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April 18, 2005
Does Universial Preschool Make Sense?
At Number 2 Pencil today, Kimberly mentioned a push by Rob Reiner to make preschool universal. A recent study by the Rand Corporation claimed that making universal preschool available in California would yield $2.62 in benefits for ever $1 spent. The study is here.
The study says that the benefit breakdown is as follows
19 percent of the benefits to California society are realized by the public sector in the form of savings to the education, child welfare, and justice systems and in the form of higher taxes. Forty-eight percent of the benefits are in the form of increased earnings (net of taxes and higher education costs) of participants in adulthood, while another 21 percent of the benefits stem from the value of childcare to the parents. The remaining 12 percent of benefits accrue to participants and the rest of society in the form of savings from reduced child abuse and crime.
This means that even if we assume that all their assumptions and data is correct, in terms of California funds, the state would actually be getting back about fifty cents on every dollar. The rest of the benefits would go to participants, participants’ parents, and “society.” That changes things a bit.
Plus the study makes some assumptions that would very much change the results. First of all they take a study done by Chicago Child-Parent Centers and use the benefits of being in a preschool program that that study found and assign a value to them. The benefits are things such as reduced likelihood of failing a grade and lower incidence of involvements in the juvenile justice system. Thankfully, the CPC study does indeed address and try to reduce the effects of self-selection. However, one of the benefits listed is “lower incidence of child abuse and neglect from ages 4 to 17.” I find it kind of hard to understand how putting a random child in a preschool program will make that child less likely to be a victim of child abuse and neglect. What, does the preschool teach the child to get out of the way when their dad comes home drunk or something? Therefore I would suspect that there are some self-selection effects here and that the findings of the CPC study probably overestimate benefits.
The Rand study also makes assumptions in order to assess how much of the CPC benefits each child will gain. One of these assumptions is that the new universal preschool will be better than current public preschools, meaning that a high risk child attending the universal public preschool will get 50% more of the CPC benefits than if they had attended one of the current public preschools. This assumption is certainly not robust; there’s no reason to think that a universal preschool would be any better than the current public preschools. They also make the assumption that medium and low risk children who currently attend no preschool will get 50% and 25% respectively of the CPC benefits by attending the universal preschool. This assumption is also somewhat suspect. I would think that it is probable that low risk children might even be better off NOT attending preschool.
In fact, it may very well be that the only children who would benefit from universal preschool would be high risk children who currently do not attend preschool. If we use their assumptions on how many children would enroll in the universal preschool, we see that even though the universal preschool plan would mean that twice as many California 4 year olds would be in public preschool (35% to 70%), the overall rate of preschool attendance would only raise from 65% to 80%. Almost 70% of the new children enrolled in public preschools would be low risk children, most of them moved over from private preschools. Only 5.82% of California 4 year olds would be the high risk children not currently enrolled in preschool who would enroll in the universal preschool that the program would help the most. Instead of doubling costs, costs could be increased by less than 20% in order to make preschool available for more high risk children.
I certainly agree that putting more high risk children who don’t get stimulation and learning at home into preschool would help break the cycle of poverty. But I see no reason, even with this study, to make universal preschool available.
Some other interesting tidbits in the study:
As of 2001, 43 percent of U.S. 3-year-olds and 66 percent of 4-yearolds were enrolled in some form of preschool program. These percentages are three times as high for 3-year-olds and twice as high for 4- year-olds as they were in 1970.
Somehow I doubt there were twice as many children with educational problems in 1970 as there were in 2001. Obviously most of this is the increase in popularity of preschool, both due to more working mothers and more focus in educational circles on starting children young. This doesn't really support the idea that preschool is necessary for sucess in school
However, the current enrollment rates are subject to large variations across groups of children, depending on race/ethnicity, family income, parental education, and other factors. For example, enrollment rates are lowest for Hispanic children, and lower for families with incomes below poverty compared with families at the top of the income scale.
In the CPC study, it actually says that poor black children are the most likely to be enrolled in preschool, compared with other poor children. I thought this was interesting.
One of the sharpest contrasts is by mothers’ education, with just 38 percent of 3- to 5-year-olds whose mothers have less than a high school education enrolled in early education programs compared with 70 percent of those whose mothers have at least a college degree.
I’m sure this is not a surprise. Holding income even, more mothers who have college degrees work outside the home, thus more of them have reason to put their children in preschool.
Posted by illuminaria at April 18, 2005 07:01 PM
Comments
"This assumption is certainly not robust; there's no reason to think that a universal preschool would be any better than the current public preschools."
I agree 100%. This is why I'm skeptical, and one of my readers already pointed this out - if California's done such a rotten job with public schools, why do we expect a preschool version of that to be any good? I'm leery because to me "universal" means your kid HAS to attend, and homeschoolers/charter schoolers have enough of a time fighting the K-12 public system.
Posted by: Kimberly at April 18, 2005 07:11 PM
btw, I twice tried to send email to the address you list on your front page, and twice it bounced back. Just wanted to let you know.
Posted by: Kimberly at April 19, 2005 05:26 AM
The real motivation behind universal preschool is to get the kids into the leftist indoctrination pipeline at an earlier age.
Posted by: dweeb at April 19, 2005 10:57 AM
Having been involved with the children of quite a few friends over the years, all of which were dragged into Headstart and government preschool programs, I can state without doubt, these programs do not help with the further education of anyone's children. Sorry kids, conformity is not an advancement of your education. What more needs said?
Posted by: 2Hotel9 at April 20, 2005 10:30 PM