What Pre-K Evangelists Get Wrong
By Katharine B. Stevens
OP-ED
October 14, 2016
The extraordinary push for pre-kindergarten continues to gain steam. Last week, for example, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio hosted representatives from around the country – Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dayton, Ohio, Nashville, San Francisco, Seattle, Tulsa, San Antonio, Salt Lake City, Mesa, Arizona and Montgomery County, Maryland – for a "daylong learning lab" to advance free, universal pre-K for all four-year-olds in the U.S.
The New York City event is yet another instance of the rapidly growing pre-K mania reflected in headlines across the country over just the past few months: "Vermont kicks off universal access to publicly-funded pre-K," "Philadelphia's New Universal Pre-K Commission Gets Down to Business," "Proposed Legislation would expand pre-K in NJ," "Cincinnati Public Schools asks voters for levy that pays for preschool," "Indiana lawmakers recommend expanding publicly funded pre-K," "Minnesota awards $25 million to launch pre-K programs," "Texas school districts receive $116 million in pre-K grants." Nationwide, state funding for pre-K in 2015 to 2016 increased by 12 percent over 2014 to 2015 spending and, by the looks of things, will keep heading up.
Pre-K advocates are using two primary arguments to drive the accelerating expansion of pre-K, both focused on helping low-income children and families. The first is the brain science argument, which goes like this: "Science tells us that the first five years are the most important period of a child's learning and development. Pre-K gives disadvantaged children the strong early start that a growing body of brain research clearly shows they need." The second is the child care argument, which you also may have heard: "Low-income families are desperate for affordable, high quality child care. Pre-K helps give working parents the child care they so badly need."
Brain science does not tell us that children should go to pre-K. What brain science does tell us is that the earliest years of a child's life matter a great deal. Starting at birth, the environments young children are in and, most especially, the adults they interact with have a profound, lasting impact on their healthy development and lifelong wellbeing.
But none of that has anything to do with sending children to school when they're four years old. Home environments have a much more significant impact on children than a few hours a day of school does. And further, while age four seems early from a school's point of view, it isn't early at all from the perspective of child development. Eighty percent of a prekindergartner's life occurs before he turns four. And fundamental groundwork is laid during those four years that affects all that follows.
Growing research underscores that gaps between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers emerge long before children are old enough for pre-K. For example, Stanford University researchers recently found that "[b]y 18 months of age, toddlers from disadvantaged families are already several months behind more advantaged children in language proficiency." By age two, they're six months behind. And by age five, they score as much as two years behind on language development tests.
In another well-known study, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley found that by 36 months of age, vocabulary gaps between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds have already become huge. Their study showed that three-year-old children of college professors had an average vocabulary of 1,116 words, children from working class families had a vocabulary of 749 words, and children from families on welfare had a vocabulary of just 525 words. The poorer children also had a much lower rate of vocabulary growth, adding new words much more slowly than their wealthier peers. Both the size and growth rate of children's vocabulary at age three was strongly predictive of their language skill at age nine to 10.
By age four, the researchers concluded, children on welfare were so far behind that "even the best of intervention programs could only hope to keep the children in families on welfare from falling still further behind." In other words, pre-K is simply too little, too late to provide a strong start for disadvantaged children.
Pre-K does not address low-income working families' need for child care. Parents who are working full-time often need child care as much as 10 hours a day, five days per week, 52 weeks per year, starting when their children are infants. And many lower-paying jobs have non-traditional, variable hours, requiring child care that's available literally 24 hours per day.
Pre-K doesn't help these parents. First, it's usually available only to four-year-olds, excluding 80 percent of children under five. Second, many pre-K programs run just three hours a day – and even so-called full-day programs run just six to seven hours per day, weekdays only. What pre-K advocates seem to forget is that being able to drop your child off at 9 a.m. and pick him up at 3 p.m., Monday through Friday, is a big luxury that a great number of low-income working parents simply don't have.
Furthermore, school is open only a fraction of the days that many parents have to go to work. A recent report from the Center for American Progress found that between summer vacation, holiday breaks and staff training, the average public school is only open about two-thirds of weekdays per year – which is less than half of all days when weekends are included. So even if the school day schedule happens to work for a family, they still have to cope with finding other child care arrangements during the many days, weeks and months that school is closed.
The bottom line is this: Despite the widely-repeated claims, pre-K doesn't give disadvantaged children a strong start, and it doesn't provide useful child care for large numbers of working parents. Who knows why some people are so excited about getting children into school at age four instead of age five. Whatever their real reason, however, they need some new arguments for pushing it that actually make sense.
See Also
Blog ~ July 19, 2017
Op-Ed ~ May 11, 2016
Op-Ed ~ June 10, 2016