Does America Need Universal Preschool? A Long-read Q&A with Katharine Stevens
By James Pethokoukis | Katharine B. Stevens
BLOG
September 8, 2016
One pillar of the Democratic platform this election is universal pre-kindergarten, lauded by Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and followers as a necessary improvement to an “embarrassment” of an early childhood education system and necessary to ensure every child has “the chance to live up to his or her God-given potential” – not to mention get parents of young children back into the workforce. While the GOP platform included no such commitment, many early contenders in the race as state governors had accepted federal funds for early childhood education.
But what exactly is the research landscape of early childhood education? Is there any evidence that universal pre-K will be policy salve for families across the country?
Katharine Stevens, who leads AEI’s early childhood program, joined me to discuss all this on my Ricochet podcast. Here are bits from our conversation, lightly edited and condensed.
Pethokoukis: To start, here’s an October 2015 Vox article by Ezra Klein :
Perhaps pre-school doesn’t help children as much as we thought or hoped. A new study finds that children who were admitted to Tennessee’s pre-k program were worse off than children who didn’t make the cut.
So the results were not what a lot of pro-universal pre-K people had hoped, though Hillary Clinton’s website says she will make preschool universal for every 4 year old in America. Where is the debate? What are the positions people are locked into?
Stevens: I think that there’s one thing that’s clear: the first five years of a child’s life are the most crucial developmental period in the human life cycle – in particular, really from conception to a child’s third birthday – so pre-natal, infancy, and toddlerhood are considered the most crucial period of development. So where the problem’s coming is people are starting with that, calling that early childhood, and then promoting a very specific, narrow kind of approach in that age range, which is sending all four-year-olds to school.
So in effect, they’re using really impressive scientific research on early development to justify tacking an additional grade onto our 13-grade, K-12 system. It’s gotten tangled up between what is really important research on early development on the one hand, and on the other hand, an advocacy movement that’s focused on expanding the reach of our K-12 public school system. There’s quite a powerful group of stakeholders aligned around K-12: the two national teachers’ unions, 50 state teachers unions, several major national associations of school administrators, superintendents, principals. So there’s a really large, powerful, well-established group of stakeholders that have some clear interest in adding grades to their system.
And teachers’ jobs.
And teacher jobs. And more money. More money for a principal, more money for a school district, more money for a state for their education budget. More jobs for teachers. The thing is that for disadvantaged children, what we know is that K-12 schools have largely done a dismal job for disadvantaged kids – 80% of low income fourth graders are not proficient in reading and math. So we know that this is a system that has not been capable of delivering quality to disadvantaged children for the 13 years it already has them.
So, I agree with you. It’s not clear how they will be able to do any better with a 14th grade than they have with the 13 they already have.
A phrase you hear a lot is “high quality”. It’s easy to read over those words quickly, but if we cannot deliver high quality through K-12, how can you make the assumption that if we got kids earlier, delivered more education to them at an early age, somehow those other years would be easier to teach?
Well, I think they are making that argument, but when you look over the last 20 years, we already added a grade to the public school system, which was kindergarten. That was 20 years ago – a much smaller percentage of children went to kindergarten and then when they started to go it was half-day kindergarten. Now it’s full day kindergarten, in some states mandatory. And yet children’s performance at any point in their K-12 experience has not improved at all.
So we tried adding a grade at the lower end and that hasn’t worked. In addition, the percentage of children who are going to pre-K now has increased a lot and we have not seen a big jump in early elementary performance. So, so far that doesn’t seem to be working, number one, and number two, the fact is that disadvantaged children are arriving at kindergarten up to two years behind their more advantaged peers.
It simply isn’t credible that a few hours of school a day – for a year, when you’re four – is going to move the needle in the way that people are describing. And to your quality point, my suggestion would be the following. We know that it won’t work if it’s not high quality. So, taking disadvantaged kids – and those children are often going to schools that are very low performing schools; they are not integrated schools because of the way residential patterns work – you could make a deal that if the school systems were successful in doing across-the-board high quality kindergarten, then we could perhaps revisit the question of pre-kindergarten.
Basically what we’re talking about is a broken system, and though early childhood is important, approaching it through the K-12 system just isn’t the right way to do it.
But if they’re not even capable of doing across-the-board high-quality K, much less high-quality K through 12, there’s absolutely no reason to expect that they would do any better with pre-K than the 13 grades they already have.
One other factor that people don’t really know is – I spent 10 years working with low-performing schools in New York City in a teacher training program, so I was in and out of low-performing classrooms for 10 years – principals in poor neighborhoods, in low-performing schools routinely push their worst teachers down to the earliest grades because those are not the tested grades. So the state tests will be occurring, for example, in fourth grade, and they’ll put their worst teachers in first grade and kindergarten. So it stands to reason that if a pre-k grade is added, that will simply be another grade for principals in some cases to put their worst performing teachers.
Basically what we’re talking about is a broken system. Early childhood is important and approaching it through the K-12 system just simply isn’t the right way to do it.
The work of Nobel laureate James Heckman suggests that there’s a huge return on early childhood education. He looked at two programs from a decade ago that randomly assigned low income kids to treatment groups and control groups. The kids that had intensive early childhood education had better outcomes as adults.
So if that’s true, how can we turn that into actual policy in the real world to help a lot of kids?
Right. So the two programs that you’re referring to, one is called Abecedarian and the other is called Perry Preschool. The first thing to know about those two programs is they bear almost no resemblance to what we describe today as “pre-K,” which is a year of school before kindergarten.
The two key characteristics of those programs that make them successful are: one, the age that they started working with children – in the case of Abecedarian, with infants – and in the case of Perry, working very closely with families, with the home environment. Programs that are successful have those two characteristics. Starting very young – not very young like age four, but very young like infancy or even focusing on pre-natal health – and supporting parents, helping parents better fulfill their role as their children’s first teachers.
Abecedarian was a five year program. It was essentially a very high quality educational childcare program. The kids enrolled when they were 6 weeks old – these were all poor children of young, single mothers – and they were in child care year-round, 52 weeks a year, 10 hours a day, starting in infancy, until they went to kindergarten, while their mothers went back to school and got jobs and got themselves back on their feet. That program, which was very intensive through that entire period of a child’s life, while supporting the family, helping the family get on the right track, had by far the strongest results.
A lot of what we’re spending on in K-12 is remediation, or fixing things that have already gone wrong.
And the people who were running it were very experienced people. It cost a lot of money. I think the number was around $90,000 per child.
Yes, over the five years. This year, on the K-12 system, we are spending over $700 billion and an average across the country of $12,500 per kid. It’s not that we don’t already have a pretty big public investment in the learning and development of young people. I think that’s important to remember: we’re already spending a huge amount of money. What we need to be doing is making sure that we’re spending that money in the smartest way. If you’re spending money better at an earlier age – assuming you can do it at a high quality basis at scale, although it’s not clear that’s possible – you, in theory, could avoid expenditures down the line because a lot of what we’re spending money on in K-12 is remediation: we’re fixing things that have already gone wrong.
How do you take the lessons that you’ve learned from those programs, and scale them? Whom should we scale them for?
Just so your listeners know: Perry Preschool was a two year program for three-year-olds and four-year-olds. They went to school for just two-and-a-half hours a day. However, that was only half the program. The other half of the program was a weekly home visit by the teacher to the child’s home – working with the mother to help her be the child’s teacher at home. That’s basically a home visiting program and home visiting programs, like the Nurse Family Partnership, have been shown to be very successful.
The two strategies that are embodied by Perry and Abecedarian are home visiting – in other words, helping parents be better parents – and high quality childcare. So the place for us to start in terms of our focus are the youngest, most disadvantaged kids.
We get the biggest bang for our buck with very young children and it’s the most disadvantaged kids who most need help.
Some parents need more help in being the parent they want to be than others.
For example, after the Welfare to Work legislation passed in ’96, lots of very low income parents are working long hours. So one logical place to start: It would make sense to start with pilot projects in providing high quality educational childcare to young children whose parents are trying to move off welfare, for example.
So that’s one place to start. The other piece, that the Perry preschool provides a really good model of, is targeted outreach to parents who overwhelmingly want to do the right thing for their kid, but don’t always know what that is. Some parents need more help in being the parent they want to be than others. There was a study recently that the Bezos Foundation funded that found 90% of low income parents said their children are their greatest joy in life. Parents really want to do the right thing so that’s another place for us to be thinking.
I also want to point out though, we tend to approach things in terms of huge policies and giant programs, billions and billions of dollars coming out of Washington, when we really don’t know what exactly to do or how it’s going to play out. I think it would make much more sense if we were to do smaller scale pilot projects, in one city or in one part of a city, that are carefully researched to see what approaches are working. But the place to start is with childcare: There’s a lot of research that shows that bad childcare can have a really negative impact on kids. And that’s also just common sense– if you have an infant or a toddler in a really bad environment 50 hours a week, that can’t be good. There may be some low-hanging fruit there.
There’s a huge gulf from what you’re describing, and what typically appears in the New York Times.
It’s really only recently that early childhood has moved into the public spotlight like this. It’s been a fairly small number of people who have been working in this field. I think there may be a political calculation – two things. One: if you’re promoting something universal, you will stand a much better chance of getting public support. And perhaps that if you have “the k-12 powers that be” on your side, you’ve got a lot of political clout. Disadvantaged mothers and infants do not have huge interest groups or lobbying organizations. So I think there may be a kind of a political calculation that this is the best place to make inroads.
To me, it’s disappointing. We have an enormous, $700 billion/year experiment in universal education: our K-12 system. What we see is that it works extremely well for wealthier kids, and horrifically, dismally, for poor kids. So we already know that universal programs disproportionately benefit middle and upper income people. It really is very cynical to be promoting a universal pre-K program in the name of helping disadvantaged children, when what we know is that universal education programs have not at all been shown to benefit disadvantaged children. And you’re using scarce dollars.
Here’s a Twitter question: Do computer tablets have any value for pre-K?
Up until age three or four, it has no impact at all. Research shows that a child cannot learn that way until they are three or four. When they’re three or four, there are certain things they can learn – for example, letters, really rote academic knowledge. But, what’s most important for very young children to be learning are social-emotional skills and what’s called executive function, which is the ability to sit still, take your turn, cope with frustration, stick with a problem when you’re trying to solve it. These are skills that children start developing in infancy.
Even when you’re four, those aren’t skills that you’re learning from a tablet. So a tablet for four-year-olds has a useful function, like an alphabet book that the computer’s reading so the grownup doesn’t have to. But the fact is, at that age a child is always going to get much more out of an interaction with an adult.
The bottom line of this is that early human development is a very time- and attention-intensive process. We’re hardwired that way. For most of history, early human development was accomplished by full time maternal care, with a number of other helpful people around. We are wired to need very intensive attention in the first years of life. You know, our world can change, but basic human nature and what’s required for healthy development hasn’t. That’s something that’s really important to remember in this whole debate.
Sounds like we’re a long ways off from being able to provide that kind of intensive child care – and recreate that, make it broad enough to work.
Right. But one thing, for example – if you have six or seven infants and one person who’s just kind of there but doesn’t like infants and isn’t interacting with the infants –
We are wired to need very intensive attention in our first years of life. The world can change, but basic human nature for healthy development hasn’t.
And there’s “Beauty and the Beast” playing on the big screen TV…
That’s exactly right. There’s some fascinating research that a group at Harvard did on Romanian orphanages. When children are institutionalized from birth – they’ve done brain scans on these kids from infancy up now through adolescence – it damages their brains when they are in an interaction-deprived, institutionalized setting. Some of the childcare in our country comes close to that setting.
So even without knowing exactly how to achieve phenomenal results, or even quite good results, we do know enough about what is most certainly going to be damaging that we could start working on that before we implemented universal pre-K.
Are there currently ongoing studies we’re waiting on results from? Where is the research taking us and what are you on the lookout for?
There’s a lot of money for education research. So a lot of the research is focused on what happens to children when they go to school when they’re four instead of when they’re five.
What we really need is research on childcare. I don’t think there’s nearly enough of that going on. I don’t think people have been focusing on the impact – positive or negative – of childcare environments. There’s some, but one of my hopes is that if the public becomes more aware of how crucial that is, there will be more research attention and more research funding directed to that question.
I was just reading a book by a Scandinavian journalist about daycare systems that focuses on our inadequacies — how women here are trapped and if only we had better childcare, then they’d get them right back in the workforce. If you buy that general theory, then it’s imperative we understand as a nation the importance of early childcare and delivering the so-called high quality education for the people who need it the most. Sounds like that’s not where we’re at.
No, but hopefully, your listeners will become part of a growing group that’s pushing for more work in this area because it’s clearly needed.
Politicians don’t like to run on “we need to do more research.” They want to be able to say “I have a five point plan that’s going to cost $100 billion dollars. It will make all of your lives better.”
I just completed a major report on pre-K, looking at the 10 top, most-cited programs, called “Does pre-K work?” And my next big project is going to be on childcare so I’m actually digging into this. So six months from now I should have an update on the state of childcare research and what it’s telling us.
See Also
Report ~ April 12, 2016
Op-Ed ~ April 9, 2021
Podcast ~ February 16, 2022