Dear John,

You can put down the gun. There’s a slew of new reports to read to distract you from the Central Falls-out.  Or, turn your attention to a charter school for American Indians, the group’s abysmal graduation rate (especially compared to Massachusetts), and how unqualified their Head Start teachers are.  Good thing early childhood education doesn’t really help minorities. But does integration? Power to the people!

–Daniela Fairchild, Fordham research intern

The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews dedicates his column today to discussing Checker’s new book “Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut,” in which Checker takes strong issue with the idea of universal preschool. Mathews says that leaders of the movement to expand preschool are “not going to like” the book, but that “its clarity and depth are hard to resist.” He reviews a few of Checker’s main points, disagreeing with him a bit at times. But Mathews concludes:

I haven’t seen enough preschools, good or bad, to decide if Finn is right. But his analysis is a good starting place. There has been much written about the benefits of universal preschool. This report will inspire much more, both positive and negative, and help those of us overwhelmed by conflicting data to figure out the essentials, and see the weaknesses on both sides of the debate.

And if you’re interested in reading more about this debate, Checker wrote an op-ed that ran in the Post  earlier this month.

Don’t forget to register for Fordham’s upcoming event, “The Cons and Pros of Universal Pre-K“, coming up on Thursday, June 4 from 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM. This event coincides with the release of Chester Finn’s new book, Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut. Prekindergarten is one of the most hotly contested topics in American education today. Finn’s book challenges the orthodoxy of “universal preschool” while explaining the key issues that drive and complicate this contentious debate: Which children really need preschool? How many aren’t getting it? Who should provide it–and at whose expense? What’s the right balance between socialization and systematic instruction between education and child care? Where does Head Start fit in? What are reliable markers of quality in preschool programs? Finn concludes by recommending a tightly targeted but intensive (and highly cognitive) approach to preschool for the neediest children. The discussants can be expected to take issue with that conclusion.

Finn will present.  Responding will be Steven Barnett (Co-Director, National Institute for Early Education Research), Neal McCluskey (Associate Director, Center for Educational Freedom, Cato Institute) and Sara Mead (Director, Early Education Initiative, New America Foundation).  Richard Colvin (Director, Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, Teachers College, Columbia University) will moderate.  We’ll convene at the Fordham Institute conference center (1016 16^th Street NW, 7^th Floor).

The first 70 guests will receive a free copy of the book!  To RSVP, please e-mail Christina Hentges at rsvp@edexcellence.net. Video of this event will be online after June 5.

The new “Condition of Education” report released today by the National Center for Education Statistics offers fresh evidence as to why some American kids need more and better preschooling but the “universal” approach is wrong. Fifty-five percent of three- and four-year-olds are already in preschool (2007), up from 47 percent in 1994 (See Indicator 1). Moreover, 33% of four-year-olds are proficient at “letter recognition” and 65% at “numbers and shapes” (See Indicator 3). Thirty-nine percent of four-year-olds are read to daily by a family member–and 50% are sung to (See Indicator 2). Not everybody, it seems clear, needs more than they’re already getting. But some do. Among kids in poverty, African-Americans and those whose parents have less than a high-school education, just one in five is read to at home on a daily basis. And proficient “letter recognition” among four-year-olds ranges from 52 percent for those with a parent who has some graduate education down to 16 percent among those with less-than-high-school-educated parents. This reinforces my contention that intensive but highly targeted pre-school services, starting very young, is what America needs more of; not more middle-class entitlements for those who are already doing okay.

Sara Mead’s thoughtful blog post responding to my Washington Post op ed is several hundred words longer than my original piece. Mead is smart and perceptive, however, in addition to wordy. Once she actually gets her hands on the book (Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut) on which my op ed was based–due back from the printer in a few days and meanwhile available in pdf form–she will, I think, find that I actually do heed the “factual” points she makes. Perhaps the only fundamental on which we disagree (and it’s indeed fundamental) is whether “universal” pre-K is the right goal for American public policy. But the more interesting area of semi-disagreement concerns the markers and criteria of “quality” in the early-childhood field. Mead acknowledges that the field relies overmuch on input measures and should pay greater heed to learning outcomes. She’s got that right; indeed, that’s one of the book’s major thrusts. But then she more-or-less exonerates the field for this oversight with the lame excuse that preschool programs are so egregiously underfunded that they must worry about inputs before they can afford to worry about results. That’s mostly wrong. Some programs are doubtless underfunded but in the NCLB era they’re going to have trouble making the case for additional resources unless they demonstrate their seriousness about school readiness and other outcomes. And some of the worst offenders–Head Start, for example–aren’t underfunded at all, yet are profoundly resistant to being judged on their school-readiness results. This is a conversation worth continuing, however. I’m looking forward to a face-to-face version of it at our upcoming panel discussion of my book and delighted  that Sara will be on that panel.

Checker argues in this morning’s Washington Post that universal preschool as currently conceived should be reexamined.

For all its surface appeal, universal preschool is an unwise use of tax dollars. In a time of ballooning deficits, expansion of preschool programs would use large sums on behalf of families that don’t need this subsidy while not providing nearly enough help to the smaller number of children who need it most. It fails to overhaul expensive but woefully ineffectual efforts such as Head Start. And it dumps 5-year-olds, ready or not, into public-school classrooms that today are unable even to make and sustain their own achievement gains, much less to capitalize on any advances these youngsters bring from preschool. (Part of the energy behind universal pre-K is school systems–and teachers unions–maneuvering to expand their own mandates, revenue and membership rolls.)

In fact, the way in which we think about preschool is grounded in four incorrect assumptions, he explains. Instead of jumping on the preschool bandwagon, we should be asking ourselves four things: if everybody really needs it, if preschool fulfills educational goals, if the existing programs are really doing a good job, and, especially, if Head Start, the long lauded and incredibly expensive federal program, really is the right model to espouse and expand. Furthermore, there are things we could be doing that would make preschool an effective tool. Find out the rest of Checker’s argument here.

Checker was recently the author of a book on this very subject. If this article piques your interest, you can purchase that tome here.

In the running for worst idea of the year, the National Head Start Association is pressing its members to lobby hard in coming days for Congress and the Obama administration to include $4.3 billion for Head Start in the forthcoming economic stimulus package. Among other things, they want higher pay for Head Start program directors.

Head Start is, of course, an iconic program revered by many. But it’s no education program. Forty years of evaluations have demonstrated that Head Start does next to nothing to prepare its young charges–needy three- and four-year-olds–to succeed in kindergarten and beyond, and that whatever gains it yields quickly dissipate once the kids enroll in school.

The major reason it’s ineffective as a pre-school program is because it has no curriculum and little cognitive content, because most of its staffers are “child care workers”, not teachers, and because the National Head Start Association itself has defied every effort by policymakers to transform it into the pre-literacy program that it ought to be and that these kids truly need.

Dumping more money on it–flooding the Congress with pleas for  that–is, to put it mildly, a genuinely ineffectual investment.

Photograph of teacher and children from New York Public Library on Flickr