Pre-K Drives School Draft Budget Up

That was one of the headlines in the local paper over an article detailing how the St. Johnsbury School directors have voted to approve a proposed $365,000 increase (about 2.3%) in the school budget with the bulk of the increase going to fund “universal prekindergarten.” This funding is to implement the program one year ahead of the date required (July 1, 2016) by Vermont’s recently passed universal pre-k mandate.

While prekindergarten has been getting a lot of press of late, to judge by the government’s own studies it is hardly worth the money being thrown at it. In the report Early Head Start Children in Grade 5: Long-Term Follow-Up of the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project Study Sample prepared for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the researchers summarized the results for all the children in the study:

Impacts on the full sample of children and families in the grade 5 follow-up suggest that for the overall sample, Early Head Start did not continue to have the broad pattern of impacts for child and family outcomes seen at earlier ages; however, there were interesting patterns of impacts for some subgroups. For the overall sample, there was one significant impact at the trend level on a social-emotional success index that summarized multiple measures (the individual measures did not reach significance).

So there are no real educational, and education should be the primary focus of schools, benefits found by grade 5 and the only “significant” benefit is some improvement in social-emotional success, whatever that means. It should be noted here that significant doesn’t mean in statistics what it means in everyday English. In this usage it simply means that the results were unlikely to be due to chance.

Even for high-risk students, those for whom the program is most intended to help, these programs don’t appear to help in the long term. From the same report as above:

For high-risk children, there were negative impacts in the cognitive/academic area. The analyses revealed a pattern of unfavorable impacts of Early Head Start on math scores, academic success, and cumulative success with trend level negative impacts on receptive vocabulary, absenteeism, and cumulative risk among children in the highest-risk families compared to those in the control group. This is consistent in part with findings from earlier waves of the study where this group had some positive and some negative impacts. The positive impacts on important family risk factors seen at age 5 were not seen at grade 5.

So there are essentially no lasting educational benefits for any students from these programs and it is actually detrimental to those whom it is supposed to help the most. This hardly seems to be a program worth spending a quarter of a million dollars on, even if it is being mostly paid for by “state money.” (I’ve written about that particular bit of economic idiocy before. And here.)

I wrote last year about the state of affairs that led to the town voting down the school budget three times before finally approving one. It will be interesting to see what happens this year.