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Heritage Foundation
Research
Review: Universal Preschool May Do More Harm than Good
By Lindsey Burke and Salim Furth, Ph.D.
A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that universal preschool
programs fail to improve a range of outcomes for participants. New
studies of large-scale preschool programs in Quebec and Tennessee show
that vastly expanding access to free or subsidized preschool may worsen
behavioral and emotional outcomes. In the absence of compelling
evidence that subsidized preschool provides an important public good,
the subsidies should be reduced, not increased. Policymakers should
recognize that expanding subsidies for preschool is unnecessary,
provides no new benefits to low-income parents, and would create a new
subsidy for middle-income and upper-income families, while adding to
the tax burden for Americans.
KEY POINTS
The Head Start Impact Study, a scientifically rigorous evaluation that
tracked 5,000 three-year-old and four-year-old children through the end
of third grade, found little to no impact on parenting practices or the
cognitive, social-emotional, and health outcomes of participants.
Baker et al. found that children exposed to the Quebec program were 4.6
percent more likely to be convicted of a crime and 17 percent more
likely to commit a drug crime and their health and life satisfaction
were worse.
In a major review of the literature on early childhood education,
Elango et al. draw very sanguine conclusions from rather mixed data.
Proponents of universal government-subsidized preschool have to grapple
with the fact that previous universal programs have failed and had
negative social impacts on children.
Evidence continues to mount that government-funded preschool fails to
fulfill the promises of its proponents. New studies of large-scale
preschool programs in Quebec and Tennessee show that vastly expanding
access to free or subsidized preschool may worsen behavioral and
emotional outcomes. Even proponents of universal preschool admit that
it does nothing to improve future academic performance.
As proponents of government preschool programs continue to appeal to
findings from 50 years ago that have never been replicated, current,
large-scale, rigorous evaluations of major programs at the federal
level, in the states, and internationally make a strong case against
such initiatives and deserve serious consideration from policymakers
wont to further expand government intervention in the care of the
youngest Americans.
Universal Preschool Proponents Appeal to a Handful of Dated, Unreliable
Studies
Proponents of universal preschool tend to appeal to one of two studies
that found benefits of preschool attendance: the Abecedarian Preschool
Study and the Perry Preschool Project. The Perry Preschool Project
began in 1962 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and included just 123 children
(58 in the treatment group), all from low-income households. Perry is a
half-century old boutique program that provided around-the-clock,
comprehensive preschool and care services to a few dozen “at-risk”
children. The children, deemed at risk of “retarded intellectual
functioning and eventual school failure,” received weekly home visits
and structured classroom time, and their parents participated in group
meetings with teachers.[1] The Perry Preschool Project followed program
participants through age 40 and found that they were more likely to
have completed high school, to be employed, and to earn more than
non-participants. Perry participants were also less likely to have been
arrested five or more times by age 40. As a result, Perry researchers
claim a $7.16 return on investment for every dollar expended.[2]
Advocates of expanding government-subsidized preschool typically appeal
to the Perry Preschool Project for evidence about the benefits of early
childhood education. As the Brookings Institution’s Russ Whitehurst
cautions, “Perry was an intensive, expensive, multi-year, hothouse
program carried out 50 years ago with less than 100 black children in
Ypsilanti, Michigan. The mothers stayed at home and received home
visitation. The control group children had no other preschool services
available to them.” Whitehurst sums up the utility of extrapolating
from Perry, noting that the findings “demonstrate the likely return on
investment of widely deployed state pre-K programs for four-year-olds
in the 21st century to about the same degree that the svelte TV
spokesperson providing a testimonial for Weight Watchers demonstrates
the expected impact of joining a diet plan.”[3]
Similarly, the Abecedarian Program, which began in 1972 in Chapel Hill,
North Carolina, had a sample of 111 (57 in the treatment group)
majority African American children from low-income households. The
program included individualized education services, transportation, and
social and nutritional services, among other interventions. As with
Perry, Abecedarian Program participants also had positive outcomes in
adulthood, including a greater likelihood of attending college, lower
rates of teen pregnancy, and an increased likelihood of working in a
skilled job.[4] And as with Perry, Abecedarian suffered from many of
the same methodological shortcomings, including violation of random
assignment rules,[5] small sample size, lack of findings replication,
and management of the evaluations by the program developers
themselves.[6]
The limitations of Perry and Abecedarian—including the dated nature of
the evaluations—should largely exclude their findings from
considerations of the efficacy of subsidized preschool programs.
Current, Rigorous Empirical Evaluations of Preschool Tell a Different
Story
In contrast to the Perry and Abecedarian studies, recent large-scale
evaluations of the federal Head Start program and Tennessee’s Voluntary
Pre-K Program should carry more weight for policymakers considering any
expansion of subsidized preschool—whether at the federal or state level.
The Head Start Impact Study. In late 2012, the Department of Health and
Human Services released the Head Start Impact Study, a scientifically
rigorous evaluation that tracked 5,000 three-year-old and four-year-old
children through the end of third grade. The study found little to no
impact on the parenting practices or the cognitive, social-emotional,
and health outcomes of participants. Notably, on a few measures, access
to Head Start had harmful effects on participating children.[7] For
both the three-year-old and four-year-old cohorts, access to Head Start
had no statistically measurable effects on any measure of cognitive
ability, including reading, language, and math.[8] In other words, by
the time they finished third grade, there was no difference between
those children who attended Head Start and the control group of their
peers who did not.
Vanderbilt Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K Study. In 2015, a team of
researchers from Vanderbilt University released an evaluation of
Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K (VPK) Program, a state-subsidized preschool
program open to low-income children in the state. Some 18,000 children
participate in the program, which was introduced in 1996. Proponents
have long claimed Tennessee’s VPK program is a model state-based
preschool program, with standards aligned to the Obama Administration’s
Preschool for All initiative.[9] Teachers must be licensed, the
child-adult ratio is limited to 10:1, and a structured
“age-appropriate” curriculum must be used in classrooms. The program is
available first to children from low-income Tennessee families, and
then, space permitting, to children with special needs and children
with limited English proficiency, among other children deemed
“at-risk.” An earlier evaluation found that gains made by participating
four-year-olds had faded by kindergarten. In a follow-up evaluation
released in September 2015, Mark Lipsey, Dale Farrar, and Kerry Hofer
reported that there were no sustained benefits for the same children
through the end of third grade.[10]
The random assignment evaluation tracked more than 3,000 participants
overall, contrasting them with a control group of students who applied
for a slot in the program through the lottery process but did not
receive one. A more intensive evaluation consisted of a subset of 1,076
children: 773 in the experiment group, randomly assigned to a VPK slot
(that is, the program is oversubscribed and children were admitted
through a lottery), and the control group of 303 children whose parents
applied for, but were not offered seats in the VPK program. The
randomization, however, was imperfect—a flaw that we discuss below and
that should be addressed in future studies of the program.
The authors analyzed the VPK program’s impact on children’s math
skills, emergent literacy, and language skills, as well as the
program’s impact on non-cognitive measures, such as behavior. “By the
end of kindergarten, the control children had caught up to the TN-VPK
children and there were no longer significant differences between them
on any achievement measures. The same result was obtained at the end of
first grade using both composite achievement measures.” And notably, by
second grade, “the groups began to diverge with the TN-VPK children
scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures. The
differences were significant on both achievement composite measures and
on the math subtests.” “Pre-K was generally thought to be better than
Head Start, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in Tennessee,” stated
University of California, Berkeley professor David L. Kirp in The New
York Times.[11]
The findings of the TN-VPK program were not limited to academic
outcomes. As Lipsey et al. explain:
In terms of behavioral effects, in the spring the first grade teachers
reversed the fall kindergarten teacher ratings. First grade teachers
rated the TN-VPK children as less well prepared for school, having
poorer work skills in the classrooms, and feeling more negative about
school. It is notable that these ratings preceded the downward
achievement trend we found for VPK children in second and third
grades.[12]
Quebec’s Negative Non-cognitive Results
The province of Quebec introduced universal low-cost day care for
children through age four beginning in 1997. The program has had a
large impact: privately funded child care arrangements have almost
disappeared, and Quebec has the highest rate of subsidized child care
in Canada, at 58 percent in 2011.[13] The program caused a 14.5 percent
increase in the share of mothers of young children working outside the
home.[14] The Quebec experience offers more guidance for the potential
introduction of universal child care than small, targeted programs,
because it implicitly includes indirect effects on non-participants and
any general equilibrium effects due to the drastic shift in the way
child care was funded and conducted.
Regrettably, new research has found that children who became eligible
for the program in Quebec were more anxious as children and have
committed more crimes as teenagers. The availability of day care
clearly worsened children’s non-cognitive “soft” skills.
Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan found that children
exposed to the program were 4.6 percent more likely to be convicted of
a crime and 17 percent more likely to commit a drug crime. Their health
and life satisfaction were worse.
Baker et al.’s study is based on a large representative sample of
Canadian children, both before and after the institution of universal
low-cost day care in Quebec. This is important and correct. If they had
studied only participants, their results would have been contaminated
with selection bias. However, since the program only increased day care
enrollment by 14 percent of eligible children, the effects on the
children who actually participate may be much larger. The effects could
be occurring through any (or all) of three channels:
Worse care for children who would have been cared for by a family
member if day care were not subsidized;
Worse care for children who would have gone to a less-regulated,
non-subsidized day care; and
Spillover impacts on children who are not participating.
It is instructive to compare Quebec’s program with Tennessee’s. In
Quebec, all children through age four are eligible; in Tennessee only
three-year-olds and four-year-olds are eligible. In Quebec, the program
cost parents $7.30 (Canadian) per day;[15] the Tennessee program is
completely free at the point of delivery. The majority of Quebec’s
subsidized day cares are home-based; the Tennessee program does not
include in-home care. Quebec’s day care workers are unionized;
Tennessee’s are not.
Different child care arrangements have different results, and no two
programs are the same. Subsidized day care in the Quebec style may be
better, on average, than some alternatives, but probably less
beneficial to most children than being watched by their grandmothers,
for example. How the Quebec program compares to other child care
programs is an empirical question.
Critiques of Large-Scale Studies
In a major review of the literature on early childhood education, Sneha
Elango, Jorge Luis García, James J. Heckman, and Andrés Hojman draw
very sanguine conclusions from rather mixed data.
Although Elango et al.’s review is extensive, it is not universally
careful: it badly misreports the results of Baker et al.’s 2015 paper
on Quebec, claiming that the latter found “evidence of decreased
criminal activity.”[16] The misunderstanding is especially surprising
given that Baker et al. note in their abstract that “cohorts with
increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life
satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life.”
Setting aside that lacuna, Elango et al.’s key findings are that
Even high-quality demonstration programs affect only non-cognitive
skills; long-term cognitive skills appear to be unaffected.
Child care performs best among disadvantaged households, including
those who experience poverty or the absence of a parent.
The first finding implies that programs targeted to children under age
five belong in the category of care rather than education.
The second implies that universality is overrated: for most families,
home care or privately purchased child care provide better outcomes
than what governments have offered. Furthermore, giving middle-class
families child care subsidies is an expensive market distortion with no
justification.
Elango et al. are very critical of the Head Start Impact Study (HSIS),
a large-scale randomized experiment that is “notorious because of its
transparent and rigorous design” and found that the benefits of Head
Start “disappear by first grade.”[17] The authors are critical of the
HSIS because it covers a wide variety of Head Start centers, some much
better than others.[18] But that heterogeneity is a feature, not a bug.
Widespread government programs are always diverse, and evaluations
should take that mixed quality into account.
Elango et al. argue that HSIS is “contaminated” by the fact that
families in the control group often purchase child care on their own or
attend other subsidized child care centers. From the perspective of
policymakers, however, the control group ought to represent the full
range of options absent a new policy.
The paper that Elango et al. call “the best available study” is a
clever long-term study by Pedro Carneiro and Rita Ginja, which covers a
variety of implementations of Head Start and has “control
contamination,” although Elango et al. make no criticism of it.
Carneiro and Ginja do find some promising evidence that the expansion
of Head Start eligibility in poor counties led to lower levels of
obesity and better mental health during adolescence. However, the study
uses a low standard of statistical significance (90 percent) and finds
statistically significant gains in only three of 12 measures at age
12–13, in two of eight measures at age 16–17, and two of six measures
at age 20–21.[19] The study puzzlingly finds that increased eligibility
does not increase girls’ enrollment at all, so all the estimates are
for boys.
Elango et al., happy with the results, mention none of these caveats.
Since they disagree with the results of Lipsey et al.’s study of
Tennessee’s pre-K program, Elango et al. only mention its drawbacks.
For example, they note that “[grade] repetition is the only outcome
measured for the entire sample” in Lipsey et al.[20] Nowhere do they
admit that the “intensive substudy sample” of 1,076 children[21]
measures a variety of outcomes, including both detailed test
performance and teachers’ evaluations.
Elango et al. do note one serious shortcoming of the data: the
Vanderbilt team was unable to obtain affirmative consent from many
parents, mostly because they did not have adequate communications in
the first year of the sample. If the sample of participants was from
poorer, less educated households than the control group, the study’s
results would be in doubt. However, the opposite is true: the control
group is very similar to the treatment group. Where small differences
exist, such as in the mother’s level of education, the control group is
at a slight disadvantage. It is certainly true that the Tennessee
randomization had flaws and that scrutiny of the evidence calls for
greater caution. But the flaws do not appear to have compromised the
experiment.
Conclusion
Proponents of universal government-subsidized preschool have to grapple
with the fact that previous universal programs have failed and had
negative social impacts on children. Evaluations of large-scale
programs, such as those in Quebec and Tennessee, are a better indicator
of the potential costs and benefits of universal child care than small,
targeted programs are.
Government subsidies for child care introduce a large distortion into
the market and must be funded by higher tax rates. Particularly in the
absence of compelling evidence that subsidized preschool provides an
important public good, the subsidies should be reduced, not increased.
Additional federal subsidies for early childhood education would
produce negative effects, such as crowding out private providers from
the preschool market, which would ultimately limit options for
families. Policymakers should recognize that expanding subsidies for
preschool is unnecessary, provides no new benefits to low-income
parents, and would create a new subsidy for middle-income and
upper-income families, while adding to the tax burden for Americans. A
growing body of empirical evidence also suggests that such policies
fail to improve a range of outcomes for preschool’s young participants.
—Lindsey M. Burke is the Will Skillman Fellow for Education in Domestic
Policy Studies, of the Institute for Family, Community, and
Opportunity, at The Heritage Foundation. Salim Furth, PhD, is a
Research Fellow in Macroeconomics in the Center for Data Analysis, of
the Institute for Economic Freedom and Opportunity, at The Heritage
Foundation.
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