Eric Stinton: Don’t Justify Public Preschools By Citing Dubious Studies

If you’ve spent any time working in education, you know how often data is conscripted to justify change, big and small. Which is good! Reform should be based upon data to whatever extent possible. Vibes alone can’t improve educational outcomes.

Yet in a recent report on statewide kindergarten readiness – defined by skills such as sharing, using scissors and recognizing shapes and letters – there was a noticeable absence of data about the academic benefits of early childhood education, despite a preponderance of confident assertions from various education leaders.

Kerrie Urosevich, executive director of Early Childhood Action Strategy, was not surprised by the poor overall results of this year’s kindergarten readiness assessment, because “We don’t have equitable access to early learning programs across the islands.” 

Department of Education Assistant Superintendent Teri Ushijima noted that starting kindergarten with the aforementioned skills leads to “quicker progress toward longer-term goals, like reading at grade level by third grade.”

Third grade is an interesting cutoff point to mention; by then, the data tells us, academic benefits gained from pre-K education tend to disappear. 

Advocates of pre-K education often point to the 1960s Perry Preschool Study and the 1970s Abecedarian Project as evidence that high quality preschool results in a wide range of benefits later in life: being more likely to graduate high school and own a home, and less likely to commit crimes or experience teenage pregnancy.

ʻUnsupported By Any Available Evidenceʻ

That’s great news, but upon further scrutiny, the studies have been criticized for their small sample sizes and significant investments that can’t be replicated at scale. 

“Contemporary preschool programs are not like these intensive small-scale demonstration programs,” write Vanderbilt University researchers Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey, who conducted a rigorous study of pre-K programs in Tennessee. “To assert that these same outcomes can be achieved at scale by pre-K programs that cost less and don’t look the same is unsupported by any available evidence.”

Even the results of those best-case scenarios seem less impressive the longer you look at them: the Perry Preschool study shows, for instance, that if we take a small group of largely homogenous at-risk students, put them in classes with a 1:4 ratio of teachers to students and invest more than $15,000 per student, then only one in three students will get arrested five or more times in adulthood instead of one in two. 

And those are the best results we have, so unique that they can’t be reasonably scaled.

Larger, more recent studies – with better methodology including random assignment of students to the pre-K and control groups – show much more mixed results. The aforementioned study from Tennessee showed that students who enrolled in early childhood programs experienced significant short-term gains compared to their peers, but by the end of kindergarten the students who did not attend had already caught up.

Worse yet, by second grade, the students who did not attend a pre-K program outperformed the students who did on cognitive assessments. Teachers also rated the students who attended pre-K as “having poorer work skills in the classrooms, and feeling more negative about school.” 

This mirrored the results from the 2002 National Head Start Impact Study, which showed early improvements for students who participated in the program that faded out by the end of first grade. 

Similarly, another large-scale study published in Developmental Psychology in 2022 showed that students who attended pre-K programs showed initial gains entering kindergarten compared to their peers who did not attend pre-K, but by the end of kindergarten and first grade, students who did not attend pre-K had already caught up. 

By third grade, students who attended pre-K were actually performing worse than the control group in reading and math – a trend that persisted through the end of sixth grade, when the study concluded. 

The pre-K group also fared poorly on non-academic indicators. By third grade they had more school rule violations and major disciplinary offenses than the control group, and slightly worse rates of attendance (trends that also persisted through sixth grade).

Yes, We Do Need Preschools

For the record, I also don’t think it’s fair to say that pre-K programs necessarily lead to worse outcomes over time, so much as they simply don’t guarantee any long-term result one way or the other. From one child to the next, from one year to the next, there are innumerable factors at play that shape how a student experiences and performs in school. The causes of academic success – especially the kind that continues into adulthood – are much more complicated than simply extending educational services an additional year or two before elementary school. 

It would seem, then, that if we are to be as data-driven as we claim to be, we would not be touting pre-K programs as solutions for academic gaps. 

But this is not a rallying cry to shutter pre-K programs. Far from it. I fully support President Joe Biden’s call for universal pre-K, as well as Hawaiʻi’s $200 million investment in building, expanding and renovating pre-K facilities. I would love to see public preschool become reality. 

As I wrote in a previous column, one of the functions of public education is providing child care, which frees up parents to go to work. This helps the individual families as well as society as a whole. Extending child care services to include even younger children provides numerous social benefits, even if the academic benefits are limited. That shouldn’t be an issue. Taking care of children and helping families are inherently virtuous pursuits. We don’t need to justify them with performance metrics.

Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick wrote, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

The reality is that, according to the best available data right now, pre-K programs are a worthwhile investment, but not for the reasons for which they are often cited. Luckily, that doesn’t mean we have to abandon early childhood education efforts. We can support them while also being honest about it. 

If we are to educate students to be data-literate critical thinkers, let’s show them what that looks like.

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.