|
At
last, the Kaine administration is admitting the
real reason the Governor wants his
taxpayer-financed preschool proposal to be
universal – and it has nothing to do with
children.
“Public
programs for just at-risk students don’t have
the broader constituency of support as one that
includes all children,” Secretary of Education
Tom Morris told a Charlottesville public forum
last month.
In
other words, it’s all about the politics: The
more you expand a program, the more support it
will generate – even though it will cost
everyone else a lot more.
A
governor who used his better instincts as a young
missionary helping the poor of Central America
thus appears to be in the odd position of
advocating a solution based on the assumption that
other Virginians don’t share those better
instincts.
The
National Institute for Early Education Research
notes that more than 78 percent of four-year-olds
from families making $100,000 a year are already
in preschool. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s concept
simply shifts the cost of preschool for the
wealthy to the rest of the state’s taxpayers,
creating a huge new entitlement program certain to
drive future tax increases.
The
Governor’s Start Strong Council cites a number
of studies supporting universal preschool. Those
studies clearly show that quality preschool helps
at risk students, and programs that help those
children prepare for public school should be
improved. But the studies don’t show the same
effect for upper and middle income children.
Kathy
Glazer, directors of the Governor’s Working
Group on Early Childhood Initiatives, told the
press she agreed that the studies are “focusing
on at-risk children.” She suggested that the
program needed to include middle- and upper-class
kids because higher quality teachers won’t be
attracted to classes of only at-risk children.
But
in a world of limited dollars, creating a program
for everyone instead of targeting it for those
children who need it most sets up a competitive
situation in which those parents who know best how
to work the system will be most likely to access
the resources. Or, as Albemarle County preschool
coordinator Charity Haines put it, "I
don't want to dilute the services of those at-risk
students”.
More
importantly, Virginia doesn’t have a handle yet
on the programs it already has in place. The
Virginia Preschool Initiative for At-Risk
Four-Year-Olds has been in existence for more than
ten years. In 2004, appropriations jumped from
$18.9 million to $47.4 million. Only in the last
two years, however, has the General Assembly
required aligning the outcomes of the preschool
program with the expectations for incoming
kindergarten students.
And
there has never been a study of Virginia’s
current preschool program to determine whether or
not it is actually accomplishing what it is
supposed to do, or what it could do better.
Gov.
Kaine has recommended a pilot program for his
initiative, but doesn’t offer specifics on what
the pilot is to study. Ms. Glazer says the pilot
is in its “design phase,” but both she and
members of the Governor’s staff have indicated
that the plan is “not to look at immediate
student outcomes but to test this model of
public-private partnership.”
In
other words, the pilot simply assumes – on the
basis of research studies focusing on at-risk kids
– that universal preschool is desperately needed
by everyone. And having decided that, their only
question is making it work.
A
true pilot would do more: It would disaggregate
student scores and other data by socioeconomic
status to see if preschool really makes an impact
with middle- and upper-class children. It would
have a control group (students with similar
demographics not participating in preschool
programs) to assess preschool’s impact. And it
would collect long-term data to see why so many
studies show a “fall-off” in student
performance after they enter public school.
The
Governor has also called for creation of a
“Quality Ratings System” to encourage quality
and consistency – a system that could be
important to parents in choosing their preschool
program. But the proposal doesn’t suggest
looking at the cost of various quality components.
A
report by the National Institute for Early
Education Research notes that only Arkansas has
achieved at least nine of ten “quality
benchmarks,” but does so at a cost of more than
$7,800 per child – well above Virginia’s
current cost of $5,700 per child – and a figure
that would blow Governor Kaine’s cost estimates
out of the water.
The
General Assembly has been asked to fund both the
pilot program and creation of a quality ratings
system. Legislators would be wrong to reject it
out of hand. But they would be more wrong to
approve it without insisting on a pilot that will
actually study the effectiveness of universal
preschool or a rating system that will give some
sense of what this will all cost somewhere down
the road.
--
January 8, 2007
|
