Offering David Brooks a Crash Course in Education Policy

Sometimes it's tough to get going first thing in the morning. Sometimes coffee's just not enough to shake the system awake.

But sometimes it's easy. Sometimes I read something so shocking that it succeeds where caffeine has failed. For instance, sometimes David Brooks writes a New York Times column suggesting that perhaps the United States has been putting "too much emphasis on early education."

As anyone who's read our recent report, "Subprime Learning: Early Education in America since the Great Recession," knows, that's false by almost any metric.

Once I'd recovered from the shock, I published a response at The New Republic:

It’s hard to imagine where Brooks gets the notion that early education has received disproportionately great attention...Federal spending on early education (broadly construed) has been basically flat since 2008, and state funding has been all over the map. The National Institute for Early Education Research called 2011 to 2012 the “worst in a decade” for state funding.