Don't Throw Money at Early-Childhood Education

Ed Week

There's no trendier cause in education policy than promoting increased funding for early-childhood education. President Barack Obama has made universal access to prekindergarten the principal education policy objective of his second term, and the recently passed federal spending bill includes a $1 billion increase in spending on early-childhood education. At the state level, governors from both parties are advocating for new state-level pre-K spending, even in the face of current budget constraints. And New York City's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, won the election promising to raise taxes on incomes over $500,000, in part to fund universal pre-K.

Policymakers are focused on early-childhood education for a good reason. Studies have consistently shown that attending high-quality preschool programs makes students more likely to be successful in elementary school, middle school, and high school. And yet, what advocates of more spending on early-childhood education often neglect to note is that the government's record of actually producing high-quality pre-K programs is mixed at best. For instance, a 2010 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study of Head Start—the country's largest government-sponsored preschool program—found that by 1st grade, economically disadvantaged students with access to Head Start demonstrated almost no greater cognitive or emotional development than demographically similar students without access.

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