Obama and universal preschool

I know I say this a lot but there is a vitally important Albert Mohler show regarding the innocent sounding but dangerous proposal for universal preschool that is an integral part of the Democrat party platform.

From the Obama campaign official webpage:

Barack Obama's Plan

Early Childhood Education

Zero to Five Plan: Obama's comprehensive "Zero to Five" plan will provide critical support to young children and their parents. Unlike other early childhood education plans, Obama's plan places key emphasis at early care and education for infants, which is essential for children to be ready to enter kindergarten. Obama will create Early Learning Challenge Grants to promote state "zero to five" efforts and help states move toward voluntary, universal pre-school.

Expand Early Head Start and Head Start: Obama will quadruple Early Head Start, increase Head Start funding and improve quality for both.

Affordable, High-Quality Child Care: Obama will also provide affordable and high-quality child care to ease the burden on working families.

That sounds very noble, but underneath the nice rhetoric is, I believe, an ominous agenda. The goal is to sink the bureaucratic claws into our kids earlier and keeping them in longer. Obama is calling for both universal pre-school and a college education that is “the birthright of every American". Funny, I don't recall that as one of our fundamental rights. Just more overheated, empty rhetoric from Obama.So now we have universal education, K-12. Obama and his supporters want to expand that to universal health preschool and universal college.

One comment from Obama during his call for universal preschool seemed so outlandish as to obviously draw scrutiny, but you don’t hear much about it. Obama claimed very dogmatically that every dollar we spend on preschool “education” returns us $10 in costs associated with drop outs, remedial education etc. No idea where he came up with that number, since that is something that would be awfully hard to pin down, but he said it like the Gospel truth. A couple of writers in the Wall Street Journal cut through the rhetoric and exposed what is really going on and how futile this enormous spending plan would be in an article titled "Protect our kids from preschool". Read it and learn...

“Mr. Obama asserted in the Las Vegas debate on Jan. 15 that every dollar spent on preschool will produce a 10-fold return by improving academic performance, which will supposedly lower juvenile delinquency and welfare use -- and raise wages and tax contributions. Such claims are wildly exaggerated at best.

In the last half-century, U.S. preschool attendance has gone up to nearly 70% from 16%. But fourth-grade reading, science, and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) -- the nation's report card -- have remained virtually stagnant since the early 1970s.

Preschool activists at the Pew Charitable Trust and Pre-K Now -- two major organizations pushing universal preschool -- refuse to take this evidence seriously. The private preschool market, they insist, is just glorified day care. Not so with quality, government-funded preschools with credentialed teachers and standardized curriculum. But the results from Oklahoma and Georgia -- both of which implemented universal preschool a decade or more ago -- paint an equally dismal picture.

A 2006 analysis by Education Week found that Oklahoma and Georgia were among the 10 states that had made the least progress on NAEP. Oklahoma, in fact, lost ground after it embraced universal preschool: In 1992 its fourth and eighth graders tested one point above the national average in math. Now they are several points below. Ditto for reading. Georgia's universal preschool program has made virtually no difference to its fourth-grade reading scores. And a study of Tennessee's preschool program released just this week by the nonpartisan Strategic Research Group found no statistical difference in the performance of preschool versus nonpreschool kids on any subject after the first grade.”

So universal preschool will lower the welfare rolls ‘cause Obama says so, will it? The facts and logic don't seem to support that assertion, but that is Ok because they are irrelevant to Obama. The facts don’t mean anything, because whenever the government gets involved, we get higher quality at lower cost. Just remember, whenever a liberal uses the word “universal”, grab your wallet!

What it really amounts to is de facto tax subsidized daycare, and because it is government sponsored and sanctioned preschool, those workers in these daycare facilities become professional educators and guess what, that makes them eligible for and probably required to become members of a teachers union.

Always follow the money and always check the ideology. This is not about getting kids better prepped for school. This is about more money in union coffers driven by more union “teaching” jobs, more positions for education majors to fill and more control over children outside of the influence of their parents. It also drives more parents, mainly women, into the workforce sooner. With our economy in the state that it is, we certainly don’t need more people in the workforce. Wages are already artificially inflated thanks to minimum wage laws and labor unions.

Incentivizing the earlier and earlier separation of very young children from the parents, and by design from the influence of their parents is disastrous. Are children best served by having their formative years dictated by a state run institution that is beholden to unions and entrenched interests, or by care received from their parents? Make no mistake that there is an insidious underlying motive here. Secular humanists have assumed for decades that man’s “progress” would eventually lead to a complete rejection of faith but Christianity has proven far more stubborn than they could have envisioned. Clearly a large part of that is that children are raised in the faith by their parents, so what better way to wean society off religion than to intervene in children's education and formation as early as possible to minimize the impact parents can have on their kids worldview.

Another issue is that certainly bears discussion is the idea that we should pay for preschool to give “disadvantaged” children a boost. It sounds great, but at what point do we stop caring for the children of kids for these sorts of backgrounds? Should we take them at birth so they can be institutionalized and raised by the state? Certainly there are some who would advocate that. But it hardly can be argued that the government needs to get further involved in child care. Our focus should be on intact families, not a nanny state that raises kids.

This really sums up in the insanity of the universal preschool mantra.

“Why don't preschool gains stick? Possibly because the K-12 system is too dysfunctional to maintain them. More likely, because early education in general is not so crucial to the long-term intellectual growth of children. Finland offers strong evidence for this view. Its kids consistently outperform their global peers in reading, math and science on international assessments even though they don't begin formal education until they are 7. Subsidized preschool is available for parents who opt for it, but only when their kids turn 6.
----
If Mr. Obama is serious about helping children, he should begin by fixing what is clearly broken: the K-12 system. The best way of doing that is by building on programs with a proven record of success. Many of these involve giving parents control over their own education dollars so that they have options other than dysfunctional public schools. The Obamas send their daughters to a private school whose annual fee in middle school runs around $20,000. Other parents deserve such choices too -- not promises of subsidized preschool that they may not want and that may be bad for their kids.”

There is the crux of the issue. Spending billions to prepare kids to enter a dysfunctional system, worldview issues aside is like getting your car waxed and detailed before a demolition derby. It may look nice going in but it will look the same as every other wreck coming out.