Getting Reason-able About the Evidence for Quality Pre-k

Fresh off recent anti-universal pre-k op-eds by Reason’s Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell, the libertarian think tank/magazine has now produced a snazzy new mini-documentary to make the case against universal pre-k .

We’ve already addressed many of their arguments elsewhere, but the video offers some new angles that deserve mention: First, it strongly implies that supporters of universal pre-k want to move all 4-year-olds into district-run public schools and push existing providers out of the market. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, most state funded pre-k programs utilize a network of diverse providers—including faith-based providers, center-based childcare, and even family care homes—to deliver pre-k, while also helping these providers improve the quality of their offerings. For folks who support increased choice and competition in education (as both Reason and Early Ed Watch do) this should be a selling point for universal pre-k, rather than a count against it, because universal pre-k programs have the potential to create a new segment of the public education system in which diverse provision and parent choice are the norm, creating a model for greater choice and diversity in the K-12 sphere.

Quality is a word that doesn’t come up much in this video, in part because the folks at Reason seem incapable of perceiving the distinction between daycare and quality pre-kindergarten programs. They argue that quality should be largely irrelevant to policymakers since “the best judge of outcomes for a three-year-old is the parents, right?” And they cite a poll of parents in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska as evidence that the majority of parents think their childcare is great—perfect, even. The chart is striking, but there are three good reasons not to believe it: First, the percentage of parents who said they would choose the same care provider for their child again was lower than the percentage of parents who gave their child’s care an “A” or “A+”. That suggests that not all parents who gave the programs high grades weren’t actually satisfied with them (possibly because they were grading on a curve relative to poor quality programs they know dominate the market). Second, we already have abundant evidence that parents give high ratings to their child’s school or care provider, even when outside evidence shows that the results being produced aren’t actually all that good. Reasons spends a lot of time in this video talking about how our public schools are “failing,” but the results of polls that ask parents to grade their child’s public school are pretty similar to the ratings parents give childcare providers in the poll Reason cites. Further, we know from research by the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies that parents often inaccurately perceive the quality of care their children receive, assuming, for example, that childcare providers have specialized training in early childhood or are regularly inspected for health and safety when in fact that is not the case. That’s not to say that parents are stupid–they’re not! But the patchwork system of early care and education in most states can make it very hard for parents to get reliable information about childcare quality, a problem quality rating and improvement systems in a growing number of states are designed to address.

Moreover, there is hard evidence that the quality of childcare that most 4-year-old children currently attend is not very good. There is a strong base of research on what constitutes quality in early education programs, and what children need to support their cognitive and social-emotional development in the early years, regardless of where they’re cared for. And we know that a lot of children aren’t getting what they need in child care.

A recent RAND study that sampled preschool and center-based childcare programs in California found that only 22 percent of children attended childcare centers that were rated “Good” or better on the ECERS-R (an observational tool that researchers use to measure the quality of early education settings), and only 24 percent of children attended centers that provided good quality instructional support (as measured by the CLASS, an observational tool that looks at the quality of interactions between adults and children in the classroom). Low-income and African American children were much less likely to get quality care.

Reason’s Lisa Snell also argues that universal pre-k advocates shouldn’t cite the high-profile Abecedarian, Perry Preschool, and Chicago Child Parent Center programs as evidence of the effectiveness of high-quality pre-k, because children in those programs got “iron supplements” and other interventions in addition to quality pre-k. That’s a fair criticism to level at the Abecedarian Project, which started targeted interventions for children in infancy. But it’s harder to write off the Chicago CPC program, which was conducted at a large scale, with federal funding at levels comparable to what state pre-k programs can spend. There is robust evidence of long-term benefits from participation in CPC, including reduced rates of special education placement and grade retention, and higher high school graduation rates. And the math and literacy gains children make in Oklahoma’s state universal pre-k program are similar to those children made in the CPC program’s pre-k year.

CPC’s experience is informative here: The program provided children both high-quality pre-k and sustained educational supports through third grade. The Reason video argues that universal pre-k is not a silver bullet, and we couldn’t agree more. Although there’s abundant evidence that universal pre-k produces learning gains for students, high-quality pre-k needs to be matched with high-quality early elementary school programs that can sustain and build on the progress children make in pre-k. That’s why we argue for Pre-k to 3^rd education reforms.

While we’ve found a lot to criticize in this Reason mini-doc, there’s one thing in it that we feel pretty good about. Throughout the video, Snell and Reason’s Nick Gillespie are very critical of the evidence for universal pre-k, but they seem to admit that high-quality pre-k can provide real benefits for disadvantaged kids, and that there’s a government role in paying for quality pre-k for impoverished youngsters. The fact that an organization like Reason is willing to admit this is a sign of just how much progress pre-k advocates have made. Given that nearly half of poor children lack access to pre-k programs (and many of those that do have access attend poor quality ones), there’s clearly a lot of work to be done within that consensus, even if we don’t all agree on the need for universal pre-k.