Tuesday, September 02, 2008

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.
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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.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

It sounds like Obama might be referring to a study I heard about often while I was in college to be a teacher - the High Scope study. It ONLY applied to disadvantaged children who otherwise generally have poor nutrition, illiterate parents who couldn't read to them, little stability, etc. Even in college, we were told that the study didn't apply to children raised in a loving, stable family. Hmmm..... maybe we should focus on strengthening families, rather than strengthening the government's hold on children.

Anonymous said...

It sounds like Obama might be referring to a study I heard about often while I was in college to be a teacher - the High Scope study. It ONLY applied to disadvantaged children who otherwise generally have poor nutrition, illiterate parents who couldn't read to them, little stability, etc. Even in college, we were told that the study didn't apply to children raised in a loving, stable family. Hmmm..... maybe we should focus on strengthening families, rather than strengthening the government's hold on children.

Arthur Sido said...

I think you are right, it was done in Ypsilanti and other places where kids come from horribly broken and dysfunctional homes.

Shae Khan said...

I have to disagree.

*oh snap*

lol. I work at a preschool in Dearborn, Michigan and my little brother attends one in Detroit. There's a huge difference in the level of academic performance and socializing skills. I am doing an advocacy project for U of M on making preschools universal and am using Obama's words as backup.

I mean yeah I work with the students that are from broken homes, but that doesn't mean the child can't learn autonomy and socializing skills with others at a young age even if they are from great homes. Well I like your article....I think its very well written and opinionated.

Arthur Sido said...

Shae, I am not sure how well written my post was but it certainly is opinionated! I still believe that for very young children especially, and children in general, the best place for them at a young age is with their family. Preschool is less about socialization and education, in my humble opinion, and more about daycare. I would be OK with a parent having their kid attend some group activities at a young age for a few hours a week, but sending kids off to a preschool for a huge chunk of every day?

Anonymous said...

Universal preschool does NOT mean all preschool-age children will have to go to preschool. It means that all children whose parents want it, will have the option.

And no, there are no nefarious conspiracies behind it. Many people have been calling for universally-avaible preschool for a long time, and Obama is reflecting on the movement and the research that has been done.

I teach children in an urban public school. I used to teach kindergarten, and was shocked by what my students didn't know, coming in to their first school experience. Many of them did not know any colors, numbers, shapes, or letters of the alphabet. Stop and reflect on that for a minute -- would YOUR child, at age five, not know any color names? They didn't know how to write their names, and some of them only knew their family nicknames and had no idea what their real names were. They could not speak in coherent, complete sentences. They could not make rhymes. They could not sit and listen to a story, or recall anything from the story after it was read. They had abysmally small vocabularies. I could go on and on.

Most kids get these things from their parents. Your child gets these things from his parents. But many poor children do not, and we cannot make any assumptions about what they are supposed to know by the time they arrive in kindergarten.

The call for universal preschool has come about because the achievement gap starts so early; privileged five year olds arrive at kindergarten way ahead of their peers who live in poverty.

Solid research has shown that a HIGH-QUALITY preschool program will have long-term effects on poor children.

If you don't want to send your children to preschool, don't. They don't need it. But don't put barriers in the way for poor children to have access to a quality preschool education that will give them a chance at success in kindergarten and beyond.

Anonymous said...

Universal preschool does not mean that all preschoolers shall be forced to go to preschool. The very idea is ridiculous, frankly, and it completely misses the point.

Universal preschool means all children whose parents want it would have the opportunity to go to preschool. The reason behind it is simple: poor children arrive at kindergarten already woefully behind.

I teach preschool in an urban public school, and I used to teach kindergarten. When I taught kindergarten I was shocked by all the things my students didn't know. Some of them didn't know their colors. Many of them did not know any numbers, letters, or shapes, could not write or recognize their own names, couldn't listen to a story, couldn't speak in complete sentences, couldn't "use their words" to solve a problem with another child, and had abysmally small vocabularies.

Can you imagine your five year old not able to recognize or name the color blue? No? Of course not. Most parents naturally talk to their children in such a way that the children learn everything they need to know in kindergarten. None of those children need preschool, and none will be forced to go.

But when I taught urban, at-risk five year olds, I had to try in one year to teach them everything they had missed in the first five years of their lives, plus get them through the kindergarten curriculum so they'd be ready for first grade, and sometimes, the job was just impossible.

Now that I teach preK, I find that I am able to teach my little ones the things they need to know. My students are learning the letters, the sounds, the numbers, how to count, the shapes, how to measure, the colors, how to listen to stories, how to retell stories, how to discuss books in depth, how to take turns, how to be friends, how to solve problems, you name it. The ones who speak a different language at home learn how to speak English -- imagine if they showed up at K without a word of English!

The research -- including the Perry Preschool project in Michigan -- clearly shows that a HIGH QUALITY preschool program will have lasting, positive effects on an at-risk child's life.

If the parents -- themselves poorly parented, and with many stressors in their lives such as poverty, hunger, homelessness, drug-addiction, mental illness, etc. -- cannot raise their preschoolers to be ready for kindergarten, we as a nation can't just stand by and say, "too bad, kids, you're screwed." We must do what we can to lift them up, help them learn, and give them a chance at success.

Otherwise we're sending kids to kindergarten who are already so far behind they will never catch up. I think that is immoral.

What about you?

Arthur Sido said...

kiri8,

Thank you for your passionate comments.

You argument is predicated on a couple of assumptions. The first is that the Federal government has an obligation to fund preschool, universal or otherwise. That assumption is false and quite frankly decades of enormous intervention at the Federal level accompanied by enormous spending certainly has not borne much fruit. After decades of increasing intervention on the part of the Federal government in education, social services, etc it is hard to argue that we find ourselves in a better position. The solution is not found in bigger government but in stronger families. The reason children don't recognize their colors is because of poor upbringing. Our focus should be on removing barriers to parenting and discouraging the social structures that support and encourage unwed mothers and various other social ills that lead to children coming into the school system unprepared. We have not seen a correlation between increased spending and increased performance. As exhibit A in that assertion, look at the condition of the schools with the highest per pupil spending.

Your second assumption is the notion that this is designed to help kids, when in reality I believe that the main beneficiary of this effort will be the education establishment. I am not sure how closely you read my post, but I am not against education. Far from it. What I am against is using the cloak of "education" to create more and more unionized jobs.

We cannot regulate and spend our way out of this mess. As long as familes are the disasters that they are in, kids will continue to fail and the benevolent government will be happy to take more tax dollars and grab kids at an earlier age.