Social policy needs to be accountable policy

A few days ago I posted The ruins of our early hopes block us from new approaches.  This was a response to the recent study concluding that Tennessee pre-school had no academic benefits and caused negative non-academic outcomes.  

Today there is an NPR article, A top researcher says it's time to rethink our entire approach to preschool by Anya Kamenetz.  I have a profoundly negative view of the quality of NPR news reporting these days compared to 15-25 years ago.  Almost every assertion is grounded in ideological conformity rather than in factual reporting.  

To my surprise, this piece actually has some value.  It is an interview with the researcher who led the team doing the evaluation of the Tennessee program.  Kudos to that researcher, Dale Farran.  It is clear that she wanted the results to be different.  She is also confident in her research design and is reluctantly accepting the reality that the good design means her expectations were misplaced.  She is now looking for what else might be gleaned and what other approaches might make improvements.

I think most independent reviewers of the pre-k literature long ago arrived at two or three common observations.  

There is no academic gain to be achieved.

Without academic benefit, we should not lard these programs with all the educational institution costs.  We don't need the credentials which add no benefit.  

We should focus on the benefits of day care and seek non-academic benefits.

We shouldn't be using school classrooms which are ill designed for day care.  

If the programs are focused on the poor, then they need to emphasize stability.

And these seem to be where Farran is focusing.  So perhaps, the Education Institutional insistence that these programs should work is weakening and we might get some new thinking.  Perhaps.  

There are some interesting truths acknowledged.

"Higher-income families are not choosing this kind of preparation," she explains. "And why would we assume that we need to train children of lower-income families earlier?"

Farran points out that families of means tend to choose play-based preschool programs with art, movement, music and nature. Children are asked open-ended questions, and they are listened to.

This is not what Farran is seeing in classrooms full of kids in poverty, where "teachers talk a lot, but they seldom listen to children." She thinks that part of the problem is that teachers in many states are certified for teaching students in prekindergarten through grade 5, or sometimes even pre-K-8. Very little of their training focuses on the youngest learners.

So another major bias that she's challenging is the idea that teacher certification equals quality. "There have been three very large studies, the latest one in 2018, which are not showing any relationship between quality and licensure."

In 2016, Farran published a study based on her observations of publicly funded Tennessee pre-K classrooms similar to those included in this paper. She found then that the largest chunk of the day was spent in transition time. This means simply moving kids around the building.

Partly this is an architectural problem. Private preschools, even home-based day cares, tend to be laid out with little bodies in mind. There are bathrooms just off the classrooms. Children eat in, or very near, the classroom, too. And there is outdoor play space nearby with equipment suitable for short people.

Putting these same programs in public schools can make the whole day more inconvenient.

It is not all excellent reporting.  Kamenetz falls into woke orthodoxy and has several paragraphs on how learning discipline in pre-school is probably a problem and that the fundamental issue is institutional racism.  It is seemingly a willful misreading of the evidence.  

There is a classic NPR conclusion and admission. 

The United States has a child care crisis that COVID-19 both intensified and highlighted. 

Along with everything else in the NPR advocacy pantheon, it is a "crisis".  Well, no.  It is the shattering of unrealistic expectations.  But not a crisis.  

And that is quite the sotto voce acknowledgement that government responses to Covid-19 have made the matter worse.  Not something frequently done at NPR where masks and lockdowns are still the go-to policy positions despite there being no facts to stand with that are supportive of those positions. 

And there is a classic ending to the piece.  One of the standard responses for failed social programs: we asked too much.

But the biggest lesson Farran has drawn from her research is that we've simply asked too much of pre-K, based on early results from what were essentially showcase pilot programs. "We tend to want a magic bullet," she says.

"Whoever thought that you could provide a 4-year-old from an impoverished family with 5 1/2 hours a day, nine months a year of preschool, and close the achievement gap, and send them to college at a higher rate?" she asks. "I mean, why? Why do we put so much pressure on our pre-K programs?"

We might actually get better results, she says, from simply letting little children play.

Why did we have that expectation?  Because all the pre-school advocates made that promise.  Spend this money and we will get these results.  Nobody is retroactively imposing new expectations.  Those outside are merely imposing the same rules everyone else works within - be accountable for your results.

Academics and advocates don't operate within those constraints.  So when their predictions and forecasts fail, they hive accountability off to anyone or anything else.  What the most recent Tennessee study has indicated is that when academics and advocates get the program they wanted, and it fails to deliver the results they predicted, they do not want to be held accountable.

We still should strive for improving the lives of the poorest children.  But we probably need a much better, and certainly much more accountable, breed of academics and advocates.  Ones who are more grounded in the real world and more willing to accept the consequences of their own ideas.