-authorized programs; $1 billion for some sort of incentive to overhaul NCLB (it’s not clear how the president can offer Congress extra money to act, but I’m sure there are details to come); a $1.35 billion extension of the stimulus-funded Race to the Top fund; and a $17 billion increase in Pell Grant funding. In other words, education appears slated — as I feared it would — to be the administration’s post-Massachusetts, big vote bribe.
At the same time the budget proposal is coming out, the administration is also starting to release information about it’s plans for NCLB reauthorization. According to the New York Times, the basic idea will be to “change federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students.”
On the surface, it makes sense to reward high performance rather than just send money to states based on set formulas. But a little deeper digging reveals the pit below.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Teachers Union Channels Teen Talk Barbie
“Math class is tough!” –Teen Talk Barbie
Political scientist Jay Greene bravely decided to read the new NEA paper that is billed as showing that “Teachers Take ‘Pay Cut’ as Inflation Outpaces Salaries. Average teachers’ salaries declined over the past decade.”
But a funny thing happened when he reviewed the study: it didn’t support the NEA’s own claim. Here’s Jay:
The only problem is that this is not what the data in the NEA report actually show. In Table C-14 “Percentage Change in Average Salaries of Public School Teachers 1998-99 to 2008-09 (Constant $)” we see that salaries increased by 3.4% nationwide over the last decade after adjusting for inflation…. I can’t find a single table or figure in the report that would justify the headline and claims in the press release. But when the Ministry of Truth speaks, who are you supposed to believe — them or your lying eyes?
Of course the real reason that public school labor costs have risen so much in the past 40 years is not that salaries have skyrocketed, but that employment has. We now have 70% more staff per student than we did in 1970, and students’ scores are not a whit better for it at the end of high school.
Would the NEA be happy if we gave every teacher a raise but returned to the staff/student ratio of 1970? I doubt it. It would drastically cut the union’s dues revenues.
In any event, the union’s impact through collective bargaining, as I wrote in the Cato Journal recently, appears to be negligible. Where they make a difference is in effective lobbying to preserve the existing government education monopoly. The monopoly is great for public school employee unions, but lousy for kids, parents, and taxpayers.
How the Washington Post Covers Education
Yesterday, the president proposed yet another big increase in federal education spending. The Washington Post quoted ”senior White House officials” as saying that the spending would boost “the nation’s long-term economic health.”
I sent the story’s authors a blog post laying out the evidence that higher government spending hasn’t raised student achievement, and that if you don’t boost achievement, you don’t accelerate economic growth.
Today, there is an updated version of the original WaPo story. It no longer mentions the stated goal of the spending increase. It doesn’t mention that boosting gov’t spending has failed to raise achievement, and so will fail to help the economy.
But it does cite a single non-government source for comment on the president’s plan: the Committee for Education Funding. The Committee is described by the Post as “prominent education advocates,” and as an organization that “represents dozens of education groups.”
Here’s how the CEF itself measures its accomplishments: “The… Committee [has] been very successful in championing the cause of increasing federal educational investment. Through strong advocacy… [it has] won bipartisan support for over $100 billion in increased federal education investment over the last five years.” Its members, if you haven’t guessed already, include virtually every public school employee organization you can name, including, of course, the national teachers unions.
That’s the source, the one source, the Washington Post asked to weigh in on a new federal education spending gambit.
I asked the author of the revised version of the story to comment for this blog post. At the time of this writing, I’ve received no response.
Less Is More in Education Funding
Spend more money on education, the President says? Actually, we should be looking there for savings . . . here are some of the numbers:
State governments spent 35 percent of their general funds on K–12 education in 2007, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. In contrast, Medicaid — which is continually singled out as a problematic state-budget item, even though most Medicaid funds come from the federal government — accounted for just 17 percent of general-fund expenditures. Combined, state and local governments spend 27 cents of every dollar they collect on public K–12 education system, but only 8 cents on Medicaid.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Bipartisan Badness?
As I wrote last week, I had a bad feeling that President Obama would turn to education bribe — er — “reform” after last Tuesday’s bombshell election, and it seems I was right to be afraid — very afraid. It’s an area where Republicans have been all too happy over the last decade or so to let big government in despite its undeniable record of failure, and it will give the President a terrific chance to look like a new, “bipartisan” man. Fortunately, many progressive Democrats dislike extremely intrusive federal education laws like No Child Left Behind, so while the battle lines over what the president is likely to propose for K-12 education will probably be different than we’ve seen over the last year, hopefully the opposition will be just as strong. And when it comes to some efforts Mr. Obama is likely to highlight in higher education — even more federal spending and a complete takeover of student lending — Republicans will likely offer much more unified resistance. In other words, fighting the awful proposals we’re likely to hear about in tonight’s State of the Union won’t be easy, but it won’t be impossible, either.
President to Call for Big New Ed. Spending.
Here’s a Look at How that’s Worked in the Past
According to the Washington Post, “President Obama will propose a major increase in funding for elementary and secondary education for the coming year in Wednesday’s State of the Union address.” This, “senior White House aides said… fits into a broader effort by the administration to focus scarce resources on the nation’s long-term economic health.”
Give kids a better education and they’ll be more successful when they ultimately enter the workforce. Sounds plausible enough. And if you dig into the scholarly research you find that, lo and behold, it’s actually true. Nations that improve student achievement the most end up with faster economic growth.
But that leaves us with one important question: does higher government education spending raise academic achievement? At the risk of stepping on Ross Perot’s toes, let’s pull out the charts.
The Case of the Missing Evidence
Last fall, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a lawsuit against Arizona’s K-12 scholarship donation tax credit program. Under the program, citizens can donate to non-profit organizations that help families pay for private school tuition, and in return, the donors receive a dollar-for-dollar tax cut. The 9th Circuit, ruled that the program violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, because many taxpayers choose to donate to religious scholarship-granting organizations whose scholarships are only usable at religious schools. This, in the Court’s view, meant that the program unconstitutionally favored religious scholarship-seeking parents over secular ones.
Supporters of the program will soon be appealing this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. They’re very likely to win, for a variety of reasons. Foremost among them, the Establishment Clause forbids only governments from favoring religion, but imposes no similar limit on individual citizens. It is for this reason that charitable tax deductions can be claimed for donations to both religious and secular charities without running afoul of the First Amendment — even if taxpayers overwhelmingly choose to donate to religious charities.
In rereading the original complaint, I noticed something interesting: even if the 9th Circuit’s misconstrual of the Establishment Clause were correct, plaintiffs still wouldn’t have a case. That’s because the evidence they presented did not — and still does not — support their claim that secular parents have been at a comparative disadvantage in obtaining scholarships. To see why, read on….
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Law and Civil Liberties; Tax and Budget Policy
Is “Race to the Top” Handwriting on the Wall?
As freedom-minded folks have been celebrating major setbacks for Obama Care, campaign-speech control, and lots of other attacks on liberty, some have been sounding the alarm over the insidious “Race to the Top” contest. A couple of siren blasts I just caught are well worth taking in yourself, one by the Heartland Institute’s Robert Holland and the other by Colorado Board of Education member Peggy Littleton. In particular, the writers think they see the handwriting on the wall in the de facto requirement that states promise to adopt as-yet-unwritten “common” (read: national) standards to compete for RTTT funds. As Littleton writes:
We already know that the federal government, or at the least consortiums of states, wants to develop assessments to assess the Common Core. The scary progression continues… National Common Core, common assessment, will inevitably lead to a national curriculum.
Is nationalizing — and thereby federalizing — the curriculum the Obama administration’s goal? RTTT sure as heck makes it seem that way, but we should have an even better idea soon: the administration wants Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act this year.
And so it may be coming to pass: Perhaps, ironically, because of this week’s revolt against Washington, we might be heading for another power grab by Washington. And this time, we shouldn’t expect anything close to unanimous Republican help fending it off.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Government and Politics
Are We Mad about SAFRA?
This morning I mused about whether yesterday’s Massachusetts miracle would curb the drive to have the feds take over K-12 education. In particular, I wondered if the president’s new proposal to extend the “Race to the Top” – and as part of that directly connect local districts to the feds –will meet an almost immediate demise as legislators dive frantically to avoid the backlash against ever-expanding federal power.
My hope is that it will, but I’m not especially sanguine. The prospects for stemming the centralization tide are probably better today than they were yesterday, but federal education initiatives tend to have a fair amount of bipartisan support, especially if they throw money at public schools — which liberals like — as well as things like charter schools, merit pay, and “standards” that conservatives support. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama, facing hopeless prospects on health care, cap and trade, and other anger-igniters, were to propose reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act as one big Race to the Top. Incorporating both big bucks and things conservatives endorse, it would stand a pretty good chance of garnering some Republican support. And that would allow Obama to say he has learned his lesson about working with both parties while letting legislators head back home declaring that they’d done something “for the children.”
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; General; Government and Politics
School Choice Advocates: Beware Washington
The Brookings Institution will release a new school choice policy guide on February 2nd, and from the sound of it, children, parents, taxpayers, and the authors themselves should be concerned. The guide will provide:
a series of practical and novel recommendations for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including national chartering of virtual education providers; expanding the types of information collected on school performance; providing incentives for low-performing school districts to increase choice and competition; and creating independent school choice portals to aid parents in choosing between schools.
The goals these recommendations are meant to achieve are entirely laudable, but there are three reasons for serious concern:
1) The Constitution delegates to the federal government no power to provide or regulate education services, except in the execution of its explicitly enumerated powers. So the Supreme Court can ensure that state education programs abide by the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, but Congress cannot “charter virtual education providers.” Of course the federal government has been transgressing the limits on its education powers for more than half a century, but no one who supports the rule of law can condone that transgression, much less its expansion.
2) From a regulatory standpoint, Washington is the worst level of government at which to implement an education program. National education programs impose a single set of rules on every participating provider in the country. Get those rules wrong — either up front or down the road — and you not only hobble the effectiveness of every single provider, but you eliminate the possibility of comparing outcomes between providers operating under different sets of rules. In essence you lose the ability to distinguish between different “treatments” — to determine what helps and what is harmful to the service’s overall success.
3) We have ample evidence about the quality of education programs implemented by the federal government. For example, after 45 years and $166 billion, Head Start has just been proven entirely ineffective. (See also the NCLB paper linked to in “1)”, above). Once again, this problem is exacerbated by the all-encompassing nature of federal programs. Get them wrong and you get them wrong for every participating student, everywhere in the country. With variation in programs among states, by contrast, we not only have the ability to compare the merits of alternative approaches, we have powerful incentives for states to get their programs right. Just as tax competition drives businesses from one state or nation to another, so, too, can education policy competition. States with better policies will attract businesses and more mobile residents from states with worse ones, eventually compelling the inferior policy states to redress their errors. We’re just beginning to see the prospects for this now, as school choice programs proliferate and grow at the state level, and introducing national programs that might well interfere with this process would be a disastrous mistake.
I hope that school choice advocates, including those who have contributed to the forthcoming Brookings report, will weigh these concerns.
Can Scott Brown’s Election Stop the Federal Takeover…of Education?
Yesterday, I wrote about President Obama’s proposal to extend the Race to the Top program, this time letting school districts completely bypass state governments and apply directly to the feds for funding. I pointed out that the proposal was one among several troubling signs that Obama intends to put Washington fully — and, of course, unconstitutionally — in charge of American education. At the time, I didn’t realize how right I was.
When I was writing yesterday I was basing my comments on documents from the White House’s website and hadn’t yet read the details of what went on at the President’s photo-op announcing the proposed extension. I sure wish I had: At the dog-and-pony show, the President just came right out and said that he wants to push aside states — mentioned by name was famous holdout Texas — that dared to invoke the Constitution and not participate in a program that was, Constitution or no Constitution, supposed to be voluntary.
“Innovative districts like the one in Texas whose reform efforts are being stymied by state decision-makers will soon have the chance to earn funding to help them pursue those reforms,” intoned the President.
Fortunately, Texas Governor Rick Perry wasn’t about to be cowed: “I will say this very slow so they will understand it in Washington, D.C.: Texas will fight any attempt by the federal government to take over our school system.”
So it’s pretty certain now, more so even than just 24 hours ago: President Obama wants to federalize American education.
Thankfully, a lot can clearly happen in 24 hours. Yesterday’s election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts could very well send shockwaves of fear through the ranks of Democratic (and maybe even Republican) legislators in DC, who might finally get the message that Americans just don’t like federal takovers. Heck, perhaps even the President will get the message. If so, then maybe even something as relatively small as a $1.35-billion scalpel designed to cut through states and get right at districts could be seen as too dangerous to handle.
That’s speculation, of course, but we should know a lot more in just, oh, the next 24 hours.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Government and Politics
Race to Domination
Today’s the day that states must submit their applications to the U.S. Department of Education to compete for round-one “Race to the Top” grants. But no worries if your state’s a little behind: Not only will there be another application round for the $4.35-billion dash-for-cash, but as President Obama announced today, he wants a $1.35-billion sequel to what was supposed to be a one-time, stimulus-funded contest.
The important question, of course, is whether sponsoring this race is worthwhile for federal taxpayers. The clear answer is no.
Sure, in response to RttT states have been raising charter-school caps, allowing teachers to be evaluated using student performance, and instituting other changes, but they’ve done little of real substance. Just raising caps won’t make it much easier to get good, competitive charter schools since most of the charter-supply problem revolves around over-regulation and painful authorization processes. And while states have eliminated prohibitions on using student test results to evaluate teachers, they haven’t done much to actually base teacher evaluations on student performance or other meaningful metrics.
What has RttT done that is of substance? Unfortunately, push yet more power into federal hands, forcing states and districts to jump through all manner of hoops for a chance to get back some of their citizens’ money. Indeed, it is becoming painfully clear that President Obama intends to put Washington firmly above the states in the hierarchy of education power.
For his $1.35 billion RttT expansion, President Obama plans to allow districts to directly compete for federal funding, bypassing states completely. And then there’s his crusade for national curricular standards. His administration has been talking up “common” standards since almost day one, and in the ”fact sheet“ accompanying the RttT expansion announcement the first bullet states that RttT emphasizes “designing and implementing rigorous standards and high-quality assessments, by encouraging states to work jointly toward a system of common academic standards.”
Don’t be fooled, by the way, by the “states” working “jointly” thing, or utterly unbelievable administration denials. If the feds are paying states to adopt common standards then those standards will be de facto federal. Either that, or the feds will let states adopt any old joint standards and still get paid. Six of one bad thing, half dozen of the other…
Thankfully, there is resistance to Obama’s bribe-to-the-top scheme. Texas, most notably, has refused to participate in RttT, with Gov. Rick Perry declaring that ”we would be foolish and irresponsible to place our children’s future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special interest groups thousands of miles away in Washington.” And Texas is not alone: According to a New York Times article appearing yesterday, states and districts around the country are refusing to put on their track shoes and run for the federal funds.
Still, federal money — taxpayer money — can be a tough thing for any elected offical to turn down. Sooner or later, if we let him, Obama will almost certainly find an amount that no state or district can resist.
Vermont’s Education Spending
I happened to catch the January 7 State of the State speech by Gov. Jim Douglas of Vermont on C-SPAN. It was a sober and serious presentation that laid out the facts about higher taxes and excessive spending, which are problems in just about every state.
Douglas on excessive education staffing Vermont:
Since 1997, school staffing levels have increased by 23 percent, while our student population has decreased by 11.5 percent. The number of teacher’s aides has gone up 43 percent. The number of support staff has gone up 48 percent. For every four fewer students a new teacher, teacher’s aide or staff person was hired. There are 11 students for every teacher – the lowest ratio in the country – and a staggering five students for every adult in our schools. With personnel costs accounting for 80 percent of total school spending, it’s no wonder that our K-12 system is among the most expensive in the nation at $14,000 per student per year.
Current staffing and compensation levels cannot be maintained as the student count continues to decline. If we simply move from our current 11 to 1 student/teacher ratio to 13 to 1, we would still have one of the lowest ratios in the country, while saving as much as $100 million. If we want to make education costs sustainable, we must return balance to classrooms. I propose that over four years we bring our statewide student/teacher ratio to affordable levels.
Douglas on excessive education bureaucracy:
Our school governance structures are a vestige of the 19th century and, like our unsustainable personnel costs, must be reformed. We have 290 separate school districts –- one for every 312 students –- 63 different supervisory bodies and a State Board of Education. That’s a total of 354 different education governing bodies for a state with only 251 towns.
Douglas on education financing:
At the root of our education funding challenge is a system that’s substantially eroding local control. Each year the connection between your school budget vote and your property tax bill becomes more and more distant. . . our education funding regime has grown into an unmanageable maze of exemptions, deductions, prebates, rebates, cost-shifts and hidden funding sources. Overlapping rings of complexity keep all but a few experts from understanding the many moving pieces. This is not good tax policy, not good government, and, if you ask most Vermonters, not good for much of anything. It’s time to pull back the curtains and let the sun shine in on how education is funded. Transparency – Who is paying? What are we paying for? What are the results?
Douglas on excessive education regulations:
Currently, Vermont schools are prohibited by law from accessing out-of-state distance learning programs … If a school sought to provide a new Chinese program for this student, or even a group of students, they would have to hire a new teacher with the expertise – a costly step. Allowing students to access approved distance learning programs from around the country is a simple, affordable change we can make to improve quality.
Excessive staffing, complex bureaucracy, complex financing, and excessive regulation are problems in government education systems across the country. There is no better time than today, when states have large budget gaps, to tackle these chronic problems.
So kudos to Douglas. His speech was a contrast to that of Colorado’s Gov. Bill Ritter, who followed him on C-SPAN uttering the usual lofty but vacuous speech we expect of most politicians.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
But Wait, There’s Less! [Head Start Unravels Further]
I’d missed something about the new Head Start Impact Study until this morning. It reports 44 cognitive test results, only one two of which were statistically significant at the end of 1st grade. The thing is, a certain number of apparently significant results are to be expected merely by chance, and the probability of these false positives grows in proportion to the number of tests you report.
Statisticians use a variety formulas to control for the expected proliferation of false positives when multiple results are reported, and even if we apply a very forgiving control (the Dubey and Armitage-Parmar procedure with an assumed average correlation among results of .8), the two marginally “significant” Head Start result become, you guessed it, insignificant. (If we were to apply the very conservative Bonferroni correction, these marginal results would be savagely beaten, buried in concrete, and dropped into the Mariana Trench.)
In short, this very high quality study of a very large national sample of students reveals absolutely no evidence of statistically significant cognitive benefits to Head Start at the end of first grade. None.
To their considerable credit, the authors acknowledge this issue in footnote 99 on page 6-2 of the full report, linked above, and in the notes to their results tables in section 4 of the report, on cognitive outcomes. Indeed when they apply their own choice of control for false positives due to multiple tests (Benjamini-Hochberg), they, too, find that none of the cognitive effects holds up. Kudos.
Fairfax Schools to Get More Money, District Claims Penury
Washington Post ed columnist/reporter Jay Mathews had a great post the other day in response to some WaPo coverage of supposedly catastrophic cuts to the Fairfax County school budget. He rightly notes, “the end-of-the-world reactions from Fairfax County parents in my colleague Petula Dvorak’s latest column are so divorced from reality as to be comical.”
Oh, it is funny, but not ha-ha funny. It’s more a makes-you-want-to-cry kind of funny. Consider:
- Fairfax aims spend 1.4 percent more per-pupil in 2011 according to their Operating Fund total, which includes the vast majority of total spending and core services.*
- Total per-pupil spending increased 20 percent in constant dollars between 2000 and 2010.
- Using Washington Area Boards of Education (WABE) total expenditure figures, Fairfax spent over $15,300 per student in 2010. Per-pupil spending remains higher than in FY 2006.**
It is difficult to see how increasing the per-pupil budget in the midst of an economic crisis and no inflation can be construed by district officials as “dramatic spending reductions,” or “devastating.”
The Fairfax County school superintendent claims that nearly 600 positions will be cut. Why? Why do they need to cut hundreds of positions when their per-pupil budget is increasing? From what baseline is he measuring these cuts?
These facts and statements do not reconcile. I have emails and voicemails in to officials, and I am eager to hear how they explain all of this.
*Their proposed budget document does not seem to contain an identifiable total expenditure figure. The Fund totals cannot be summed because of unnoted double-counting — because, well, who cares how much we’re spending overall, right? A query has been sent to officials, who need additional time to determine if their budget document can be used to calculate total spending for the budget and to provide me with a total spending figure.
**The WABE listed per-pupil figure leaves out some k-12 spending and provides a number that is significantly less than that in more comprehensive state records or that can be compiled from the district budgets, so I’ve divide the total expenditures listed on p.23 by the enrollment to get the real total per-pupil spending.
How the Media Are Covering ‘Head Start’s’ Failure
A day after it was released, here’s a roundup of how the mainstream media are covering the HHS study showing that America’s $100 billion plus investment in Head Start is a failure:
[...crickets...]
Nada. Zilch. Rien du tout, mes amis.
That’s based on a Google News search for ["Head Start" study]. The only media organs to touch on this topic so far have been blogs: Jay Greene’s, The Heritage Foundation’s, the Independent Women’s Forum, and the one you’re reading right now.
Okay. There was one exception. According to Google News, one non-blog — with a print version no less — covered this story so far. The NY Times? The Washington Post? Nope: The World, a Christian news magazine. And they actually did their homework, linking to this recent and highly relevant review of the research on pre-K program impacts.
And for those other publications in the MSM still standing at the edge of the pool: the water’s warm folks, c’mon in.
What’s really interesting, though, is that the HHS had the moral fibre to actually issue a press release about this damning study. That showed courage — and a certain panache. I particularly liked this, from HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: “Research clearly shows that Head Start positively impacts the school readiness of low-income children.”
Umm, yes Ms. Secretary, but the same research shows those effects vanish by the end of first grade. I guess that information is on a need-to-not-know basis. The public needs to not know about it or the administration hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in Kauai of getting American tax payers to throw another $100 billion or so at government pre-K, as President Obama is so very keen to do.
Update:
In my original review of the coverage on this story I missed the blog that first broke the story: Early Ed Watch at the New America Foundation. One thing that distinguishes New America’s supporters of big government pre-k programs from those in the Obama administration is that the former have a good grasp of the implications of this study, writing that: “The next few weeks are probably going to be rocky ones for the Head Start community. Results released today from the Impact Study show that children’s gains from participating in Head Start, documented in a 2005 installment of the study, do not last through the end of 1st grade.”
But if the folks at the NAF recognize this reality, that begs an important question: will they now redirect their efforts to the support of programs whose benefits for disadvantaged children actually grow in magnitude the longer kids stay in school, or will they continue to push for programs like Head Start that have been proven costly failures?
Head Start EPIC FAIL
Andrew’s earlier post is a great overview of the context for the Head Start findings.
I thought we should also highlight the description of the Head Start Impact Study findings in the report itself (p.215/4-31):
Looking at effects on participants does not change the overall patterns found in the main analysis, which show that Head Start improved children’s language and literacy development during the program year but not later and had only one strongly confirmed impact on math ability in a negative direction. (For the 3-year-old cohort, kindergarten teachers reported poorer math skills for children in the Head Start group than children in the control group.)
This is a devastating report for proponents of government-run early childhood initiatives.
It’s past time we turn to the education reform that has proven itself through multiple random-assignment studies; school choice.
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