W. Steven Barnett on the lasting effects of prekindergarten

The essence of the argument against universal prekindergarten is as follows. We should focus our resources on children in poverty. The achievement gap is the key educational problem, and the middle class does not really need preK. Their children are doing well, and most already attend preschool programs. Moreover, preschool education has been shown to be ineffective for middle class children, at least after several years of subsequent schooling. As I will show, this argument is false in all of its particulars. Instead, the evidence suggests that we should invest in quality preK for all our children.

First, the problem of poor preparation for school success extends well beyond children in poverty. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of the kindergarten class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) reveals that the number of middle class children with cognitive tests scores below the average for poor children at kindergarten entry exceeds the number of poor children who score this low. Subsequently, nearly one in ten middle class children repeats a grade and the same percentage drop out of high school. As a result, most children who repeat a grade and most dropouts are from middle class families not families in poverty. If we focus solely on children in poverty, most of the school failure problem will not be addressed.

Second, about 70 percent of all children attend some kind of preschool program, but few attend programs that are educationally effective. The typical private preschool provides minimal educational benefits, far less than a quality preK program can provide. [See Preschool Education and its Lasting Effects: Research and Policy Implications] (PDF) Only by enrolling children in stronger programs that promote substantive gains in cognitive, social, and emotional development will we make a real dent in the problem of school failure. Many parents simply can’t afford to pay for top quality programs, and many targeted public programs including Head Start suffer from inadequate funding and low standards. Head Start is better than most private programs, and even its effects are quite weak compared to those of programs that meet higher standards. After 40 years of pursuing a strategy of targeted programs, we have neither full coverage for children in poverty nor adequate quality for those we do serve.

Third, proponents are selectively citing weak studies to support their case while ignoring stronger studies that find positive effects for the middle class. According to our comprehensive review of the research on lasting effects, the Fuller and Tennessee studies both fail to find persistent effects, but as every introductory statistics class makes clear, failure to find an effect is not the same as finding there is no effect. These studies are methodologically weak and have been demonstrated to be seriously biased. More rigorous studies of state preK find substantial initial gains for all children. Methodologically strong studies of preschool programs including one randomized trial, the NICHD study of early care, national studies in England, and international comparisons find lasting positive effects on the general population and on middle class children. These effects persist through the elementary school years to adolescence, and even adulthood in one study.

W. Steven Barnett is a Board of Governors Professor and codirector of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.