Letter: The research on early education outcomes is mixed at best

Posted 10/26/18

Barry Brown’s letter in the Oct. 18 Phoenix asserts that early education correlates with successful outcomes. One would hope that this would be the case, but contrary to Mr. Brown’s …

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Letter: The research on early education outcomes is mixed at best

Posted

Barry Brown’s letter in the Oct. 18 Phoenix asserts that early education correlates with successful outcomes. One would hope that this would be the case, but contrary to Mr. Brown’s ambiguous claims, early education does not produce the results claimed.

Head Start, a product of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, has been carefully evaluated by the Administration for Families within the Department of Health and Human Services. The study examined 4,667 3- and 4-year-olds across 23 states. As David Armor and Sonia Sousa relate in the 2014 Winter issue of National Affairs, the Head Start Impact Study (HSIS) found almost no positive effects of the program.

While children in the program showed some positive results on measures of cognitive skills and social/behavioral ratings while in the program, those results lasted only so long as the children were enrolled and did not carry through to kindergarten or early elementary school.

Additionally, in 2014 on the Brookings Institution website, Russ Whitehurst had a post entitled, “Obama’s Preschool Proposal Is Not Based on Sound Research.” Whitehurst explains that the studies the president and other advocates of universal pre-K rely on are flawed. They do not involve randomized controls (as the HSIS did).

The Whitehurst post noted that, “Because ‘gold standard’ randomized studies fail to show major impacts of present day pre-K programs, there are reasons to doubt that we yet know how to design … a government funded pre-K program that produces sufficiently large benefits.”

With this in mind, the issue becomes one of how do we allocate scarce resources for the greatest benefit of our youth. Mr. Brown ought to look at the studies done of Georgia’s (1995) and Oklahoma’s (1998) pre-school programs. Both programs do not show the desired improvement in high school graduation rates, declines in teen pregnancy, and higher earnings claimed by universal preschool activists.

Finally, Mr. Brown does not address the main point in my letter, that Laufton Ascencao’s proposal that the state should fund preschool education as a way to subsidize day care expenses, is not a good use of our spending for education.   

Michael T. Byrnes

Bristol

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