Jaw
It's OVER 5,000!
https://reason.com/2022/01/26/state-run-pre-k-resulted-in-worse-educational-behavioral-outcomes-for-kids/
Over and over again, the Biden administration has touted the benefits of "universal" preschool and pre-kindergarten (pre-K) education. These programs, a White House fact sheet declares, are "critical to ensuring that children start kindergarten with the skills and supports that set them up for success in school." Indeed, they are so critical, in this view, that President Joe Biden's stalled spending bill plans to devote what the White House calls a "historic $200 billion investment in America's future" to expanding access to preschool and pre-K schooling.
Biden himself has advertised the supposed benefits of the new spending, which would roll out through state-based partnerships, on his Twitter feed, with an October post declaring that "studies show that the earlier our children begin to learn in school, the better. That's why we're going to make two years of high-quality preschool available to every child."
On the contrary, a recently published study of a state-run pre-K program in Tennessee found that not only did the program not produce any long-term educational gains, by sixth grade, the children who attended the state's pre-K program were actually performing worse on both educational attainment and behavioral metrics relative to their peers. State-run pre-K appears to have entirely negative effects for children enrolled.
The new study results were based on the findings of a randomized controlled experiment that looked at nearly 3,000 children in Tennessee. Some of these children were randomly selected for the state's pre-K program; others may have attended alternatives, like Head Start or home-based care. The children in both groups were then followed for years, allowing the researchers to track educational attainment and disciplinary issues over time.
As public policy research goes, this sort of study design—randomized selection into a program plus years of follow-up on the same relatively large group of subjects—is about as high-quality as you're likely to get. Indeed, this is the first randomized controlled study of state-run pre-K, lending extra weight to its findings. And that makes the results all the more devastating.
Although the program initially produced small gains in educational achievement among students who attended pre-K, relative to their peers who did not, by third grade those gains had been wiped out, and a small decline in student performance began to show.
By sixth grade, the difference was even starker: Students who had attended pre-K performed worse on standardized tests, had more disciplinary issues, and were more likely to be sent to special education services.
The study's authors have not sugar-coated the results: "At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing," Dale Farran, a Vanderbilt University professor who worked on the study, told education news organization the Hechinger Report, in a report on the study's findings.
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Well ain’t that something…
I was involved in the GA DECAL longitudinal study for tracking the results of PreK kids through third grade. Originally it was intended to run through twelfth grade, but I don't know if that's still happening, funding may have gotten pulled after the third grade results. You can read it here- https://www.decal.ga.gov/documents/attachments/GAPreKEvalLongitudinalYr5Report.pdf
but here is the relevant part of the executive summary:
Key Results from the Comparison Sample:
Children who attended Georgia’s Pre-K Program had literacy skills that were moderately higher and
executive function skills that were somewhat higher in the fall of third grade than children whose parents
reported that the child did not attend any pre-k program (comparison group). These results are similar to
the findings of the Longitudinal Study where children who attended Georgia’s Pre-K had higher scores in
foundational literacy skills relative to the national norming sample. Together, these results suggest that
foundational literacy skills, which are a focus of pre-k, were not obtained by children in the comparison sample.