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Should we invest in preschool or parents?

March 2, 2011 By

What helps disadvantaged children more:  High-quality preschool or parenting classes for Mom and Dad?  With $10 million from a hedge-fund billionaire, University of Chicago economists John List and Steven Levitt and Harvard’s Roland Fryer are tracking outcomes for more than 600 children in Chicago Heights, a low-income suburb.

Local families with kids 3 to 5 years old were encouraged to enter a lottery and were randomly sorted into three groups.

Students selected to attend the Griffin school are enrolled in the free, all-day preschool. Children in another group aren’t enrolled in the school, while their guardians take courses at a “parenting academy” and receive cash or scholarships valued at up to $7,000 annually as a reward.

The more than 300 kids in the third contingent receive no benefits — nor do their parents — and serve as a control group.

The children’s test scores, attendance records and graduation rates will be monitored. Later, researchers will track their employment, pay and criminal records, if any.

While early results from the experiment may be published as soon as this year, the project has money to follow the students “until they die,” List says.

The Griffin experiment may show that the U.S. doesn’t spend enough on helping parents, List says. “We have too many eggs in the kid basket,” says List, himself a father of five. “We need to spend much more time and many more resources on helping parents.”

We know more about how to set up preschools than we know about how to help parents do a better job.

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High-quality preschool pays off

February 5, 2011 By

The Chicago Public Schools’ federally funded Child-Parent Centers, started in 1967, provide high-quality preschool and after-school programs for disadvantaged children in early elementary school. The program generates $4 to $11 of benefits for every dollar it costs, concludes the National Institutes of Health.

CPC facilities, located in or near elementary schools in poor Chicago neighborhoods, are staffed by certified teachers and offer instruction in reading and math, small group activities and educational field trips for children ages 3 through 9. The centers also provide meals and health screening. Center staff offer support services such as parenting or job skills training to parents and encourage them to volunteer in the classroom and to help supervise student field trips.

The researchers analyzed education, employment, criminal justice and child welfare records for the participants through to age 26. A previous analysis found that children who had been enrolled in the centers were more likely to go to college,work full time and have health insurance and less likely to go to prison or suffer from depression.

However, the study did not assign children randomly, so it’s possible the CPC children had more motivated parents.  The non-CPC children went to another program or did not attend preschool.

“These findings suggest that high-quality education programs focused on preschool through the elementary grades may produce long term benefits not only for the children enrolled, but for society as well,” said Alan E. Guttmacher, director of the . . .  NIH institute that funded the study. “The findings also provide evidence that combining early education with job skills training and other instruction for parents also may increase benefits for children.”

Ninety-three percent of the children in the study were African-American and 7 percent were Hispanic.

Researchers estimated the value of increased lifetime earnings, taxes paid on these earnings and savings on schooling (fewer children repeating a grade), health care, depression treatment, child welfare services and criminal-justice costs.

Lifetime benefits were greater for children who started CPC in preschool compared to those who started in elementary school.  Greater benefits also were found for certain subsets, such as boys, children living in higher-poverty areas and those in high-risk homes.

Compared to Head Start, which doesn’t produce lasting benefits for children, the CPCs are much more intensive and long-term and provide more parental support. The average preschool isn’t a game changer for very disadvantaged children. They need more.

Via Shanker Blog.

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Do everything — except fixing schools

December 2, 2010 By

David Kirp’s soon-to-be-published book, Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children’s Lives makes the “broader, bolder” case for reforming urban education without changing schools, writes Paul Peterson on Education Next.

According to Kirp, the best way to improve America’s urban schools is to ignore them. Instead, attention should be focused on parents, pre-schooling, reshaping neighborhoods, finding mentors for the kids, and giving kids money to go to college. In other words, do everything except fix the disastrous state of the big city school system, shaped by court decisions, federal regulations, professional bureaucrats, collective bargaining agreements, and a progressive philosophy that expects little in instruction from teachers.

It’s nice to see the importance of good parents recognized, writes Peterson,  even though Kirp “puts his chips on professionals telling mothers what to do rather than suggesting ways to keep parents married and families intact.”

Nurturing preschools, mentors and college savings plans are desirable. But good schools matter too.

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School reform hasn’t lifted achievement

September 9, 2010 By

School reform has promised a lot and delivered little except for “intellectual dishonesty and political puffery,” writes Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post.

Since the 1960s, reading and math achievement has improved in elementary school but faded out by high school, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).  The racial achievement gap narrowed modestly but stopped improving in the late 1980s.

Standard theories don’t explain this meager progress. Too few teachers? Not really. From 1970 to 2008, the student population increased 8 percent and the number of teachers rose 61 percent. The student-teacher ratio has fallen sharply, from 27-to-1 in 1955 to 15-to-1 in 2007. Are teachers paid too little? Perhaps, but that’s not obvious. In 2008, the average teacher earned $53,230; two full-time teachers married to each other and making average pay would belong in the richest 20 percent of households (2008 qualifying income: $100,240). Maybe more preschool would help. Yet, the share of 3- and 4-year-olds in preschool has rocketed from 11 percent in 1965 to 53 percent in 2008.

Samuelson sees two reasons reforms have produced meager results.

First, we still don’t know how to teach inner-city students well enough to overcome their disadvantages. A few schools have succeeded, but the changes haven’t been replicated widely.

Second, students are less motivated to work hard.

The unstated assumption of much school “reform” is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers. The reality is that, as high schools have become more inclusive (in 1950, 40 percent of 17-year-olds had dropped out, compared with about 25 percent today) and adolescent culture has strengthened, the authority of teachers and schools has eroded. That applies more to high schools than to elementary schools, helping explain why early achievement gains evaporate.

As more students attend high school, standards fall, Samuelson writes. An estimated “60 percent of incoming community college students and 30 percent of freshmen at four-year colleges need remedial reading and math courses.”

School reform ignores these realities, he writes.

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Preschoolers wear tracking devices

August 29, 2010 By

Preschoolers are wearing tracking devices at a center run by Contra Costa County near Oakland.

When at the school, students will wear a jersey that has a small radio frequency tag. The tag will send signals to sensors that help track children’s whereabouts, attendance and even whether they’ve eaten or not.

School officials say it will free up teachers and administrators who previously had to note on paper files when a child was absent or had eaten.

County officials claim the system, funded by a $50,000  federal grant, could pay for itself within a year.  If they’re spending $50,000 a year taking attendance, they must be paying staffers a lot of money.

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'Kindergarten ready' kids

July 27, 2010 By

Getting children “kindergarten ready” is just as important as college and career readiness, argues Elanna Yalow in Education Week. She wants “common standards for early-childhood learning” that “both capitalize on the unique abilities and interests of all children and create a clear path to helping them develop the skills they will need in school and beyond.”

Much of the development that influences achievement throughout life occurs before children even set foot in school, and kindergarten teachers will tell you that they are not molding fresh pieces of clay. Not only do we need to create consistency across state lines for early learning, but we also need to expand content areas beyond language arts and mathematics, the focus of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, to include social and emotional competencies that are the foundations of learning itself.

It’s critical that children arrive at kindergarten with the cognitive, emotional, and social skills needed to succeed. We know that children who start behind tend to stay behind.

Children develop at very different rates. Is it possible to create a common standard for all five-year-olds?

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Kindergarten hopes, few gains

March 3, 2010 By

State-funded “universal kindergarten,” which spread in the ’60s and ’70s, was supposed to prevent school problems.  Yet it had a small benefit for whites, but did nothing for blacks, concludes a new study by Elizabeth Cascio, a Dartmouth economics professor, in Education Next.

My results indicate that state funding of universal kindergarten had no discernible impact on many of the long-term outcomes desired by policymakers, including grade retention, public assistance receipt, employment, and earnings. White children were 2.5 percent less likely to be high school dropouts and 22 percent less likely to be incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized as adults following state funding initiatives, but no other effects could be discerned. Also, I find no positive effects for African Americans, despite comparable increases in their enrollment in public kindergartens after implementation of the initiatives. These findings suggest that even large investments in universal early-childhood education programs do not necessarily yield clear benefits, especially for more disadvantaged students.

State-funded kindergarten pulled black children from Head Start, which may have offered a higher-quality program, Cascio notes. White children were less likely to be enrolled in a program, so even a weakly effective kindergarten had some benefits.

Now, of course, many policy makers are pushing state-funded “universal” preschool, while others argue for expanding high-quality preschool programs designed for the neediest children. There will be more political support for preschools that serve everyone, but will these programs offer the academic preparation, especially language development, that most middle-class kids don’t need and most poor kids do?

Use rigorous research to expand what works for needy children, writes Isabel Sawhill of Brookings in Education Week.

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Head Start study shows no lasting gains

January 15, 2010 By

Head Start’s benefits fade by first grade, concludes a major study on the $7 billion-a-year program’s impact. While Head Start participants have a social, emotional and cognitive edge over similar kids who didn’t participate in pre-K, according to a 2005 study, the advantages don’t last long.

“The next few weeks are probably going to be rocky ones for the Head Start community,” writes Early Ed Watch, which suggested K-3 teachers aren’t trained to help Head Start grads move forward.

The mainstream media have ignored the study, complains Andrew Coulson of Cato @ Liberty. I did spot a column in the Kansas City Star.

Update: Education Week’s Mary Ann Zehr has more on the study.

It’s time to “terminate, consolidate or reform” federal preschool programs before ‘investing’ more dollars, writes Dan Lips of the Heritage Foundation.

Jay P. Greene has more detail on the study.

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As easy as 1, 2, 3

July 11, 2009 By

Preschoolers should learn their 1-2-3′s as well as their ABC’s, concludes the National Research Council. From NBC:

The National Research Council finds kids ages 3 to 6 are already learning numbers and geometry through everyday experiences.

“When we’re going outside we’re lining up and then we’re all gonna count. Count how many friends we have,“ teacher Anuschka Boekhoudt said.

“They’re learning addition and subtraction but they don’t really realize it you know. It’s just, it’s fun for them,“ Helling said.

Kids are ready to learn the report says. It’s preschool teachers who need more math training.

There are fun ways to introduce math before children decide it’s scary or hard, researchers say.

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Universal pre-K: 21st century boondoggle

May 18, 2009 By

Universal pre-K will be very costly and largely ineffective, argues Checker Finn in the Washington Post.

In a time of ballooning deficits, expansion of preschool programs would use large sums on behalf of families that don’t need this subsidy while not providing nearly enough help to the smaller number of children who need it most. It fails to overhaul expensive but woefully ineffectual efforts such as Head Start. And it dumps 5-year-olds, ready or not, into public-school classrooms that today are unable even to make and sustain their own achievement gains, much less to capitalize on any advances these youngsters bring from preschool. (Part of the energy behind universal pre-K is school systems — and teachers unions — maneuvering to expand their own mandates, revenue and membership rolls.)

Florida, Oklahoma and Georgia are offering preschool to all four-year-olds. So far, expanded preschool access hasn’t raised school performance in those states.

“Fewer than 20 percent of 5-year-olds are seriously unready for the cognitive challenges of kindergarten,” Finn estimates. Preschool designed for their needs is intensive and expensive — and unneeded by most kids. 

. . .  while a few tiny, costly programs targeting very poor children have shown some lasting positive effects, the overwhelming majority of studies show that most pre-K programs have little to no educational impact (particularly on middle-class kids) and/or have effects that fade within the first few years of school.

Making pre-K “universal” makes it impossible to replicate the programs that have shown long-term effects.

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