By: Phyllis Schlafly
12/17/2013 06:00 AM
In an
attempt to shift public discussion from the Obamacare train wreck, as well as toady
to the feminists, Barack Obama is again promoting universal tax-paid daycare
for preschoolers. But spending $75 billion on free preschool for all won’t work
any better than the numerous times it’s been tried before.
Progressives
don’t call it spending but instead use the code word “investments” to disguise
tax increases. Obama wants to line up big-business support with a fairy tale
that daycare “investments” will pay off by turning out kids who will be better
trained for school-to-work.
Lobbyists
for early childhood education (pre-K) always cite the Perry Preschool Project
conducted years ago in Ypsilanti, Michigan, as their model. But it was based on
separate classes of six preschool-age children, each class taught by a
well-trained teacher with a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education plus
extra training in a special curriculum.
Each
teacher conducted a two-and-a-half-hour-daily class with the children, and then
had a 90-minute visit at each child’s home in the afternoon. The mothers in the
Perry Project were required to be stay-at-home moms, married, and supported by
the husband’s income.
Obama’s
top economist, Austan Goolsbee, bases the argument that expenditures for
universal pre-K education will produce social goodies by citing the Perry
Preschool Project. But the Perry results have never been replicated despite
many subsequent attempts, so that study is not scientifically credible.
Two
embarrassing facts shoot more holes in any pretense of using the Perry Project
as a model for pre-K spending. The Perry Project was 50 years ago (1962-67)
when there were dozens of differences in our family and child-care culture, and
all the 123 kids chosen for the project had stay-at-home moms.
That
lifestyle for children was very different from today; we had the nuclear family
as the norm, and a very different culture of child care. The Perry Project did
not involve a takeover of little kids by government nanny care, but a mere 2.5
hours a day of training with a well-educated teacher plus home visits to give
specialized, personal counseling to the stay-at-home mothers.
Economist
Goolsbee cited the work of another economist, James J. Heckman, who asserted
that “each dollar invested [in government daycare] returns in present value
terms 7 to 10 dollars back to society.” Heckman’s rash conclusion was endlessly
echoed by so-called daycare experts, who claim that the Perry Project gave
society a return of six to seven times its cost. Goolsbee then solemnly
pontificated that this exceeded “the historical returns of the stock market.”
With its
virtually one-on-one, hands-on care of children, the Perry Project was
prohibitively costly — about $19,000 a year per student in today’s dollars. The
other project touted by the advocates of Big Government raising our children
from an early age, the famous Head Start program that began in Lyndon Johnson’s
War on Poverty, has been running for nearly 50 years and still does not provide
evidence that government would ever do a better job than mothers.
Our generous
U.S. taxpayers have poured billions of dollars into Head Start, which claims to
apply the logic of the Perry Preschool Project. The government’s own evaluation
of Head Start by the Department of Health and Human Services showed that, while
there were some initial positive impacts from Head Start, “by the end of third
grade there were very few impacts found in any of the four domains of
cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices.”
Of
course, we want to raise the low rankings of U.S. kids on international tests.
The trouble is we’ve spent large chunks of money with minimal results.
Well-established pre-K programs in Georgia and Oklahoma also show that a
majority of 4-year-olds failed to justify the money spent.
Just last
month, the liberal Brookings Institution admitted that the supposed benefits of
pre-K programs often “don’t last even until the end of kindergarten.”
Brookings’ lead research analyst commented, “I see these findings as
devastating for advocates of the expansion of state pre-K programs.”
We should
get the facts, learn from past failures, and abandon pie-in-the-sky projects
before we “invest” any more taxpayers’ money. How about a study to find out if
kids do better in school if they have the good fortune to live with their own
mother and father like the kids in the famous Perry Project?
Phyllis Schlafly is a lawyer, conservative political analyst and
author of 20 books.
