Universal preschool is inviting universal disaster

Ideas that seem great in theory are often a disaster in practice. California's Preschool for All initiative being pushed by director-turned-child advocate Rob Reiner is just such an idea. This is not mere ivory-tower doom-mongering. This is what a sober assessment of a similar universal day care program in Quebec suggests.

If Reiner's initiative is approved in June, individuals making more than $400,000 a year ($800,000 for families) will face a 1.7 percent tax increase to raise $2.5 billion to finance three hours of free preschool a day for all of California's 4-year-olds -- even the 62 percent who already attend preschool without universal subsidies.

Reiner's initiative is a statewide version of Proposition H, the universal preschool program that San Francisco voters approved in March and that will be started in 22 preschools clustered in four low-income communities in a few months. It authorizes $20 million from the city's general funds over five years for public schools to offer pre-school services.

The arguments Reiner and San Francisco child care advocates make are identical to the ones made in Quebec eight years ago. They claim that an investment in preschool will pay for itself not once, but many times. A Rand Corp. study estimates that every dollar spent on preschool will yield $2.50 in savings for the state by, among other things, boosting graduation rates and diminishing juvenile crime.

Setting aside the inherent difficulty of accurately quantifying such nebulous and distant benefits, such calculations inevitably underestimate the ultimate bill because they don't take into account the inflationary pressures that the program itself creates. The final price tag for Quebec's day care program is 33 times what was originally projected: It was supposed to cost $230 million over five years, but now gobbles $1.7 billion every year.

With this kind of spending, one would think that Quebec was offering top-notch day care to every tot, toddler and teen. Think again. Much of the increased spending has gone not toward increased access, but increased costs. Day care worker unions, on the threat of strike, negotiated a 40 percent increase in wages over four years. The cost of care has doubled since the program began, with the annual per-infant cost now exceeding $15,000.

Besides unions, the other major reason for the skyrocketing costs is that when people don't pay the full price for a service, they consume more of it -- what economists call the problem of the moral hazard: Quebecois taxpayers pay 80 to 90 percent of the cost of care, requiring parents to pitch in only $7 a day. Such low co-pays have encouraged mothers who might otherwise have stayed at home with their newborns to return to work. But any hope that the program would be able to meet the demand that it created was doomed right from the start, because it banned new centers and barred existing ones from participating, decimating the private day care market. (It has since reversed this policy).

Literally overnight, long lines of desperate parents vying for a "free" day care spot emerged. Parents registered babies yet to be conceived. And when they did land a spot, they paid their $7-a-day to hold it -- even if they were months away from using it.

But perhaps the most shocking part of Quebec's program is that it is reinforcing the very inequities it was meant to eradicate. Many low-income parents, who lost their child care tax deductions in order to finance the program, have been crowded out by middle- and upper-income parents more savvy at negotiating the system. According to research by Peter Shawn Taylor for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, half of Quebec's day care spaces are taken by families in the top 30 percent income bracket.

Is there any reason to believe that California will dodge Quebec-type cost overruns or shortages or inequities? None whatsoever. It is true that California's program will be for only 4-year-olds, somewhat limiting demand. However, this will be offset by the greater moral hazard in the program, because parents won't be required to contribute anything toward their child's care. At the same time that it will fuel demand, the program -- by its very existence -- will shrink supply in the private sector. Unlike Quebec, California's program won't ban new private preschools or bar existing ones from participating. But private preschools that don't participate will be hard-pressed to find parents to pay when competing against fully subsidized schools.

Preschools that do participate will have to pay wages on the K-12 teacher scale negotiated through a mandatory collective bargaining process that the unions lobbied for. They will also face other onerous regulations such as minimum staff-child ratios. All of this will raise the cost of doing business, driving many private day care centers out of the market and leaving fewer affordable options for low-income parents for whom three hours of state-funded day care covers less than half their needs.

Will California's program enhance school readiness of children in its care and improve educational outcomes, one of the main arguments of child care advocates? Not if Quebec's experience is any indication. Pierre Lefebvre, an economics professor at Universite du Quebec, has just completed a study comparing 4- to 5-year-olds in Quebec with kids elsewhere in Canada and found that Quebec kids have no better scores on the Peabody vocabulary test -- the most widely used indicator of school readiness.

California's private day care industry already serves the needs of a majority of parents effectively. In addition, California and San Francisco already offer child care assistance to needy parents through welfare-to-work and myriad other programs. Instead of instituting a huge, new pre-school entitlement, the best way to deal with any remaining need might be to strengthen such programs.

Universal preschool sounds progressive, but actually has pernicious unintended consequences for the parents and children it seeks to help.

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Britain: The inspectors who praise bad schools

If Her Majesty's inspectors were to assess the progress of Her Majesty's government in education honestly, they ought by rights to give it an extremely bad report. National literacy strategy - failed. Sure Start programme - failed. Achievements for children in care - very poor indeed. Planning - weak and inconsistent. Spending - ill considered. Two major reports published last week have shown that both the national literacy strategy and the Sure Start programme for young children have proved to be worse than useless. In particular they have failed the most vulnerable 20% of children, whom this government had most intended to help. It is hardly an exaggeration to call this a national scandal.

Unfortunately, however, one cannot rely on Her Majesty's inspectors to give the most objective of reports. One of the many unpleasant facts to emerge last week about the mess the government has been making of our children's lives is that Ofsted has failed to sound alarm bells. On Thursday Jim Rose's eagerly awaited literacy report pointed out that Ofsted has somehow managed to find no fault with some of the country's worst-performing primary schools.

On the contrary, Ofsted inspectors have heaped praise on the dozen primary schools at the bottom of the performance tables. Schools at which only a tiny minority of 11-year-olds achieved the standard expected for their age were described as effective and good value for money. None was listed as seriously weak or in need of special measures - a list that Ofsted has been under government pressure to reduce. As I said, it is hardly an exaggeration to call this a national scandal.

To be fair to the government, it did, presumably when panicked by educational realities and the outrageous cost of the remedial reading recovery programme (2,500 pounds per child), commission this review. The Rose report has overturned 30 years of fashionable and failed orthodoxy, and new Labour's botched attempt to reform it through the much vaunted national literacy strategy. Rose recommends a return to phonics, now rather irritatingly called synthetic phonics, to distinguish it from less effective phonics teaching. It simply means your child learns to read by decoding words, putting each sound together as in th-a-t.

Many people have imagined that the national literacy programme was doing this. No, it was undermined from the first by squabbling, and reduced to a hodge podge of different methods used all together, none of which is teacher-proof or child-proof, and all of which fail to teach the simple, essential skill of decoding words by sounds. Today 30% of children fail to learn to read properly by the age of seven, which almost every child ought to be able to do, if correctly taught, including the very slow learners.

At the same time, reports by various authors at Birkbeck College (coyly sneaked onto the internet at the same time as the headline-grabbing Turner report on pensions) argued that the ambitious Sure Start scheme to provide care and early education for children from conception onwards has harmed more children than it has helped. Either Sure Start has made little difference, or in the case of children from problem families - teenage mothers, single mothers and jobless parents - those who have been through Sure Start scored worse on verbal ability and social competence, and higher on behaviour problems, than similar children who hadn't. It defies belief. More than 3 billion pounds has been spent. Many billions are earmarked for future spending.

Given new Labour's high ambitions and good intentions for children, its failure to "deliver on" its promises - to use its annoying expression - is all the more remarkable. The government is failing in its top priorities and not for lack of spending. Child obesity is worse, truancy is shocking, classroom disruption and bullying are shameful, exam standards are collapsing, the brightest children have been failed as well as the least able, testing is at best dubious and the illiteracy level, masked by years of ill-conceived testing, is simply unacceptable. Nothing could be more disastrous.

To send a poor child into the contemporary world illiterate and ignorant is like sending him naked into a Dickensian storm. It is to push him into unemployment, poverty, rage, crime, drug abuse, Asbos and jail. An illiterate girl might just as easily fall into all that and into single motherhood as well, condemned to breed more underclass babies and antisocial teenagers....

My view is that the problem has been old-fashioned [Leftist] ideology, so long a-dying, and the government's failure to recognise it, or when it has recognised it, its moral failure to stand up to it, not least because various cabinet ministers have shared the ideology. Synthetic phonics was condemned by the "progressive" orthodoxy as regimented, repressive, uncreative, old-fashioned and involving grouping according to progress. In practice it has been almost impossible to fight this orthodoxy. Even now most local authorities are unwilling to accept independent new synthetic phonics programmes with clearly proven success records, because they are "commercial".

Similarly with Sure Start, the need to "target" the most needy was undermined by the terror of "stigmatising" them. As usual, the mothers and children in most need have got least out of it, and indeed have been rather wary of it, whereas the aspirational middle classes have taken full advantage. Sure Start has distracted professionals from the most needy, enticing them into brightly coloured and comfortable Sure Start centres, and away from the hard-to-find families in need in the mean streets.

If the government cannot find ways to bypass left-wing orthodoxy, it is condemned to more of the same disgraceful failure.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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