Evidence Mounts That Pre-K Harms Kids
It seemed that only a handful of conservative policy experts were willing to point out that these studies were irrelevant to the contemporary question of expanding pre-K. But in a recent Annenberg Institute working paper titled: “Why Are Preschool Programs Becoming Less Effective?” academics noted: “In hindsight, it is naïve to believe that findings from the early RCT studies would generalize to public programs operating at scale that serve millions of children each year at a fraction of the cost.” Yes, it is.
But it’s perhaps worse than naïve to stare at a spate of negative findings and frame them as “less” positive. In their report, the researchers summarize much of the major recent evidence on the effects of pre-K.
