Pre-K may not be the panacea that some of its boosters make it out to be, but it's still worth nurturing in the hope that it eventually outgrows its present flaws, writes EricLevitz
Photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Providing all children with a prekindergarten education is one of the best investments a society can make. The minds and personalities of tiny humans are highly malleable. Therefore, the earlier that the public-school system begins cultivating intellectual curiosity, emotional intelligence, and grit in our nation’s youngsters, the more effective it will be at improving students’ later-life outcomes, both in the classroom and outside it.
Alas, there are several reasons why the Abecedarian Project is a poor basis for deriving strong conclusions about the likely impact of universal pre-K. A small one is that the experiment’s random assignment of students to the program and control conditions wasn’t 100 percent random. A slightly bigger issue is that its sample size consisted of only about 50 children.
Meanwhile, a wide variety of relatively small-scale programs that combine prekindergarten with comprehensive social services have shown great promise. In Chicago, the introduction of full-day pre-K classes to disadvantaged neighborhoods was associated with gains in test scores and academic performance through second grade. A recent study of universal pre-K in Boston found enrollees in the program were more likely to graduate from high school.
The latest installment of a long-run study of Tennessee’s “Voluntary Pre-K” program lends some credence to that view. This month, researchers updated their study with results through sixth grade. The negative trend persisted. The students who didn’t attend pre-K continued scoring higher on math and reading than those who did.
Crucially, the Tennessee study is not a total outlier. One of the only other large-scale, random-control trial studies of pre-K, the 2010 Head Start impact study, also found that pre-K attendees were better prepared than their peers at the start of kindergarten, only to see this advantage all but disappear by the end of first grade.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that universal pre-K is undesirable. For one thing, the positive results from specific, intensive pre-K programs suggest that the typical American prekindergarten can be substantially improved. But even if it turns out that such programs cannot be scaled up — either because there isn’t political will for the requisite funding or because of some more fundamental constraint — the typical American pre-K program still has clear, proven benefits.
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