Welcome to Atlanta, Mr. President. Now about pre-k . . .
President Barack Obama is expected in Atlanta today, to pitch a problem to a solution.
No, I don’t have that backward.
The president’s planned visit today to a Decatur pre-k school comes on the heels of his lauding Georgia’s preschool program during his State of the Union address Tuesday night. He wants to use it as a model for a federal effort “to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America.”
While I join Obama in applauding educational innovation in the states, I can think only of reasons a federal preschool program is a bad idea. Not least is the fact that the existing federal preschool program, Head Start, has been declared a failure by the very agency that administers it.
Head Start, a program for low-income children, has been around since 1965. But three years ago, after four and a half decades and $166 billion spent on the program, the Department of Health and Human Services concluded first-graders who had been in Head Start held virtually no advantage over their peers who hadn’t.
It’s an expensive failure, costing more than $7.5 billion per year to serve fewer than 1 million kids. At $7,838, Head Start’s cost per student in 2011 nearly doubled the $4,302 Georgia spent on each pre-k student that year.
But if Georgia is getting better results at roughly half the price, shouldn’t we want to see its model copied in other states?
Maybe so. Or maybe other states have different needs. Either way, they won’t match our success — and we won’t maintain it — if the feds take over pre-k.
As U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss put it to me last month: “There are too many people in Washington who are entrenched in the idea that if the federal government’s going to be involved in a program, we need to control it. And the way you control it is with money.”
Chambliss was talking about obstacles to devolving federal programs such as k-12 education and Medicaid to the states. But this fact of life in Washington is also a certain preview of how pre-k will turn out if it’s federalized.
There will be money, but also strings: regulations, stipulations, expectations. Even in Georgia the program won’t look like it does now, because the feds will craft policies for Savannah and Seattle, and everywhere in between. Successive agency heads for the program will want to put their stamps on it, if only to justify their jobs and budgets.
And, as clearly as Georgia’s elected leaders should see this coming, they’ll be hard-pressed to avoid it. The money will be too hard to pass up.
Georgia spends about one-third of its lottery proceeds on pre-k, about $312.4 million in next year’s projected revenues. The rest goes to the HOPE scholarship. How tempting will it be for a Georgia governor one day, if the value of HOPE continues to shrink relative to the cost of tuition, to take the federal pre-k dollars and devote all lottery revenues to college students?
But it will be fool’s gold, and not only because there’s no such thing as “free money” from the feds since taxpayers foot the bill sooner or later.
There’s also this: Those folks who rate government programs chiefly by how much money we spend on them will declare this a good deal — at first. Eventually, though, they’ll bemoan the falling quality of pre-k in Georgia and beseech Atlanta or Washington to cough up more money so that it can regain the effectiveness it once had … back when it was a cheaper, state-run program.
Washington this year is projected to borrow $7 billion (almost the annual cost of Head Start) every three days. Yet, Democrats and some Republicans are wringing their hands about the so-called sequester budget cuts that would trim that figure by barely one-tenth. So, you’d think this is exactly the wrong time for the feds to take on yet another role the states have proven themselves capable of handling.
That Obama is holding up Georgia’s pre-k program as a reason for Washington to get more involved in pre-k, rather than as evidence the states can handle more roles the feds can’t afford, shows just how backward he has it.
– By Kyle Wingfield
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418 comments Add your comment
Mary Elizabeth
February 15th, 2013
3:54 pm
Some readers may be interested in the study by Dahl and Lochner (2005) which verifies causal relationship between poverty and academic achievement. Link below:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14599.pdf
Rafe Hollister preparing for an Obamanist America
February 15th, 2013
4:07 pm
Excellent article written after minimum wage hike in 2009, on its harmful effects on our youth.
As the minimum wage has risen, the gap between the overall unemployment rate and the teen rate has widened, as it did again last month. (See nearby chart.) The current Congress has spent billions of dollars—including $1.5 billion in the stimulus bill—on summer youth employment programs and job training. Yet the jobless numbers suggest that the minimum wage destroyed far more jobs than the government programs helped to create.
Congress and the Obama Administration simply ignore the economic consensus that has long linked higher minimum wages with higher unemployment. Two years ago Mr. Neumark and William Wascher, a Federal Reserve economist, reviewed more than 100 academic studies on the impact of the minimum wage. They found “overwhelming” evidence that the least skilled and the young suffer a loss of employment when the minimum wage is increased. Whatever happened to President Obama’s pledge to follow the science? Democrats prefer to cite a few outlier studies known to be methodologically flawed.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574402820278669840.html
indigo
February 15th, 2013
4:08 pm
Finn – 12:47
In fact, the Great Depression of 1929 directly affected Germany and was one of the principal reasons Hitler was able to come to power.
indigo
February 15th, 2013
4:12 pm
Aesop – 2:22
NASA predected the asteriod would come close.
It did.
What are you talking about?
indigo
February 15th, 2013
4:14 pm
Mary Elizabeth
Has it ever occured to you, even once, that poor people just might not be as smart as middle class people and may be likely to produce children who are not very bright?
Rafe Hollister preparing for an Obamanist America
February 15th, 2013
4:16 pm
ME
I never knew anyone questioned that children from poor families struggle competing against affluent kids. The question is, is pre-k and other early childhood education effective in reducing the struggle? Since these gains evaporate after the third grade, maybe we would be better off if we studied why poor children start falling behind in their teens and preteens. Spending more on preschool education doesn’t seem to be the way we solve this problem, based on what we know.
Rafe Hollister preparing for an Obamanist America
February 15th, 2013
4:21 pm
Finn’s boss must have let him go early today, to grab one of those discounted valentine flower arrangements for his poor wife.
Kyle Wingfield
February 15th, 2013
4:22 pm
I’m sorry y’all have been stuck with yesterday’s topic all day, but I’ve been out of the office interviewing people all day. That didn’t help y’all today, but it will provide some good content for next week.
That said, there’s (finally) a new post upstairs.
Tiberius - pulling the tail of the left AND right when needed
February 15th, 2013
4:23 pm
“Psssttt….it wasn’t “PAST random quotes cherry-picked from a few Republicans.””
Pssssst, it WAS random past quotes cherry-picked from Republicans.
Too bad you read too much into the opinion piece, JDW.
md
February 15th, 2013
4:24 pm
“companies leverage the infrastructure of the US to build products then shelter the profits abroad and wait for folks like you to beg them to repatriate the money.”
And a good number of them actually make that profit offshore. And it is asinine to expect them to pay double the taxes on it if they want to bring it home.
It’s a basic math problem. If they don’t bring it home, we get 0%. We can do a tax holiday, still get the 0% and what is the difference?
We have about a trillion dollars now in OUR system. And what does that mean?
TAXES…….that money will get taxed just rolling around in the system. It will never be taxed if corps leave it offshore.
JDW
February 15th, 2013
5:03 pm
@Tbieruis…I guess you are struggling with your reading comprehension today…better keep up with your meds…
You must not have caught this part…
“So for the past few days, GOP leaders have met behind closed doors to both craft an agenda that confronts the ghosts of Congresses past and figure out a way to sell it to the American people.”
Please note the part about the “past few days” indicating a current event. Then of course there is this part….
“there are some widely accepted fixes emerging from the weeklong talks.”
Indicating the currency of the material…you may resume blathering now.
Mary Elizabeth
February 15th, 2013
5:14 pm
indigo, 4:14
“Mary Elizabeth,
Has it ever occured to you, even once, that poor people just might not be as smart as middle class people and may be likely to produce children who are not very bright?”
=========================================
Indigo, in all due respect, you are asking a question that is based on stereotypical perceptions. I do not agree with your perceptions because they do not match my 35 years of teaching experiences with students from backgrounds ranging from the highest to the lowest socioeconomic groups. There are bright children in all groups, and there are also slower children from all groups. There are many reasons why some families are in poverty besides IQ quotient. Moreover, from the 2005 study that I linked, above, you will read that disadvantaged children made more significant gains in academic improvement, when family income was increased, than did the children from higher economic groups.
JDW
February 15th, 2013
5:14 pm
@md…”And it is asinine to expect them to pay double the taxes on it if they want to bring it home.”
But it is not asinine to expect them to allocate the profits accordingly. Software companies in particular transfer the product out a zero cost then book 100% of the revenue as profit abroad.
Now for this part…
“It’s a basic math problem. If they don’t bring it home, we get 0%. We can do a tax holiday, still get the 0% and what is the difference?”
Not really, most likely it will come home eventually anyway and just bringing it home doesn’t force them to spend. Realistically not a single one of those companies is spending a dollar less here than they would anyway…all you are doing is rewarding bad behavior…over and over again.
Mary Elizabeth
February 15th, 2013
5:24 pm
Rafe, 4:16 pm
Yes, pre-k has been proven to be very effective in creating greater academic parity among students. I had previously given some reasons that some pre-teens and teens do not advance in academics, in parity with their peers, in one of my earlier posts on this thread. I do hope that you will look back at that post for my analysis of how that situation can be improved, based on my in-depth firsthand experiences with the instructional delivery for thousands of students in grades 1 -12, over a 35 year period of time.
Jerry Eads
February 15th, 2013
6:37 pm
Kyle:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/opinion/brooks-crayons-to-college.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
md
February 15th, 2013
7:56 pm
“Not really, most likely it will come home eventually anyway and just bringing it home doesn’t force them to spend. Realistically not a single one of those companies is spending a dollar less here than they would anyway…all you are doing is rewarding bad behavior…over and over again.”
Nowhere close to correct…..plenty of multi-nationals are investing offshore with the profits BECAUSE they can’t bring it home. It goes against their duty to the stockholder, which is to maximize profits. Why settle for 75 million when they can keep 100 million…..
Mary Elizabeth
February 15th, 2013
11:38 pm
“NC Students Among Highest Achievers on International Math Assessments, Science Scores National Average. . . .
‘These results offer proof that North Carolina students can be competitive with their peers across the globe, especially in the critical areas of math and science,’ said State Superintendent June Atkinson. ‘Our efforts in early childhood education, providing professional development for teachers, and setting higher expectations for students are paying off, as measured by TIMSS. The fact that our scores were comparable to scores from countries such as Singapore is a tribute to the work underway to remodel public education in this state.’ ”
http://www.hcpress.com/education/nc-students-among-highest-achievers-on-international-math-assessments-science-scores-national-average.html
Aesop's Fables and other Lib Economic Theories
February 16th, 2013
2:03 pm
test
Guess who used to own Heinz’s. Dat’s right, bandaid kerry’s old lady did. And which side of this deal would benefit from inside trading information, the buyer or the seller? Correct, the seller would. And, is insider trading legal? Of course not. Do liberals ever go after corruption and malfeasance within their own political party? Bwahahahahaahahahaha, yeah, I know.