Required pre-school?

Our federal government has done such an amazing job on k-12 education and in containing costs for college (the cost of higher education has surged more than 500 percent since 1985), that now it wants to require pre-kindergarten education--even though its own program for the poor and low income (Head Start) shows no advantage--just so it can complete the job of state thought control.

 http://www.acf.hhs.gov/…/o…/head_start_executive_summary.pdf

Head Start—a very expensive feel good poverty program

The omnibus 1,582 page appropriations bill includes increased funding for Head Start and Early Head Start by $612 million, to $8.6 billion. This administration and those before it have studied this program carefully with the same results--it doesn't work. The 2012 study found little to no impact on cognitive, social-emotional, health, or parenting practices of participants. So why continue to fund it? What politician of either party could risk the backlash?

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/03/universal-preschools-empty-promises

Even though 74% of American 4 year olds are already in pre-school, Obama thinks the government needs to expand even more into this area and crowd out private and church programs, which will probably be declared "substandard" the way he did with health insurance which over 80% were satisfied with. Maybe he can reduce the gap between rich and poor by making all preschools perform like Head Start?

"The Columbus school district says it will find a way to expand pre-kindergarten even without the money that a levy would’ve raised." Columbus Dispatch Nov. 28, 2013. Professional educators are a powerful lobby for early childhood education--follow the money. Pre-schools have a patch work of standards by city and state for buildings, curricula, teachers, aides, safety, play time, unions--I mean, can you see the economic opportunities here for colleges of education, the building trades, the regulatory agencies?

Head Start isn’t

One of the biggest failures in the War on Poverty has been Head Start--again, no member of Congress would dare vote against it. The gains are lost, aka "fade away," and no amount of money will change that. Not every child with a caring, nurturing home will succeed, and not every child whose home is a disaster will fail. But statistically, we are throwing good money after bad, and 50 years of testing has shown that. Head Start has provided a lot of jobs for parents and government workers, some nutrition and health care for children, but it was never a works/nutrition/health program. If Obama wants more money for pre-schools to close his gap, just say no. It's a feel good drug.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/how-lasting-are-the-benefits-of-preschool/2014/01/07/

Head Start closures being reported

A report for WCTV by Julie Montanaro is being discussed on Facebook.

Here’s my take.  Some of the Head Start employees (often parents of the children enrolled) may suffer from the shut down, but there is evidence that any boost the children get disappears by third grade. 40 years and this is the research. http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/executive_summary_final.pdf    The report  ( Head Start Impact Study. Final Report. Washington, DC. January 2010) was sat on for four years and released on a Friday evening in Feb. 2010, so you may have missed it. Obama chose to increase the funding for Head Start anyway, as you can see from the graph, and maybe that’s the story. In government if spending billions doesn’t work, spend more.

The mission of Head Start was to give poor children a "head start" for school readiness—make up for all that middle class children got at home in vocabulary, reading readiness, socialization, good nutrition, etc. It was part of that social experiment called the “War on Poverty” of the 1960s. 40 years and $8 billion later it has failed in its mission. The most successful event to lift children out of poverty is the marriage of their parents. Co-habiting parents yields about the same results as single parent home. Poverty falls to 8% compared to 56% for single parent families. Marriage of parents also gives them a boost in health and education, and children raised with fathers are less likely to enter the criminal justice system.

Uncle Sam just isn't a good step-father because government can't be a parent and apparently isn't all that great at being a pre-school facilitator. Head Start isn't the only program--many churches support pre-schools in low income neighborhoods (mine included). My neighbor runs one--it's a delightful program. And the results are about the same--dedicated, loving, committed personnel pour their lives into these kids. The best we can say about Head Start (and private charities that do this) is that the children are safe, well cared for, and often employs the parents.

Buried deep in this article about budget increases for Head Start FY2011 you find a reference to the 2010 report of its failure of mission, although it doesn’t link to the government report I cited above. http://earlyed.newamerica.net/blogposts/2010/a_closer_look_at_obama_s_fy11_budget_head_start-27490

This is insane--cut throat pre-K applications

Are New Yorkers crazy? $30,000 for a private pre-school, and 28,817 applicants for 19,834 slots in the city’s public pre-K programs? So some have formed co-ops. Sounds like they aren't the play groups that I had with 3-4 other Moms in Upper Arlington in the early 1970s.

The dearth of high-quality preschool education for poor children has been widely reported, but there is a growing middle-class gap when it comes to prekindergarten. “Access is actually lower for middle-income people than it is for people that are poor,” said Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, a research and advocacy group that supports universal prekindergarten. Those who say middle-class families should just pay for preschool themselves, Mr. Barnett said, “don’t understand how expensive it is.”
Underground Pre-K Groups.

I don't really agree with the author on the benefits of pre-school (33% higher income in one study). The children who attend high quality schools also come from highly educated, 2 parent, high income homes with a lot of enrichment opportunities. If not, they probably lose any gains they supposedly got in pre-school. It appears that New York's strict standards, regulations and red tape for child care have caused a higher demand, fewer facilities, and a way for those on top to stay there.

The author and her husband and some other families they knew in their neighborhood created a co-op pre-school. Ending 3 weeks early after some families moved and replacements had to be found, it was exhausting. "Emotionally burned and mentally depleted, my husband and I vowed never to do it again." But they did.

One commenter, "Redstate," really became unglued with older mothers puzzling over how it could be such a big deal to help a child get ready for kindergarten. Another practically has your kid enrolled in prison if you don't get him into pre-school!

In my opinion, which means nothing to young parents or New Yorkers, the push to get more children in school before age 5 is a quest for more schools, more public teachers and more union members.

Universal pre-school

is one of Obama's plans. In today's WSJ opinion piece lauding such efforts, the writer finally got to the point.

The only lasting effect of average programs documented so far for all kids is a modest increase in behavior problems."

Pre-school, no matter how good, can't overcome the effects of poor parenting, a teen-age mom who didn't finish her education and a fatherless home. It might give them a six month or 12 month head start over the poor kid who didn't have preschool, but it will all be lost. More billions to be wasted.

The number one positive thing the Obamas can do for children, they have done by being a married couple seen in close, familial activities with their children. For so many women, marrying the father or fathers of her children isn't even on the radar. Even having his mother-in-law with them is an excellent decision, because although it doesn't take a village or the government to raise a child, an extra set of eyes and the wisdom of an older generation sure helps. Who knows where Obama would be today if it hadn't been for his grandparents.

Today's new word is TRAJECTORY

At least it is new to me the way it is used in Archives of General Psychiatry 2008;65(10) 1185-1192. My sense of the word was that it had something to do with a bullet or something flying through space in some sort of predictable line and going splat. Not so in the social sciences, apparently.

Peer-victimization trajectories
pre-school trajectories
developmental trajectories

I scoured the internet dictionaries trying to nail down a definition, but I guess you have to sit in a classroom and hear it to grasp the meaning. It sounds a lot more hopeless and set in stone than "direction," or "path." First, in case you weren't sure, "peer-victimization" is bullying. I was pretty sure it was, but had to go to the article and look for keywords or tags. Usually, finding a summary of a medical article in layman's language is helpful. This article in Medical News Today manages to summarize the original and only use the word “trajectory” once--maybe they were confused too. Their title was “How And Why Certain Children Receive Chronic Peer Abuse” instead of "Predictive Validity and Early Predictors of Peer-Victimization Trajectories in Preschool." You get paid more if you've got a fancy title.

What I got out of the article, other than a vision of seeing little kids hurtling through the air from pre-school into a gang of bullies in high school, is that the parents’ behavior and the child’s behavior cause something in the dynamics that invites bullying by other children. I’ve read it through several times and don’t see any other conclusion. The children are aggressive or hyperactive from a very early age, and the parents have poor skills and react harshly. When these children are around other kids, they are doing something that causes the other children to react mean or negative. Also, the same predictors for poverty (teen mother, single parent, low education) seem to be in the bullying scenario.

Conclusion: Early childhood preventive interventions should target parenting skills and child behaviors, particularly within families with insufficient income.

Short of taking the children away from the parents, I don’t know where this research is going, because a few public service announcements on public television (I've seen them about 6 a.m. and wonder who is watching) or a one hour parenting class at the Y probably isn’t going to change much, but the concept sure is fodder for the grant money. What do you think (if you’ve read the article.)