If we’d played a drinking game during Dayton’s State of the State message that involved taking a hit every time the Governor mentioned education, and killing the container whenever he mentioned Early Childhood Ed, then none of us would have made it back to work.
Matt Abe at North Star Liberty noticed this too (albeit maybe not in exactly the same terms).
The governor’s seven-point education plan is not content with dedicating one or two of these points to early childhood education, he embeds “ready for K” goals into five of them:
- Invest in Early Childhood and All-Day Kindergarten
- Target All-Day Kindergarten
- Expand existing K-12 system into a comprehensive pre-K-12 system
- Adopt pre-K – 3 reading standards
- Support early childhood teacher observation and development
- Reauthorize Statewide Early Childhood Advisory Council and reestablish Children’s Cabinet
- Charge Commissioner of Education with leadership of early childhood initiatives
Considering the state’s barely ten-month old kindergarten-readiness study, this obsession with pre-K seems odd.
The Minnesota School Readiness Study found that between 91 percent and 97 percent of Minnesota five-year-olds were In Process or Proficient in five developmental areas necessary for school success: physical development, the arts, personal and social development, language and literacy, and mathematical thinking. This compares to last year’s study with numbers between 87 percent and 96 percent. The increases are within the margin of error between the two years.
When you couple these findings with national empirical studies on Head Start and other preschool programs that show little if any benefit to pre-K programs, you may wonder why Governor Dayton is so bent on a significant expansion of government pre-K and all-day kindergarten.
But that “wonder” is purely rhetorical…:
Dayton’s myopic focus on pre-K and kindergarten to the exclusion of other education reforms such as streamlining the process for sponsors of successful charter schools to open new sites, and education tax credits is a missed opportunity for much-needed education reform for Minnesota students and families. Dayton’s omissions provide an excellent opportunity for the Republican majorities in the Legislature to display some leadership in state education policy initiatives.
The big worry: If there’s an area where Republicans, especially some of the longer-serving ones, are vulnerable to getting browbeaten, it’s the broad subject of education.
And this is an area where the GOP’s strategy of handling the budget in many small component pieces is going to be important. Telling a wobbly legislator “why do you hate children” is one thing; trying to browbeat a legislator into supporting, say, a specific program with real-life empirical consequences is a whole ‘nother thing.
Early Childhood Education is a particularly, cynically noxious fixation. It just doesn’t work; we knew it twenty years ago, and we know it even more today. The only thing is succeeds at…
…is putting new Education Minnesota members to work, with lifetime pensions.
Which is what it’s all about.
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You expected less from Governor Dooher? Oops. I meant Dayton (snicker).
“Support early childhood teacher observation and development”
What in the flaming hootie-hoo is that?
Why do you hate kids?
When did you stop beating your wife?
Why do you want the earth to melt from global warming?
Why don’t you want minorities to succeed?
Why do you want all of the bridges to collapse?
Why do you want to let armed people shoot innocent civilians?
Why do you want people to go without healthcare?
See a pattern?
If I was a poor or working class mom this would look like free daycare to me.
Amen Terry, and without a doubt SUBSIDIZED daycare.
Mitch,
The research you have cited is about Head Start, not early childhood education in general. That research compared Head Start participants to a control group that participated in other early childhood education and/or childcare activities. The control group did not stay at home. Thus, the research compared Head Start against all of the other (mostly private) early childhood programs. That’s an important difference.
The governor’s Early Childhood Task Force (Governor Pawlenty started it) and a newly-created (last year) legislative oversight group are looking at early childhood education in general – not just Head Start programs. I have been a member of one of the task force’s sub-committees for nearly two years now (Access and Finance).
There is research that demonstrates the effectiveness of early childhood education programs (including Head Start) over stay at home alternatives. See: http://www.ericdigests.org/1994/lasting.htm
for a comprehensive discussion that makes reference to several areas of research concerning this issue.
That Head Start is no better than other alternatives should not be suprising. The question should be whether Head Start has been the best way to invest public dollars in early childhood education or not; not whether early childhood education in general is valuable to society or not. There is research already completed that indicates that early childhood education does have a lifelong impact on participants and is on the whole cheaper than later in life interventions (law enforcement, welfare, etc.)
I’ll quibble with myself a bit.
The control group in the Head Start research did not all,/b> stay at home. They were free to participate in other preschool education programs, but were not required to.
Slow shift key finger 😉
No ofense, Leslie, but most sociological research that involves statistics is not worth the paper it is printed on.
Then why cite it ever? If it’s no good to defeat an argument, then it’s no good to make an argument either.
Leslie, citing research is appropriate when the goal is to discover the truth. When the goal of research is to push a particular policy goal (as is acceptable in many of the social sciences) it’s much more tendentious. When a group of scientists releases research that shows the core of a gas giant is metallic rather than rocky, any other group of scientists can follow the reasoning and reproduce the results.
If the HHH institute (or a group with a vested interest in public education dollars) releases research that shows that their preferred policy objective should be funded, the thesis and the methodology used to prove or disprove it must be examined very, very closely.
The worst abuse of this is, in my opinion, the use of “meta research” — research using data that is not original but is compiled from bits and pieces of other studies and statistically analyzed — to prove a thesis. Then there is the whole “publication via news release” issue. The HHH center is particularly given to using meta studies and publishing by press release. It is much more like selling a product than it is like science.