Why Early Education Investments Are the Least "Socialist" of Social Programs

Here’s one of my considered convictions about today’s Washington, D.C.: this town is not actually short on new ideas. There are tons of good ones floating around—we’re just not trying any.

That’s truer with early education investments than anything else. The research consensus on their long-term effects is both outstanding and longstanding. But we’re hardly making them a priority at the federal level.

Why not? Early education supporters usually hear that there’s just not enough money to expand services for American children. But given the relatively modest size of proposed expansions to early education budgets, that’s usually code for “this is not a spending priority.” There’s enough money in D.C. to establish universal pre-K in the United States, we’re just currently determined to spend it on other things.

I suspect that this is partly a product of general American skepticism about social programs. Which means that comprehensive early education programs start at something of a rhetorical deficit—to American ears, they sound like, ahem, democratic socialism (touting Europe’s early education programs does not help matters any).

Here’s how I summarized that view in a Talking Points Memo column this morning:

Sure, there are structural similarities to other social programs: universal pre-K is to education as a universal single-payer system is to health care. Both are “entitlements” in the sense that they involve government in the project of guaranteeing a social good. Both are, to some degree, in the social democratic project of sustaining meaningful human dignity and freedom by means of government programs. Through this lens, comprehensive early education programs sound a whole lot like Old World big-state socialism.

But there’s a subtle difference between early education investments and other social programs...