But one takeaway for me, as someone who has been in the field of education reform for decades, is that we need to stop apologizing and giving up ground because our work happens outside of the circled wagons of the education establishment. The fact is that partnering with parents instead of hiding things from them, giving parents access to the childcare setting of their choice instead of creating universal, government-managed pre-K programs, and letting parents decide where each of their children will attend school aren’t really reforms—they’re just common sense. And most people agree.

Take school choice, for example. It’s no longer a radical idea that must be wrangled with and heavily negotiated by state legislatures. Public opinion surveys repeatedly find that very few people are opposed to the idea, regardless of the type of program.

Teachers unions may have loud voices and large platforms, but that doesn’t mean that we have to set common sense aside. The idea that parents can be trusted should no longer be up for debate.

The post Why Is This Still a Debate? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Fortunately, the findings from a recent nationwide survey conducted by Gallup, the Strada Education Network, and the Lumina Foundation, suggest that a college degree isn’t necessarily the only thing that employers are interested in. Researchers looked at two types of credentials that can be earned without a college degree and measured their impact on the employability and the earning power of the people who earned them. The credentials studied were the following:

• Certificates “awarded by educational institutions for completion of professionally oriented courses that typically represent a year or less of work.”
• Certifications “awarded by independent bodies that verify specific skills and competencies through testing”

The survey looked at adults 18 to 65 years old who had no postsecondary degree and compared those who had earned a certificate/certification with those who had not. The results suggest that earning a credential offers some real benefits in terms of employment rate and income.

It’s important to note that the study involved subjects of widely varying educational levels. Some had been to college (but hadn’t earned a 4-year degree), while others hadn’t completed high school. Those who hadn’t finished high school are overrepresented in the non-credentialed group, while those who had gone to vocational/technical school are overrepresented in the credentialed group. This means that we can’t easily separate the effect of the credential from the effect of the amount of education a participant has had.

However, the study also found a benefit to having a credential among low-, middle-, and high-income earners:

There’s strong evidence that educational programs that result in students earning these certifications provide real benefits, but what does that mean for Missouri?

It could mean a lot, especially with respect to prioritizing needs when allocating the money Missouri spends on education. Credentialing programs appear to offer a positive return to students on the money invested in them. So why can’t these programs capture the imaginations of the public (and of policymakers) in the way that things like pre-K programs do—even though the case for the long-term benefits of pre-K is anything but ironclad?

Nothing against imagination, but when making spending decisions, policymakers are better off being guided by the facts. Although this survey covered adults aged 18 to 64, investing in high schoolers so they can earn industry-recognized credentials could help students leave high school qualified to enter the Missouri workforce immediately. In this case, the facts are lining up behind credentialing programs as a possible way to help Missouri’s workers and employers alike.

The post What Can Credentials Get You? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A voucher would be . . . taking public money and pouring it into a non-public entity. But pre-K doesn’t work like that and this tax doesn’t work like that. It’s not a voucher. What we are doing with pre-K instead of pouring money into [schools] from the public trough is we’re pouring more money into all of the [schools].

The mayor seems to think that money raised through a three-eighths percent sales tax is not the “public trough.” But his is a distinction without a difference; a program does not need to spend particular tax dollars in order to be considered a voucher.

It’s true, however, that many voucher programs use education dollars. National Public Radio, in an explainer piece on vouchers, said only that they are state dollars taken from “what the state would have otherwise spent to educate” children. Ed Choice, an organization that supports education vouchers, described vouchers as coming from “funds typically spent by a school district.”

Regardless of the tax source, vouchers are simply public dollars made available to families to offset the costs of the school they choose for their children, essentially functioning like a scholarship. Those public dollars can be raised from property taxes as in the case with local school funding, income taxes as in the case of federal programs, or sales taxes as in the case with the Mayor’s pre-K program. But they are all voucher programs.

It is understandable why the Mayor, in pitching his program to the education establishment, wants to avoid the term. Vouchers, and programs like it, have become toxic among public school bureaucracies since it would break their monopoly on public dollars for education. This is the main reason the public school districts in Kansas City oppose the Mayor’s proposal, but giving parents the power to choose which program is best for their kids is the strongest aspect of his plan.

Mayor James should be congratulated for recognizing and answering the demand for more and greater parental involvement in their children’s education. School choice is the trend in Kansas City and, despite its other significant shortcomings, his pre-K voucher program at least respects that.

The post Yes, the Mayor’s Pre-K Program Is a Voucher appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched the Head Start program in 1965. It was expanded in 1981 and now has a $9 billion budget. Operated in Kansas City since 2005 by MARC, the program works to provide:

Comprehensive, high-quality birth-through-five early education services that facilitate healthy development including physical and social/emotional development and prepare children for school success.

Is it working? No. According to HHS’s own 2012 report, “after the initially realized cognitive benefits for the Head Start children, these gains were quickly made up by children in the non-Head Start group.” The report indicates this finding is similar to other studies published between 1995 and 2010. 

A 2013 story in The Washington Post is a pretty even-handed write up of the value of pre-K. The author points out that extrapolating findings from the HighScope Perry study (an influential pre-k study of a small group of children in Michigan) to larger populations like Kansas City’s is highly questionable. In discussing the fade out of any initial Head Start benefit, the author wrote:

Some Head Start supporters, like Danielle Ewen, formerly of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), argue that this says more about K-12, and that what’s likely happening is that poor quality public schools are actually reversing Head Start’s gains.

If this is the case, children in the Kansas City Public School District can expect to see no long-term benefit whatsoever. Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution points not only to research on Head Start, but to large scale pre-K programs such as the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K (TVPK) program. In those follow-up studies, children in the control group soon outperformed those who received the preschool benefit.

Using the state test data and the full randomized sample, the evaluators report negative impacts for reading, math, and science scores at the end of third grade for children assigned to TVPK. The negative impacts on math and science are statistically significant and substantive: children randomly assigned as preschoolers to TVPK had lost ground to their peers who had randomly not been offered admission to the pre-K program.

Whitehurst revisits this in a 2018 paper in which he writes:

Unabashed enthusiasts for increased investments in state pre-K need to confront the evidence that it does not enhance student achievement meaningfully, if at all. It may, of course, have positive impacts on other outcomes, although these have not yet been demonstrated. It is time for policymakers and advocates to consider and test potentially more powerful forms of investment in better futures for children.

As we wrote in a previous post, policymakers in Kansas City may not be interested in confronting such evidence. This is especially true of Whitehurst’s observation that direct aid to families, such as the earned income tax credit (EITC), “produced substantially larger gains in children’s school achievement per dollar of expenditure than a year of preschool, participation in Head Start, or class size reduction in the early grades.” 

Designing public policy is not easy. Neither is delivering effective education on a large scale. But we need to rise to the challenge of both. As it stands, the proposal of pre-K in Kansas City is unlikely to lead to significant long-term benefits for the children involved, especially if they matriculate into underperforming K-12 schools. A program with questionable efficacy that taxes the very low-income families it is meant to help seems, on balance, to make this plan more harm than help.

The post Pre-K in Kansas City Likely Won’t Deliver on Its Promises appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Supporters for the value of pre-K point to a single preschool program, the HighScope Perry program in Ypsilanti, Michigan that ran from 1958 to 1962. The participants had been tracked over 40 years and the resulting data provide much of the basis for what supporters claim is the benefit of pre-K.

The Mid America Regional Council (MARC), which will administer the Kansas City pre-K program if approved by voters, claims in its 2018 “Status of Children and Families” report that (page 45):

Research shows that every dollar invested in early childhood education saves up to $13 in future social costs, leading to lower crime rates, fewer adults on public assistance, fewer teen pregnancies, and a stronger, more prepared workforce.

Mayor Sly James’s pre-K Implementation Plan for pre-K similarly claims (page 44):

. . . the public benefits accrued over time from children who attended HighScope Perry Preschool program in Ypsilanti, Michigan, at a rate of 13 to one.

These returns seem too good to be true. And they are. The 13-to-one return comes from a single study of the HighScope Perry plan published in 2005, which claimed:

For the general public, higher tax revenues, lower criminal justice system expenditures, and lower welfare payments easily outweigh program costs; they repay $12.90 for every $1 invested. However, program gains come mainly from reduced crime by males.

The HighScope Perry study was of 123 “low-income African-American children who were assessed to be at high risk of school failure.” Only 58 were randomly assigned “to a program group that received a high-quality preschool program at ages 3 and 4.” The high-quality program included:

• Two school years of preschool running October through May;
• A center-based program for 2.5 hours per day with “4 teachers for 20 to 25 children”;
• Home visiting for 1.5 hours per week; and
• Group meetings of parents.

Only 39 of the participants in this study were male (see footnote 3 here). In other words, Mayor James and MARC want voters to believe that a small-scale, intensive two-year education program conducted with 39 high-risk boys can be extrapolated to the more than 6,000 children in Kansas City.

Even other proponents of pre-K are more restrained in calculating possible returns. Economist and Nobel laureate James Heckman wrote in a 2017 research summary of that same HighScope Perry program (emphasis added):

Every dollar spent on high quality, birth-to-five programs for disadvantaged children delivers a 13% per annum return on investment. These economically significant returns account for the welfare costs of taxation to finance the program and survive a battery of sensitivity analyses.

As I pointed out in a recent American Public Square panel discussion about pre-K in Kansas City, the program Kansas City voters are being asked to support is nothing like the HighScope Perry program Heckman analyzed. The plan being put before voters does not have anywhere near the 5 or 6 to 1 ratio of child to teacher, will not include home visits, will not be two years, and will not spend as much per child as HighScope Perry did.

A recent blog post discussed the unimpressive findings on pre-K programs such as Head Start that more closely resemble what Kansas Citians are being offered. But using HighScope Perry’s results to pitch pre-K for all in Kansas City is nothing short of a bait and switch.

The post Kansas City’s Pre-K Bait and Switch appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On Tuesday, March 12, I appeared as a panelist on an American Public Square discussion titled “Pre-K for All?“ about the upcoming April ballot measure. Proponents of pre-K point to a single, small-scale study of a specific pre-K program conducted from 1962 to 1967. The study, called HighScope Perry, did show a positive relationship between participation in the program and educational and financial success. However, the program that was studied was intensive, expensive, and only included 123 children. While the Mayor and Mid America Regional Council (MARC) specifically cites the HighScope Perry study, the plan they endorse for Kansas City is nothing like what was done there.

Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution has written at length about the failure of larger-scale pre-K programs such as Head Start and the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K Program to generate impressive results. We’ll discuss that research more in future blog posts. But in a survey of the research on various school-readiness interventions, Whitehurst pointed out that direct aid to families, such as the earned income tax credit (EITC), “produced substantially larger gains in children’s school achievement per dollar of expenditure than a year of preschool, participation in Head Start, or class size reduction in the early grades.” That is a fascinating bit of information and should be of interest to anyone who is serious about helping low-income children.

During the panel discussion I offered, “You could do more for poor families in Kansas City by removing the sales tax on food and by exempting, say, the first $26,000 of earnings from the earnings tax. You can do more by aiding families—giving them more money in their pocket—than you can by taxing them and providing a program.”

But Mayor James was not having it. He responded, “There’s no way that you can tell me, regardless of what study you may cite,” that by reducing taxes on the poor that they, “are going to use the money to educate their children.” And maybe they won’t, but the data Whitehurst cites don’t specify how families spend the extra money. EITC funds are not earmarked, yet this direct support to low-income families still outperformed pre-K according to Whitehurst’s research.

Perhaps what low-income families need is not to have more money taken away from them in order to provide them more services. Perhaps what they need is more money, more flexibility, more agency to address their own challenges as they see fit. Perhaps telling poor people that government knows best how to spend their money and educate their children isn’t the best way to solve problems. The research (at least if we go beyond a specific study that seems cherry-picked to support a rosy view of Pre-K programs) seems to suggest this, if only policymakers will listen.

The post Pre-K Supporters Dismiss Research on Efficacy of Pre-K appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Crosby Kemper III Discusses Pre-K Funding on KCPT’s Ruckus appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Delayed Opening of New KCI and Sales Taxes To Fund Pre-K appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Details and key questions of the sales tax plan — how the money is distributed, who oversees and manages the program, how outcomes are measured — remain a work in progress.

While the details of the 3/8-cent sales tax plan remain unclear, so too are the benefits. My colleague Emily Stahly wrote in late 2016 that,

In Georgia and Oklahoma—states with universal pre-K programs—there is evidence that pre-K has reduced achievement gaps. The jury is still out in New York, which established universal pre-K only two years ago. Tennessee, on the other hand, implemented targeted pre-K for low-income children. Positive results were evident when these children entered kindergarten, but the benefits began to fade by first grade. By third grade, these students were performing worse than other students on statewide assessments.

One much-heralded study claiming big successes as a result of pre-K was perhaps oversold. Mike McShane wrote for National Review,

If you look at the table [page 8 of the study by Heckman et al.] that describes the cohort of students the authors studied, you see an initially recruited sample of 121 students. The actual “treatment” of center-based child care from ages zero to five had 53 participants in one of the two programs and 17 in the other, for a total sample of 70 students. It is a huge leap to argue that such an intensive, hothouse study of such a small sample is proof that such an intervention would work at scale.

Pre-K education makes intuitive sense, but actual research suggests that it isn’t as simple as funding a program and getting results. Sometimes it seems to work, and sometimes it doesn’t. Similarly, we agree that K–12 education is a good idea and yet recognize that not every district does a good job of offering it.

One promising aspect of the plan, according to the Star, is that the program may be set up to offer tuition assistance for families to choose their own program, including from among public and private providers. Giving decision-making power to parents will increase the likelihood that the Pre-K providers will need to produce results if they want to attract students.

In any case, there’s no need for a headlong leap of faith into a costly pre-K program. If Kansas City leaders want to once again increase an already-high sales tax rate, voters need much more detail and likely more time, to evaluate the proposal and its promise.

The post Are Sales Taxes to Fund Pre-K a Good Idea? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Mike McShane on Pre-K Effectiveness appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We here at the Show-Me Institute were very interested in Amendment 3 because the issue was so complex and multifaceted. From the funding mechanism (cigarette taxes) to the policy it would support (early childhood education) there was more to the question than met the eye.

Now the people of Missouri have spoken, and by a 60% to 40% margin (as of this moment), they soundly rejected Amendment 3.

There is much parsing of this election to be done, but I do want to offer a couple of quick reactions:

• Missouri does not like cigarette taxes. Not only did Amendment 3 fail, but so did Proposition A, a much smaller cigarette tax (by a 55% to 45% margin). These initiatives are just two in a long line of cigarette taxes that the state has voted down. At 17 cents, Missouri has one of the lowest cigarette taxes in the nation, and it appears we want to keep it that way.
• Voters can read between the lines. At first glance, it looked like Amendment 3 would win in a walk. According to Ballotpedia, the first polling on this issue back in July had the issue winning 53% to 29%. As more and more information came out and voters became more informed about the issue, that support eroded and eventually became opposition.
• Ideas matter.  Not all of the campaign finance numbers are in, but according to Ballotpedia numbers, the “Yes” campaign outspent the “No” campaign by a wide margin, $12.8 million to $5.7 million. But it was to no avail. In the end, the arguments matter more than the spending, and the proposal failed.

I don’t think we need to close the door on pre-K, though my colleague Emily Runge’s piece earlier this week has definitely caused me to temper enthusiasm for it (which I didn’t have a great deal of to begin with). We do need to think long and hard about how we structure it and pay for it.  As we argued in 20 for 2020, a voucher-based system that puts students and parents in charge is the best way to structure pre-K if we’re going to do it, and we should be skeptical of any plan that does otherwise.

The post Amendment 3 Falls, Hard appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Or, better yet, they may consider how little research there is on the matter. According to a recent article by Haley Glatter in the Atlantic, there are very few studies that thoroughly examine state-run and state-funded pre-K programs. Moreover, these studies are inconclusive on whether or not pre-K offers lasting benefits.

In Georgia and Oklahoma—states with universal pre-K programs—there is evidence that pre-K has reduced achievement gaps. The jury is still out in New York, which established universal pre-K only two years ago. Tennessee, on the other hand, implemented targeted pre-K for low-income children. Positive results were evident when these children entered kindergarten, but the benefits began to fade by first grade. By third grade, these students were performing worse than other students on statewide assessments.

Here are a few things we can take away from these states’ experiences:

• The quality of the pre-K programs offered matters immensely—not all pre-K is created equal.
• Good pre-K programs will not make up for the deficits of a failing K-12 system.
• There are only a handful of programs operating at a state-wide scale which makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions on pre-K.                                                                                                 

One of the lingering questions about Amendment 3 is what exactly the pre-K program it creates will look like. In his recent analysis of Amendment 3, the Show-Me Institute’s Michael McShane writes:

To date, it simply isn’t clear what the regulations for participating schools will be. In one sense, this uncertainty means we should probably reserve judgment, but in another it makes it hard to support a program when we don’t know what that program will ultimately look like.

On the one hand, it makes sense for us to gather as much information as we can about the effectiveness of pre-K programs before Missouri designs a program of its own. But then, does it also make sense to wait until we have a well-researched plan in place before amending the constitution and investing such a significant amount in early childhood education?

The post Is Expanding Pre-K a Good Idea? The Jury Is Still Out. appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Many people have been drawn to the discussion because of the unique political situation surrounding Amendment 3. It is a cigarette tax designed to fund pre-K education that is supported by tobacco companies and opposed by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. How can you not be interested by that?

But let’s cut through the fog. Politics are interesting and might get folks hooked, but ultimately it’s the policy that should concern us.

Backers have some solid reasons to support the proposal. Funds will be made available to both public and private providers, which would, in theory, provide a wider set of options than if funding was restricted solely to traditional public schools. Additionally, the drafters of the Amendment have taken steps to try and insulate the program from the forces of the educational status quo by requiring funds generated by the tax to be kept separate from general revenue and be managed by an independent board.

That said, there are reasons to be concerned about this proposal. While insulating the board from the pressure of interest groups is a laudable objective, it could mean that the board is less accountable to taxpayers. The amendment language also states that the board needs to be “equitable” in its distribution of funds. If you’ve even casually followed discussions of education finance in Missouri and Kansas, decades-long court cases can be fought over exactly what “equitable” means. Is this just opening a similar can of worms?

And all of this dances around the more central question: Even if we think that pre-K is something worth supporting, is a tax on cigarettes an appropriate way to fund it?  Cigarette taxes are extremely regressive. Poor people are far more likely to smoke than their richer peers, meaning that the poor will bear the brunt of the tax increase. Smoking is also on the decline, risking future revenue and raising the possibility that services will be cut or pressure will be put on the legislature to divert general revenue to subsidize the program.

For someone who doesn’t smoke but wants pre-K for their kids, Amendment 3 might seem to offer something for nothing. Unfortunately, nothing is free in this life, and someone is going to have to pick up the tab. Whether or not that “someone” should be a group disproportionately made up of economically disadvantaged people is worth considering.

The post Amendment 3: Politics are Intriguing, but Policy Matters More appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Look at all these glamorous people eating canapés and drinking champagne in their seersucker suits and sundresses! Oh, no—is that what I think it is? RUN!

If you think it’s not a great idea to fund educational programs via cigarette taxes, you can start to feel like a skunk at a garden party.

Here in the great state of Missouri, on November 8 we will vote on a constitutional amendment that would establish a 60-cent tax per pack of cigarettes to create a fund for pre-K education. Backers believe that it would generate as much at $300 million per year, which would pay for tens of thousands of Missouri children to attend pre-K. They have an impressive advertising campaign and a strong social media presence highlighting the bipartisan support they have assembled for their plan.

On one level, I am sympathetic to their cause. I understand that there are perfectly defensible reasons to support raising cigarette taxes. Smoking is terrible, and we want fewer people to do it. Raising taxes will deter them. If we can provide pre-K with the funds such a tax generates, we’re killing two birds with one stone.

But there is more to this plan than meets the eye.

The largest financial backers of the amendment campaign have been big tobacco companies. Why, you might ask, is an industry looking to increase taxes on itself? Well, paired with the 60-cent tax on all packs of cigarettes is a 67-cent surcharge on so-called “wholesale” cigarettes—cigarettes produced by “small tobacco” companies not party to the landmark tobacco settlement that required the big tobacco companies to pay states in exchange for protection against future lawsuits. Big tobacco pays right around 67 cents per pack into these funds, giving small tobacco an edge in the marketplace. This amendment would eliminate that advantage.

What’s more, many anti-smoking and cancer-fighting groups have decided to oppose the amendment. They argue that a 60-cent tax is not substantial enough to deter folks from smoking.

For those of you keeping score at home: We have a cigarette tax campaign that is funded by big tobacco companies and opposed by the American Cancer Society. If I’m a skunk at the garden party, at least I’m in good company.

Setting the parlor intrigue aside, it’s hard for me to not think that for many Missourians, the real draw here is getting something for nothing. I don’t smoke, so I would never pay this tax. Most Missourians, particularly educated and wealthy ones, don’t either, so they won’t have to pay. If the state generates enough funds, there is good reason to believe that many middle-class children of nonsmokers will get pre-K without their parents having to pay a dime.

If we think one step further though, we see the problem. Cigarette taxes are about the most regressive tax we could possibly institute. Poor people pay the brunt of them. If this tax was going to be passed in 1950, when nearly half the population smoked, it would be spread more evenly across the populace. But it is 2016, and only a specific subset of Missourians smoke. What’s worse, a lot of those people are addicted to cigarettes, and we are preying on that addiction to fund something that we want.

Look at what happened in Arkansas, which instituted a lottery in 2008 to provide scholarships for students to attend college in the state. Like cigarettes, lottery tickets are disproportionately purchased by poor people. In Arkansas, scholarship recipients are disproportionately middle- and upper-income, making the scholarship lottery a pretty clear upward transfer of wealth. Sure, it sounded great at the outset, as non—lottery ticket buying parents eyed scholarships for their kids, but on the backs of the poor? It just feels unseemly.

There are reasons to support providing scholarships to pre-K to students in the state, but the how matters. How we fund those services, how we determine who is eligible, and how we pay for them is critically important. These considerations can get lost in big promises to people with little skin in the game.

The post A Skunk at the Pre-K Garden Party for Cigarette Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“The benefits read like a laundry list of personal responsibility: more employment success, higher earnings, better health, greater education attainment, lower chances of incarceration, reduced likelihood of dropping out of high school, fewer teen pregnancies, and on and on.

Early education is good for business as well. Pre-K graduates show up on time, ready for work and with a temperament essential for work place success. They also possess confidence, curiosity and a greater sense of purpose, all of which will help the private sector’s bottom line…”

In short, next time I’m running late, I’ll just tell my boss, “Sorry, I didn’t go to preschool.” That ought to get me off the hook.

Preschool supporters like Schoemehl have good intentions, but often make the mistake of talking about preschool as if it’s some kind of cure-all. That just isn’t the case. While it’s true that preschool can offer some benefits for low-income students, creating a quality program is difficult. When preschool programs are constructed, they usually import some of the worst problems of our public K-12 system.

In a recent study, Vanderbilt University’s Peabody Research Institute performed an independent evaluation of the state’s Voluntary Prekindergarten program (TN-VPK). TN-VPK offers a full-day prekindergarten option for four-year-olds. The program focuses on the neediest children in the state.

Despite previous findings that showed that the Tennessee prekindergarten program was successful in producing improvements in academic skills by kindergarten, Vanderbilt found that there were no statistically significant differences between TN-VPK participants and nonparticipants by the end of first grade. Brookings Institution senior fellow Russ Whitehurst called the results “devastating for advocates of the expansion of state pre-K programs.”

In his letter, Schoemehl wasn’t necessarily advocating for a state-based program, “If we want our children to grow into responsible adults, then our kids need better options and those options need to start at birth,” he said. Schoemehl is right about one thing—options are key.

A targeted, market-driven program could deliver at least some of the results Schoemehl discussed, though no preschool model is a silver bullet. Missouri already has a large private preschool market. A voucher program that allows parents to choose the option that makes sense for their work schedules and children’s needs is a far better method of expanding access to early childhood education than simply adding a grade to an already struggling public K-12 system.

The post Preschool: Silver Bullet? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

All of the above have been pushing increased funding for early childhood education on the basis that it will provide a great return on investment, up to a stratospheric level of 8–1 in the widely-criticized study the Post-Dispatch cites. (And they accuse us of being a “belief” tank?)

The folks at the Cato Institute have been doing a great job covering the topic of early childhood education. In a recent post, they state that the large returns on investment often cited do:

. . . not in fact refer to the typical return from federal or state pre-K programs. It refers to the findings from a single intensive 1960s early childhood experiment that served 58 children in Ypsilanti, Michigan- The High/Scope Perry preschool program. Out of the literally hundreds of preschool studies conducted in the past half-century, the Perry results are not representative and have never been reproduced on a national or even a state level. In fact, an earnest experimental effort to reproduce them for just a few hundred children at eight locations failed despite an annual investment of $32,000 per child, adjusted for inflation . . .

I have written about these claims.

Spending money on children is appealing and it is something almost everyone agrees is a worthwhile endeavor. I am not opposed to spending tax money on early childhood education, but I am opposed to universal pre-school programs or systems that put the private market at a competitive disadvantage. I am also opposed to selectively using the research to advance a point, when the data simply do not bear out. The Post-Dispatch would, no doubt, call us out if we did that.

As Cato puts it, “What we have here, in other words, is a monumental act of cherry picking rather than an example of scientifically grounded policymaking.” In other words, it “just ain’t so.”

The post It Just Ain’t So appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“I don’t want someone’s hand in my child’s mouth,” said Sarah Brodsky, a teacher at First Path Day Care in Watertown and mother of 4-month-old Noah. “It’s a little too much” government intervention, Ms. Brodsky added.

I’m not the Sarah Brodsky in this article, although we do have the same name and her quote is basically what I would have said. She’s right; the decision of whether to incorporate teeth brushing into the school day should be left to preschools and day care centers.

The new law is an intrusion into preschool management, and the fact that parents can opt out is little consolation from a preschool director’s point of view. Every preschool now has to set up sinks and take time away from other activities in order to brush teeth, all while keeping track of which students’ parents opted out. Preschool teachers are sure to hear complaints from parents if one child sticks someone else’s toothbrush in his mouth, or if an opted-out child inadvertently gets into the toothpaste. Those kinds of mix-ups are unavoidable when you have a bunch of little kids brushing their teeth at the same time.

I hope Missouri won’t follow Massachusetts’ lead and mandate teeth brushing in day care centers. But now that I think about it, I don’t know whether the in-school dental care policy would catch on in Missouri — people would probably demand taxpayer-funded home visits!

The post Massachusetts Tells Preschools to Brush Kids’ Teeth appeared first on Show-Me Institute.