Alarming Pre-K News

New research is problematic news for the world of pre-K. 

We've long known that a good pre-school is not a magical jump start that guarantees your kids will end up in the Ivy League, and advantages tend to fade within a few years, but new research from Vanderbilt's Peabody College suggests the reality could be far worse. One of the authors puts it bluntly:

“At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing,” said Dale Farran, a professor in Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, director of its Peabody Research Institute and one of the authors of the study. “The kinds of pre-K that our poor children are going into are not good for them long term.”

The researchers looked at 2,990 children enrolled in Tennessee's voluntary state-funded pre-K program. By the end of sixth grade, those students were doing worse than their peers--academically, behaviorally, all the -allies. They were even more likely to end up in special ed. The study compared the students who were randomly selected for the program to those students who applied for the program, but didn't get in. So a pretty clean basis for the data.

We're looking at pre-K students from the 2009-2011 years, so there's a real possibility that much has changed in Tennessee's pre-K program (in fact, changed because of earlier findings from these same researchers). But the question remains--what the hell happened?

The short answer is that nobody knows.

Possible culprits? A heavy-on-academics program that attempts to pack the littles with studying scholastic stuff instead of just going outside and playing. But other experts argue that it's a lack of coherence, and that there's just too many pre-K programs that are higgledy-piggledy; standardize some academic rigor, these experts say. I say these experts are full of it."Possibly the problem in Tennessee is not with pre-K, but with K-6 and how it treats children who went to pre-K" says co-director Steven Barnett at the National Institute for Early Education Research (Rutgers). We know that "adverse childhood experiences" have long term negative effects--were Tennessee's pre-K programs somehow providing plenty of ACE  (for example, doing stupid worksheets and cramming academics). Another theory is that Tennessee's pre-K programs just aren't very good, but even if that's the answer, it's pretty alarming to learn that "not very good" is actually worse than nothing at all.

There are lots of blanks to fill in here, and I can't do that at the moment because the paper is behind a paywall and won't be released until January of 2023 (presumably academics can spend that year complaining that the public doesn't pay enough attention to research). So there are details I don't know--for instance, what exactly did the group that didn't get into pre-K do instead--home school? another pre-K program? nothing at all? 

And we know that other results are out there. Research about Head Start shows positive outcomes, and a recent study in Boston found benefits all the way up through high school graduation.

Meanwhile, state pre-K programs are struggling with the impact of problems going all the way back to the funding collapse of 2008 through the loss of students during the pandemic (and the corresponding loss of funding). At the very moment that we need to take steps to save these programs, we need to know what about them (if anything) is worth saving and what form they should take. This new study raises some huge questions that really, really need answers.