frankly I think we should just give whatever money would be spent on this directly to parents with young kids. I'm sure most of them would rather not work and raise their kid. besides, the child-care industry kind of sucks.
Early childhood education researcher here. And the findings from the new study in TN are pretty unsettling. I need to get my hands on the full article and review it more closely, but as someone who has spent their entire career trying to understand the active ingredients of a high quality early childhood program, I’m at a loss to explain these findings. The comprehensive review of the pre-k literature that you provide in this post is impressive. You’ve captured the state of knowledge based on empirical evidence. We have a long way to go in terms of understanding the impacts of early education—what program components are most beneficial to particular subgroups and under what conditions.
Is the problem really scaling, or are we just seeing publication bias, where it's easier to sweep studies with unsexy results under the rug (or, less cynically, harder to get them published) when the sample size is small? The chart you showed looks an awful lot like an asymmetric funnel plot. The X axis is time rather than precision, but it would likely look fairly similar if it were rearranged with precision on the X axis.
"some little kids are born to parents who can afford expensive nannies to teach those kids how to read and write and do math, while other kids’ parents can’t afford anything of the kind"
I think it's interesting what sort of assumptions are made about how much effort it takes to teach a very small child anything. I think something that is *very* underrated is just time spent with an adult who is more or less paying attention. In my experience raising 4 kids, it absolutely does not require anything like dedicated tutoring to teach a young child reading, writing, and basic math, but it does require that you interact with them quite a bit, and help them when they ask for help. Our kids have learned an astonishing amount of reading, spelling, and math just from playing roblox. They want to learn to read to play the game, they want to learn to spell to search for games, and they learn they numbers and basic math because every game has some sort of currency or stats.
I think this is relevant, because pre-k often results in a kid getting *more* one on one time with an adult, but also often results in a kid getting quite a bit less, especially if they're like, an only child with a parent who'd be staying home anyway. In my own very personal opinion, *that's* the thing that determines how much a kid learns and all of the discussion of the quality of the education is almost a red herring. I think we'd get a ton of mileage out of adding a bunch of kind, conscientious high schoolers to pre-k staffs, just to boost the ratio of adult figures to kids.
I mostly agree, but I think Pre-K is also socializing and ESL, most helpful for kids with parents with poor English, somewhat helpful but no miracle for kids with bad parents.
When I was a teenager I was convinced by technocratic sci fi that we'd eventually just send kids to government-run raising facilities in our benevolent post scarcity society, fully optimizing their development.
When I became a parent I decided this was a ludicrous fantasy and became somewhat paranoid that every single moment away from a parent was harmful.
Glad to see the policy dispute barely detects durable signals either way. Touche universe!
There are so many policy disputes like this. How do you avoid policy nihilism? Shouldn't there be a clear signal out there for something (aside from maybe Mariel)?
Would love to read an article in some techno optimist newsletter somewhere (cough) about which interventions, of all those out there in the universe of new econ and policy interventions, we should have the most confidence in.
And why is it so hard to find new ones? Is all the low hanging fruit already in the basket?
PS - Thanks for the article. I really enjoy most of your writing, but accessible lit reviews are my absolute favorite, and not sure where else I would go for those.
Back in the socialist 50s to 70s, before modern capitalism, a family could live on the earnings of one worker. This was ended in the 1980s. That created a need for day care, and day care is education, it's just not school so it looks different. There were anxieties about day care. Look at the child abuse trials of the era with day care centers with wicked clowns biting the heads off of chickens and abusing children in non-existent basements. (It's just as well most of those convicted were finally pardoned.)
We have a lot of choices. We can raise wages so most families can get by on a single income. We can provide parenting subsidies providing a UBI for people raising children. We can provide state run child care which might be beyond our ideological capacity though other nations do it just fine. We can keep doing what we are doing which is working so incredibly well.
The referenced studies are all American it seems. The US is perhaps not THE authority when it comes to pre-K? How about looking at studies done in other parts of the world?
New Zealand has had FREE "kindergarten" care available from the age of 3 onwards. The only problem is that it is not all day (mornings only for the 3 year old and afternoons for the 4 year old children) and parents have to take the time to enroll in the programme. The programmes are structured and audited. All children get a "report" stating what skills they have in both official languages. (Australia has something similar - but promotes one language only.) There are widely available Playcentre groups run by parents - and a Kohanga Reo (Maori language daycare ) system of partial or all-day day care. I had a child in the Kohanga Reo system and he came out being able to "think" bilingually.
Why did this come about? Female skill sets are vitally important to the economy and high quality childcare is essential if a country is going to take advantage of the skills on offer.
I kind of want to see a direct comparison of some of the effects you're mentioning. Like, some of the positive effects include "made it through high school", while the negative effects include some lower academic scores. What if those are two ways of reporting the same data? After all, kids who dropped out would stop accruing scores. If you get marginal kids to stick it out, then the average among all kids earning grades is _very likely_ going to be lower.
What about the other control group, the children whose parents didn't enter them in the lottery? Did the researchers do any follow up on them? Did they control for parents who lost the lottery and made alternate pre-K arrangements?
All they have demonstrated is that one particular pre-K program seems to have produced a non-stellar outcome. That particular pre-K was a new program, poorly planned and poorly coordinated. There were news stories about this at the time.
I don't think the outcome of the study was worthless, but, as usual, people are reading an awful lot into it without taking a clear look at what it actually shows.
frankly I think we should just give whatever money would be spent on this directly to parents with young kids. I'm sure most of them would rather not work and raise their kid. besides, the child-care industry kind of sucks.
Early childhood education researcher here. And the findings from the new study in TN are pretty unsettling. I need to get my hands on the full article and review it more closely, but as someone who has spent their entire career trying to understand the active ingredients of a high quality early childhood program, I’m at a loss to explain these findings. The comprehensive review of the pre-k literature that you provide in this post is impressive. You’ve captured the state of knowledge based on empirical evidence. We have a long way to go in terms of understanding the impacts of early education—what program components are most beneficial to particular subgroups and under what conditions.
Is the problem really scaling, or are we just seeing publication bias, where it's easier to sweep studies with unsexy results under the rug (or, less cynically, harder to get them published) when the sample size is small? The chart you showed looks an awful lot like an asymmetric funnel plot. The X axis is time rather than precision, but it would likely look fairly similar if it were rearranged with precision on the X axis.
Thanks for writing this up and explaining the state of the evidence on this. It really puts that latest study into context.
"some little kids are born to parents who can afford expensive nannies to teach those kids how to read and write and do math, while other kids’ parents can’t afford anything of the kind"
I think it's interesting what sort of assumptions are made about how much effort it takes to teach a very small child anything. I think something that is *very* underrated is just time spent with an adult who is more or less paying attention. In my experience raising 4 kids, it absolutely does not require anything like dedicated tutoring to teach a young child reading, writing, and basic math, but it does require that you interact with them quite a bit, and help them when they ask for help. Our kids have learned an astonishing amount of reading, spelling, and math just from playing roblox. They want to learn to read to play the game, they want to learn to spell to search for games, and they learn they numbers and basic math because every game has some sort of currency or stats.
I think this is relevant, because pre-k often results in a kid getting *more* one on one time with an adult, but also often results in a kid getting quite a bit less, especially if they're like, an only child with a parent who'd be staying home anyway. In my own very personal opinion, *that's* the thing that determines how much a kid learns and all of the discussion of the quality of the education is almost a red herring. I think we'd get a ton of mileage out of adding a bunch of kind, conscientious high schoolers to pre-k staffs, just to boost the ratio of adult figures to kids.
I mostly agree, but I think Pre-K is also socializing and ESL, most helpful for kids with parents with poor English, somewhat helpful but no miracle for kids with bad parents.
When I was a teenager I was convinced by technocratic sci fi that we'd eventually just send kids to government-run raising facilities in our benevolent post scarcity society, fully optimizing their development.
When I became a parent I decided this was a ludicrous fantasy and became somewhat paranoid that every single moment away from a parent was harmful.
Glad to see the policy dispute barely detects durable signals either way. Touche universe!
There are so many policy disputes like this. How do you avoid policy nihilism? Shouldn't there be a clear signal out there for something (aside from maybe Mariel)?
Would love to read an article in some techno optimist newsletter somewhere (cough) about which interventions, of all those out there in the universe of new econ and policy interventions, we should have the most confidence in.
And why is it so hard to find new ones? Is all the low hanging fruit already in the basket?
PS - Thanks for the article. I really enjoy most of your writing, but accessible lit reviews are my absolute favorite, and not sure where else I would go for those.
The way I put the default attitude of pre-K defenders 5ish years ago was "we'll only scale up the good ones." https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/study-of-the-week-well-only-scale-up-the-good-ones
Back in the socialist 50s to 70s, before modern capitalism, a family could live on the earnings of one worker. This was ended in the 1980s. That created a need for day care, and day care is education, it's just not school so it looks different. There were anxieties about day care. Look at the child abuse trials of the era with day care centers with wicked clowns biting the heads off of chickens and abusing children in non-existent basements. (It's just as well most of those convicted were finally pardoned.)
We have a lot of choices. We can raise wages so most families can get by on a single income. We can provide parenting subsidies providing a UBI for people raising children. We can provide state run child care which might be beyond our ideological capacity though other nations do it just fine. We can keep doing what we are doing which is working so incredibly well.
As far as I can tell, no mention of what the teachers would get if we had universal pre-K. You're gonna get what you pay for.
Yeah, my sister has a newborn and a toddler while getting her PhD so pre-k is probably gonna be her respite.
The referenced studies are all American it seems. The US is perhaps not THE authority when it comes to pre-K? How about looking at studies done in other parts of the world?
New Zealand has had FREE "kindergarten" care available from the age of 3 onwards. The only problem is that it is not all day (mornings only for the 3 year old and afternoons for the 4 year old children) and parents have to take the time to enroll in the programme. The programmes are structured and audited. All children get a "report" stating what skills they have in both official languages. (Australia has something similar - but promotes one language only.) There are widely available Playcentre groups run by parents - and a Kohanga Reo (Maori language daycare ) system of partial or all-day day care. I had a child in the Kohanga Reo system and he came out being able to "think" bilingually.
Why did this come about? Female skill sets are vitally important to the economy and high quality childcare is essential if a country is going to take advantage of the skills on offer.
Given the outcomes, this wouldn't be high on my list for what I'd do with my next incremental government dollar. It would also be massively expensive.
I kind of want to see a direct comparison of some of the effects you're mentioning. Like, some of the positive effects include "made it through high school", while the negative effects include some lower academic scores. What if those are two ways of reporting the same data? After all, kids who dropped out would stop accruing scores. If you get marginal kids to stick it out, then the average among all kids earning grades is _very likely_ going to be lower.
What about the other control group, the children whose parents didn't enter them in the lottery? Did the researchers do any follow up on them? Did they control for parents who lost the lottery and made alternate pre-K arrangements?
All they have demonstrated is that one particular pre-K program seems to have produced a non-stellar outcome. That particular pre-K was a new program, poorly planned and poorly coordinated. There were news stories about this at the time.
I don't think the outcome of the study was worthless, but, as usual, people are reading an awful lot into it without taking a clear look at what it actually shows.