Weak tea

From Pre-K: Not So 'Empirically Validated' by Neal McCluskey. The thrust of the essay:

Today the unenviable task of opposing publicly funded schooling for the littlest Americans falls to me. Worse, I have to disagree with Peter Salins, whose past work I've greatly enjoyed. Yet oppose and disagree I shall, especially with Salins's basic contention that positive effects of publicly funded, "high-quality preschool" are "empirically validated."

As the Brookings Institution's Grover "Russ" Whitehurst has been working feverishly to communicate, we simply do not have a good base of top-flight research -- studies in which children are randomly assigned to large preschool programs -- on which to conclude that public pre-K works. Most assertions about its effectiveness, such as President Obama's 2013 State of the Union claim that "every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than seven dollars later on," are based primarily on two programs: Perry Preschool of the 1960s, and Abecedarian of the 1970s. Both treated fewer than 60 children, were very expensive, and were staffed by people highly motivated to prove their programs' worth.

Good article. What I find interesting is the closing sentence.

Still, sticking to a pilot tacitly acknowledges what we actually know about public, pre-K programs: There is little evidence they work.

"There is little evidence they work" is pretty weak tea. "There is no evidence that they work" would be the more accurate statement. I understand that it is always nice to keep some wiggle room when some pedant comes up with some narrowly defined, improbable set of circumstances where it has or does occur. But you cede the high ground. We are talking about the main, not the distant fringe. Is there any evidence that these programs achieve their stated goals? No.