The Myth of Universal Pre-K
By Katharine B. Stevens
OP-ED
March 31, 2015
“Pre-K for all” has become a rallying cry for progressives, underscored last week by Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Center for American Progress' discussion on “Expanding Opportunity in America’s Urban Areas." In her seven-minute talk, Clinton emphasized the “overriding issues of inequality and lack of mobility” in America, and praised New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s universal pre-K program as a model for helping the struggling middle class.
There’s no question that the rapidly growing cost of child care has become a huge burden on middle-class families. Since 2000, the cost of child care has increased twice as much as median income of families with children. In many states, a year of child care costs more than in-state college tuition, and is often more than 50 percent of the median income for a single mother.
At the same time, in New York City and beyond, providing universal access to pre-K is also widely promoted as a key strategy to level the playing field for disadvantaged kids. De Blasio’s pre-K plan, for example, was announced last year as a “historic and transformative plan” that “will lift up all children and aggressively tackle inequality.” The claim that investing a dollar in high-quality pre-K can save more than $7 down the line has been repeated so often it’s achieved the status of received wisdom.
The problem is that there’s no evidence that universal pre-K comes even close to its touted capacity to move the needle for disadvantaged children. Pre-K advocates widely cite two well-run demonstration projects from a half century ago – Perry Preschool and the Abecedarian Project – as proof that pre-K has lasting benefits for low-income kids. Perry Preschool, run from 1962 to 1967 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, placed a total of 64 three- and four-year-old poor children in morning preschool for two-and-a-half hours per day and made weekly home visits to their mothers. Abecedarian, run from 1972 to 1975 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, placed a total of 57 poor children in a full-time, full-year, high-quality childcare/preschool setting from infancy through age five. Both programs had major positive impacts on participants’ educational and life outcomes, sustained for decades into adulthood, with big economic benefits to society through lower social welfare costs, decreased crime rates and increased tax revenue over the lifetimes of program participants.
Skeptics point out that Perry and Abecedarian were small, boutique programs, carried out decades ago, with limited applicability to large-scale pre-K in 2015. But perhaps the most important problem is that the design of those programs bears little resemblance to pre-K – much less universal pre-K – in the first place. Perry could just as well have been called the Perry Home Visiting Project, since the weekly home visiting component of the program was at least as intensive as the 15-hours-per-week preschool part. And Abecedarian wasn’t even a pre-K: Children were enrolled full-time starting when they were infants, not at the preschool age of three or four.
Perry and Abecedarian clearly show that it’s possible for early intervention (in the case of Abecedarian, starting shortly after birth), when done correctly, to significantly change the lives of poor children for the better, with considerable benefits to society. But they show absolutely nothing about universal pre-K.
The unfortunate bottom line is that big scale-ups of "pre-K for all" are much more useful to politicians and the middle class than to the disadvantaged children most in need of help.
See Also
Op-Ed ~ September 1, 2015
Op-Ed ~ February 17, 2016
Op-Ed ~ October 8, 2015