Here is a quote from a recent article (February 2013) by David Brooks in the New York Times: "The big federal early childhood program, Head Start, has been chugging along since 1965, and the outcomes are dismal. Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution summarizes the findings of the most rigorous research: "There is no measurable advantage to children in elementary school of having participated in Head Start. Further, children attending Head Start remain far behind academically once they are in elementary school. Head Start does not improve the school readiness of children from low-income families."

And yet, liberals everywhere are pushing Pre-K programs for not only disadvantaged children (read their parents don't take the time to read to them), but for everyone else's children as well. The certainty here is that the GOVERNMENT realizes that the sooner they get their hands and philosophies on our children, the sooner their will may be imposed on the populace.

The following articles point out many of the problems inherent in these programs.

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Here is yet another bogus "report" prepared by those who have a vested interest in having pre-school programs. This time it's the elementary principals' association. How dumb do they think we are?

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INTRODUCTION: The pork-laden federal stimulus law contains $53.6 billion for education including early childhood education and $2.1 billion for Head Start and Early Head Start. Another $2 billion was added to the Child Care and Development Block Grant, including $93.7 million for childcare quality activities. Despite massive budget deficits, many states like Minnesota are still trying to spend more on these wasteful, ineffective, and invasive programs.

Although lacking evidence of effectiveness and political popularity, early childhood education has become the new silver bullet answer of the education cartel to solve America’s education woes. Unfortunately, liberals and teachers unions with their desires for more funding and more control over families have been joined by big business, with its insatiable appetite for more workers, including mothers, and for government subsidies, in this case to cover employees’ childcare costs. These businesses, along with allegedly conservative politicians and big government economists have gotten on the bandwagon of having childcare turned into another government education program funded by the taxpayers.

The following is part one of excerpts from a presentation given by this author at a “citizen jury” conducted at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs in the spring of 2008. Citizens were asked to decide about the benefits and necessity of expanding these programs in the state of Minnesota. Proponents of expanded government control over the minds and hearts of our youngest citizens had nearly three full days to present their case. This author, as the only opponent of this idea had 30 minutes. Despite the very lopsided ratio of presentation time, the assembled citizens were deadlocked in their decision – 1/3 supporting preschool, 1/3 opposing it, and 1/3 undecided.

This lack of enthusiasm for preschool is a microcosm of what is true for much larger populations. In 2006, for example, there was a statewide ballot initiative in California to tax the rich, those making more than $400,000 per year individually or $800,000 per couple, to fund universal preschool in that state. Despite it being in liberal California, in what was essentially a Democratic primary and an off-year election, after millions of dollars of campaigning by proponents, the measure failed by twenty percentage points.

This will be the first of several parts laying out the scientific, academic, economic, and developmental problems with government expansion of early childhood education and related programs. The entire presentation is available here. We will first show the massive distortions of data used by economists, researchers, and governments to mislead people into thinking there is a crisis in preschool education:

MYTH: Brain Research Shows that Children Won’t Develop Normally Without Education from Birth

“The brain development researchers will tell you that in the most stressful environments the damage to the brain is the most severe; waiting until the child turns three is too late.” – Art Rolnick http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/rolnick.htm

FACT: There is NO Neuroscience Evidence Showing the Necessity of Early Childhood Education (ECE)

“Assertions that the die has been cast by the time the child enters school are not supported by neuroscience evidence and can create unwarranted pessimism about the potential efficacy of interventions that are initiated after the preschool years.” - Jack Schonkoff and Deborah Phillips, ed., From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development, National Academy Press, 2000, p. 216 (Note: This study is frequently quoted by proponents of ECE, but it is very interesting that this quote never seems to make it into the discussion)

“But there is already plenty of evidence that the biggest obstacle to learning is the belief that one cannot learn. By encouraging parents and teachers to accept this self-fulfilling prophecy, your story with its imagery of windows of opportunity slamming shut, may well do more to stunt children's futures than any deficiencies in their early upbringing. So far as we know, it is never too late for a child to get on the path to learning.” - Dr. Seymour Pappert, Lego Professor of Learning Research at MIT, and Dr. Daniel Dennett, Director of the Tufts University Center for Cognitive Studies (Newsweek, 3/11/96, p.15)

MYTH: Large number of children in Minnesota and the US are inadequately prepared for kindergarten.

“Minnesota has a readiness test right now and fifty percent of our kids do not pass that test. Most of those kids fall behind and never catch up. We've got pretty good data on that.” – Art Rolnick

FACT: The studies are suspect and there is no “readiness” crisis in Minnesota or nationally.

“We know that three, four, and five years olds are very poor test takers… you know they have their own agendas, their own personalities, their own timelines, and they don’t have the personal skills to sit for testing sometimes. And sometimes they lack language skills to truly explain what they know. They also haven’t learned the social skills or the social rules for test taking. So, with any assessment of young children, we have to recognize the limitations of the data we have... So, with work sampling or with other kinds of observational assessments, you might wonder about the quality of the observation that the teacher did. And we might wonder about the conclusions that the teacher inferred from the observations. Are they accurate? Is that child really demonstrating a proficient or is it really in process? We wonder about those kinds of things with performance based assessments. With other testing, we might wonder if the testing day was a good day or a bad day for the child. We might wonder, ‘Did he sleep well last night?’ Did he have breakfast this morning? All those things might have an impact on how the child might behave if it is a good day.” - Tracey Wallace, Kindergarten Readiness Assessment supervisor, House Early Childhood Learning Finance Committee, 2/2/07

“The Minnesota School Readiness Study found that between 90 percent and 97 percent of Minnesota five-year-olds were ‘In Process’ or ‘Proficient’ in five developmental areas necessary for success: physical development, the arts, personal and social development, language and literacy, and mathematical thinking.” – Minnesota Department of Education press release 4/2/08

82% basic pre-literacy skills such as knowing that print is read from left to right.

“Because children develop and grow along a continuum with great variability, the goal of these studies is to assess children s proficiency within and across these developmental domains and not establish whether or not children are ready for school with the use of a composite ready or not ready score. Young children develop rapidly and at varying rates across the domains, and an early, definitive determination of readiness can have unintended negative consequences” – Minnesota Department of Education 2006 Readiness Study Report at http://education.state.mn.us/mdeprod/idcplg?IdcService=GET_FILE&dDocName=031852&RevisionSelectionMethod=latest&Rendition=primary, pg 7

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Early education efforts work where families fail

David Brooks says the Republicans need to get behind Obama's proposal to expand federal programs that can help teach children how to succeed.

By DAVID BROOKS | February 15, 2013 | Updated: February 15, 2013 7:18pm

Today millions of American children grow up in homes where they don't learn the skills they need to succeed in life. Their vocabularies are tiny. They can't regulate their emotions. When they get to kindergarten they've never been read a book, so they don't know the difference between the front cover and the back cover.

But, starting a few decades ago, we learned that preschool intervention programs could help. The efforts were small and expensive, but early childhood programs like the Perry and Abecedarian projects made big differences in kids' lives. The success of these programs set off a lot of rhapsodic writing, including by me, about the importance of early childhood education. If government could step in and provide quality preschool, then we could reduce poverty and increase social mobility.

But this problem, like most social problems, is hard. The big federal early childhood program, Head Start, has been chugging along since 1965, and the outcomes are dismal. Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution summarizes the findings of the most rigorous research: "There is no measurable advantage to children in elementary school of having participated in Head Start. Further, children attending Head Start remain far behind academically once they are in elementary school. Head Start does not improve the school readiness of children from low-income families."

Fortunately, that is not the end of the story. Over the past several years, there's been a flurry of activity, as states and private groups put together better early childhood programs. In these programs, the teachers are better trained. There are more rigorous performance standards. The curriculum is better matched to the one the children will find when they enter kindergarten.

These state programs, in places like Oklahoma, Georgia and New Jersey, have not been studied as rigorously as Head Start. There are huge quality differences between different facilities in the same state or the same town. The best experts avoid sweeping conclusions. Nonetheless, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that these state programs can make at least an incremental difference in preparing children for school and in getting parents to be more engaged in their kids' education.

These programs do not perform miracles, but incremental improvements add up year by year and produce significantly better lives.

Enter President Barack Obama. This week he announced the most ambitious early childhood education expansion in decades. On Thursday morning, early education advocates were sending each other ecstatic emails. They were stunned by the scope of what Obama is proposing. But, on this subject, it's best to be hardheaded. So I spent Wednesday and Thursday talking with experts and administration officials, trying to be skeptical. Does the president's plan merely expand the failing federal effort or does it focus on quality and reform? Is the president trying to organize a bloated centralized program or is he trying to be a catalyst for local experimentation?

So far the news is very good. Obama is trying to significantly increase the number of kids with access to early education. The White House will come up with a dedicated revenue stream that will fund early education projects without adding to the deficit. These federal dollars will be used to match state spending, giving states, many of whom want to move aggressively, further incentive to expand and create programs.

But Washington's main role will be to measure outcomes, not determine the way states design their operations. Washington will insist that states establish good assessment tools. They will insist that pre-K efforts align with the K-12 system. But beyond that, states will have a lot of latitude.

Should early education centers be integrated with K-12 school buildings or not? Should the early childhood teachers be unionized or certified? Obama officials say they want to leave those sorts of questions up to state experimentation. "I'm just about building quality," Education Secretary Arne Duncan told me. The goal is to make the federal oversight as simple as possible.

That's crucial. There's still a lot we don't know about how to educate children that young. The essential thing is to build systems that can measure progress, learn and adapt to local circumstances. Over time, many children will migrate from Head Start into state programs.

This is rude to say, but here's what this is about: Millions of parents don't have the means, the skill or, in some cases, the interest in building their children's future. Early childhood education is about building structures so both parents and children learn practical life skills. It's about getting kids from disorganized homes into rooms with kids from organized homes so good habits will rub off. It's about instilling achievement values where they are absent.

Obama has taken on a big challenge in a realistic and ambitious way. If Republicans really believe in opportunity and local control, they will get on board.

Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times.