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.
But that's much less economically desirable for the country. If, for instance, daycare can be done by people getting $15-20 an hour, why do you want a parent who could be producing $50+ of value at home taking care of their kid?
But that's an argument against free daycare, not in favor of it. If you take the money the government would have spent on delivering daycare services and give it to parents as cash with no strings attached, then parents with high earning power will tend to use that money to put their kids in daycare (since it's more cost-effective) and those with lower earning power will tend to drop out of the labor force and become stay-at-home parents (because their market labor wasn't worth all that much anyway).
I'm really puzzled by Noah's conclusion here. If he really believes in freedom of choice, then pure cash assistance is the best policy option.
What have Section 8 housing subsidies and Federal loans done for the costs of affordable housing and college tuition? Why would this be any different? Particularly since the first instinct will be to attach more regulations to day care facilities.
Depends on the elasticity of supply. Both of those things would reduce cost if that were high. Zoning and credentialism, don't help that. But other things cause issues in specific cities, eg the natural barriers to horizontal expansion in San Francisco.
I don't have a great prior for the elasticity of supply in child care. Right now it seems quite high if you are talking about home day cares with a few more kids. But this would be a pretty big expansion. And if you exclude home day care from this, the elasticity probably drops write significantly.
One disadvantage of cash assistance lies in who gets it. If it is universal then you provide a smaller benefit to the children of low income parents (or it costs far more). I think it is well supported at this point that cash assistance is a better solution for most poverty fighting efforts. However, programs that are clearly designed to only benefit the poor tend to be quite unpopular. By making it a "free daycare" program, you mostly benefit the poor while still providing a seemingly "fair" and universal program.
I suppose, but why not just pay a child tax credit, which is going to seem pretty universal (and would be without a phase out). It polls pretty well. And if people wanted to spend it on day care, great. If they want to spend it staying home, also great.
Because it feeds inflation. Better to just pour the money down the pit of providing the service with a well-funded public option, than to pour it down a pit for which the very act of pouring makes it ever more bottomless.
I think Free Daycare is also more realistic because it doesn't pretend to be about "early childhood education", which to a certain segment of the population just sounds like an opportunity for liberals to spout CRT at their kids from an even EARLIER age -- or at the very least, sounds like something yuppie mommies on Park Slope think is super important, but regular people don't actually need.
If you call it Free Daycare, most of those people will at least drop their tribal objections and think about it more like an economic issue.
The thing is, the fundamental retail political environment is already highly biased against your scheme. Libertarian-minded center-lefties love proposing schemes like it, but if that sorta stuff were popular, we’d have had UBI a long time ago.
Schemes like yours also tend to have inflationary effects. It’s essentially what we’ve done in higher ed, and the schools just jack up prices, take the money, and run. When you ignore the regulatory capture working here (the professionalized school administrator class essentially runs the state accreditation commissions), you end up just subsidizing it.
College gets super expensive because loans are so easy to come by, and people in their teens don’t realize what they’re taking on. If you give people the kinds of money we see in eg the expanded child tax credit but require day care to come out of pocket I think people will be a lot more careful.
That’s only half of the equation. Most of those policies were pushed for in the 90’s-today by the administrative class that professionalized from the 50’s-70’s and captured the commissions in the 80’s.
When you’re doing this sort of work, you can’t just describe how the problem works and assume that fixing comes from fixing its symptoms. You have to fix what made the problem.
I think what you're describing (also Seneca Plutarchus) is a voucher system, where people would receive cash but only if they promised to spend it on private-sector daycare. The point is that parents should have a choice.
Actually it seems like the current political environment is more favorable to a pure CTC than to government-run daycare. Manchin doesn't seem willing to let any of the more "socialistic" items in Build Back Better get through.
You're correct on the facts, but I remain skeptical that anything but supply-side progressive approaches would fix the real problems.
In a world where the cost disease doesn't exist, your proposal is plenty reasonable. And I do kind of generally support UBI, but mostly as a measure to increase labor bargaining power and institutionalize aspects of the cost disease*, and acknowledging that inflation will be a major problem with UBI. Not as a solution to the entire cost disease itself, or a replacement for supply-side progressivism.
* For instance, an extremely generous UBI allows the free-market wages for cost-diseased professions like violinists to approach their natural values of zero, while being industry-agnostic enough to only extract the cost of the disease at the level the disease occurs (all of society), rather than being industry-specific in the way your proposal is.
I'm not sure how the Child Tax Credit is industry-specific. It's free money that parents can either spend on daycare or not, depending on how they want to organize their lives. It's basically UBI for kids, and I don't think you can predict whether it would cause the demand for daycare to go up (because more people could afford it) or down (because more people would choose not to work).
Yes, this, a million times this. To be honest it’s rather infuriating that Mr. Smith just not acknowledge that a ton of people *want* to raise their kids personally, and that raising their taxes to pay for day care is going to push a lot of folks into something they *do not want*. There is absolutely no world in which free day care is better than direct cash subsidies (or, doing nothing at all!) without blithely ignoring what people want in favor of what can be easily measured.
The weird (or maybe not) thing is, to a lot of voters, just giving people money is less popular/more unpopular than a ton of other stuff the government may do instead.
Seems that a lot of people are pretty moralistic about money (and there’s all that stuff like pride, agency, fairness, etc. that many humans seem to care about).
This post and some replies to it make it sound like UBI is a popular idea except one post that says if it was a popular idea, we’d already have it. Safe to say, IMO, that UBI has never come close to being realized and no mainstream politician aside from Andrew Yang has proposed it. I feel that’s because, sadly, Neoliberal economics has been dominant for fifty years and that theory has clearly supported Mr. Decker’s preference, “…doing nothing at all” (about inequality, poverty, hunger, ignorance, lack of medical care, etc.).
What makes you think that UBI is actually all that popular? People tell polls that the Biden tax credit wasn’t actually all that popular. Certainly less popular than a bunch of other stuff.
Ehh, i think my idea is kind of out of the scope of pre-k. Just seems more efficient to me. I mean, my mom quit her job to raise me, so anecdotally it seems optimal.
Do you have any evidence for the claim that most mothers (because we all know this doesn't apply to fathers) want to drop out of the workforce and be housewives?
Coming from a country that had daycare like this since the 60s, day care works, period. Maybe not in the unregulated world of the US with little requirements or even a definition of what it is. That is fixable. The trust in the market to provide good day care is <insert expletive here>.
Giving parents the money and subsidizing child care works pretty well. Most parents will chose day care instead of staying home, when it works well. It's also a huge benefit for mainly women who (typically are expected to make the sacrifice) won't have to stay home, impacting their careers.
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.
From my completely different background, culture, and landmass, this seems like a very likely 'false positive', and the actual pre-K is still very valuable.
Pre-K is not there for children, it's there for the parents. To understand the value of pre-K we would have to compare incomes, living standards and amounts of leisure time of parents of both groups.
In Britain, the whole compulsory education up to university is segmented so elite people send children to elite schools, well-off people get well-run schools, and people living in poor districts basically get zoos with guards, so their children somehow stay physically intact and under control while their parents toil away the day. The society is fine with that - from the rich to the poor - and british labour productivity is expectedly disastrous (something like Mississippi or Alabama).
Similar thing happens in this pre-K study I think; poor people who are stuck with their children make amends, and try to give them what best they can (it's their child, they mostly love it and care for it more than any pre-K teacher ever will), while the ones chucking them off to pre-K might feel a load has been lifted off their shoulders... but it hasn't.
We should not be surprised that a poor child getting the focus of one of his parents/grandparents is developing better than one who is put in a room with 15-20 other poor children, supervised by a poor and uninterested adult who probably thinks he/she is wasting his/her life here.
But we now have new data to consider as part of the longitudinal component. As one of the authors noted, the latest findings are even more alarming because the negative effects for academic and behavioral outcomes were more pronounced as students aged and cannot be explained by the quality of elementary schooling, since this did not vary across treatment and control groups. All of this sheds new light and raises new questions about the immediate and long-term impact of state-sponsored pre-k education, along with factors such as program quality and family characteristics that influence student outcomes.
Perhaps parents who did not get the pre-K are used to dealing and assisting their child more than the ones who got them to pre-K. If there is anything that really makes a difference to the child's developement, it's the attention of his parents, whether the child is rich or poor, smart or dumb, in pre-K or at home.
Maybe we should never expect pre-K to be able to do as much as a devoted parent, but should merely measure how close it gets.
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.
Maybe, but to be honest all of these studies are on the same 7 data sets, so basically researchers have done everything they can with these, and there's little chance of publication bias. They've all replicated each other's results in their own papers...
Yeah I was going to say the same thing. The other thing I’d add is that if you see some studies that say “PreK is pretty effective” and a second set of studies that say “PreK isn’t effective at all” I’m not sure you get to say “well it proves the first studies just did Good PreK and the second set did Bad PreK.” If you want to prove that you really should have some pre-registered objective criterion for what Good PreK and Bad PreK look like, or you’re just cherry picking.
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.
I don't really understand the comparison. There weren't a lot of families during this time period where only one spouse was working. Sure, there were a lot of families where only one spouse was in the labor market. But the other spouse was doing domestic labor, and it took up a great deal of the day. Everything from house cleaning to laundry to dishes to food purchasing, all of which has benefited from labor-saving devices since then. I don't think the household amount of hours doing work has changed all that much.
Of course people could have used the time freed up by technological advancement for additional leisure. But by and large they haven't, and they've chosen instead to work a similar amount and to have more consumption. For example, the median house in 1950 was 983 square feet. Today, it's 2333. The summer vacation of the 1950s was a pale shadow of what people do today.
It's not like there was a central planning board that sat down and decided more people must work. This is what people have chosen to do.
There might not have been a central planning board, but the baby boom itself put pressure on land prices. A lot of people wanted homes. There was limited land near employment centers, limited financing for new transportation infrastructure and existing neighborhoods and HOAs put limits on land usage.
You can't finance a house that costs much less than the land it is built on. There are formulas that banks and builders use for this. Higher land prices meant higher house prices. The easiest way to spend more building a house is to build a bigger house. If land were cheaper, builders would build smaller houses. It isn't all about consumer preference. Sometimes you have to buy what is being sold even if it meant both of you working and having to put your kids in day care.
(I think that economics as it is traditionally taught is extremely unrealistic. That whole thing about free economic actors and continuous functions seems bogus. Look at how productivity keeps rising but wages remain more or less flat. In theory, that increased productivity could have gone to more leisure. Instead, it went to higher profits. Workers and consumers really don't have all that many economic choices within the existing framework.)
"Back in the capitalist 50s to 70s, when the US was commercially dominating a world digging out from WWII....." FTFY
"We can raise wages so most families can get by on a single income."
The world got a lot more competitive in the 1970s as Japan and Germany became fully operational. And that has only increased.
You can try significantly raising wages, but I wager you'll see a lot more unemployment as services become more expensive and consequently a lot less consumption.
We're sort of doing that experiment right now. My guess is that the Federal Reserve will tank the economy by squelching credit and that this will lead to unemployment, so you are probably right. This may just be my bias having lived through the 1970s.
Right now, we're seeing all sorts of services getting more expensive, but we aren't seeing unemployment because wage growth is also fueling demand. Instead, people are buying fewer services but paying roughly the same or more for them. At restaurants, menus are smaller and the offerings have been simplified. Hotels provide less frequent maid service. Hospitals are squeezing by with less medical staff. Restaurants, hotels and hospitals, at least where I live, are still hiring.
Ignoring the Federal Reserve threat, I'm wondering if there is a point at which this breaks down. Will the services be stripped down so far or become so costly that people stop buying them completely? Will providers stop offering services as demand slackens and profits vanish? Get out the popcorn. We'll see.
We're looking at one of the most important jobs in our society, and the pay is embarrassingly low. Hopefully that would change, but since it's a female-dominated sector, I'm not counting on it. Unless they're unionized, of course.
Where's the comment that says handing out money or day care to families that haven't shown the ability to take care of themselves sufficiently to afford to have a child, correlates at all to improving that child's life (much less educational experience), or the parents' motivation and success in working?
The counterpoint has been repeatedly demonstrated: giving people handouts de-motivates their productivity, it does not catalyze it. That's why people that are the most *actively productively engaged* eschew these sorts of ideas: they take hard-earned resources from them and re-distribute those resources to people that have demonstrated they fritter away, or worse, grift, said resources
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.
But that's much less economically desirable for the country. If, for instance, daycare can be done by people getting $15-20 an hour, why do you want a parent who could be producing $50+ of value at home taking care of their kid?
But that's an argument against free daycare, not in favor of it. If you take the money the government would have spent on delivering daycare services and give it to parents as cash with no strings attached, then parents with high earning power will tend to use that money to put their kids in daycare (since it's more cost-effective) and those with lower earning power will tend to drop out of the labor force and become stay-at-home parents (because their market labor wasn't worth all that much anyway).
I'm really puzzled by Noah's conclusion here. If he really believes in freedom of choice, then pure cash assistance is the best policy option.
What have Section 8 housing subsidies and Federal loans done for the costs of affordable housing and college tuition? Why would this be any different? Particularly since the first instinct will be to attach more regulations to day care facilities.
Depends on the elasticity of supply. Both of those things would reduce cost if that were high. Zoning and credentialism, don't help that. But other things cause issues in specific cities, eg the natural barriers to horizontal expansion in San Francisco.
I don't have a great prior for the elasticity of supply in child care. Right now it seems quite high if you are talking about home day cares with a few more kids. But this would be a pretty big expansion. And if you exclude home day care from this, the elasticity probably drops write significantly.
One disadvantage of cash assistance lies in who gets it. If it is universal then you provide a smaller benefit to the children of low income parents (or it costs far more). I think it is well supported at this point that cash assistance is a better solution for most poverty fighting efforts. However, programs that are clearly designed to only benefit the poor tend to be quite unpopular. By making it a "free daycare" program, you mostly benefit the poor while still providing a seemingly "fair" and universal program.
I suppose, but why not just pay a child tax credit, which is going to seem pretty universal (and would be without a phase out). It polls pretty well. And if people wanted to spend it on day care, great. If they want to spend it staying home, also great.
Because it feeds inflation. Better to just pour the money down the pit of providing the service with a well-funded public option, than to pour it down a pit for which the very act of pouring makes it ever more bottomless.
I think Free Daycare is also more realistic because it doesn't pretend to be about "early childhood education", which to a certain segment of the population just sounds like an opportunity for liberals to spout CRT at their kids from an even EARLIER age -- or at the very least, sounds like something yuppie mommies on Park Slope think is super important, but regular people don't actually need.
If you call it Free Daycare, most of those people will at least drop their tribal objections and think about it more like an economic issue.
The thing is, the fundamental retail political environment is already highly biased against your scheme. Libertarian-minded center-lefties love proposing schemes like it, but if that sorta stuff were popular, we’d have had UBI a long time ago.
Schemes like yours also tend to have inflationary effects. It’s essentially what we’ve done in higher ed, and the schools just jack up prices, take the money, and run. When you ignore the regulatory capture working here (the professionalized school administrator class essentially runs the state accreditation commissions), you end up just subsidizing it.
College gets super expensive because loans are so easy to come by, and people in their teens don’t realize what they’re taking on. If you give people the kinds of money we see in eg the expanded child tax credit but require day care to come out of pocket I think people will be a lot more careful.
That’s only half of the equation. Most of those policies were pushed for in the 90’s-today by the administrative class that professionalized from the 50’s-70’s and captured the commissions in the 80’s.
When you’re doing this sort of work, you can’t just describe how the problem works and assume that fixing comes from fixing its symptoms. You have to fix what made the problem.
I think what you're describing (also Seneca Plutarchus) is a voucher system, where people would receive cash but only if they promised to spend it on private-sector daycare. The point is that parents should have a choice.
Actually it seems like the current political environment is more favorable to a pure CTC than to government-run daycare. Manchin doesn't seem willing to let any of the more "socialistic" items in Build Back Better get through.
You're correct on the facts, but I remain skeptical that anything but supply-side progressive approaches would fix the real problems.
In a world where the cost disease doesn't exist, your proposal is plenty reasonable. And I do kind of generally support UBI, but mostly as a measure to increase labor bargaining power and institutionalize aspects of the cost disease*, and acknowledging that inflation will be a major problem with UBI. Not as a solution to the entire cost disease itself, or a replacement for supply-side progressivism.
* For instance, an extremely generous UBI allows the free-market wages for cost-diseased professions like violinists to approach their natural values of zero, while being industry-agnostic enough to only extract the cost of the disease at the level the disease occurs (all of society), rather than being industry-specific in the way your proposal is.
I'm not sure how the Child Tax Credit is industry-specific. It's free money that parents can either spend on daycare or not, depending on how they want to organize their lives. It's basically UBI for kids, and I don't think you can predict whether it would cause the demand for daycare to go up (because more people could afford it) or down (because more people would choose not to work).
Well, it seems that Manchin is more amendable to free pre-K than to an expanded child tax credit (which I would support more, BTW).
As governor of WV, he expanded free pre-K in WV.
Yes, this, a million times this. To be honest it’s rather infuriating that Mr. Smith just not acknowledge that a ton of people *want* to raise their kids personally, and that raising their taxes to pay for day care is going to push a lot of folks into something they *do not want*. There is absolutely no world in which free day care is better than direct cash subsidies (or, doing nothing at all!) without blithely ignoring what people want in favor of what can be easily measured.
The weird (or maybe not) thing is, to a lot of voters, just giving people money is less popular/more unpopular than a ton of other stuff the government may do instead.
Seems that a lot of people are pretty moralistic about money (and there’s all that stuff like pride, agency, fairness, etc. that many humans seem to care about).
People are just fine with the government giving them money. They just don't want THOSE PEOPLE to get any of the money.
This post and some replies to it make it sound like UBI is a popular idea except one post that says if it was a popular idea, we’d already have it. Safe to say, IMO, that UBI has never come close to being realized and no mainstream politician aside from Andrew Yang has proposed it. I feel that’s because, sadly, Neoliberal economics has been dominant for fifty years and that theory has clearly supported Mr. Decker’s preference, “…doing nothing at all” (about inequality, poverty, hunger, ignorance, lack of medical care, etc.).
You took from N Decker's post that he wants to do nothing at all about inequality, poverty, hunger, ignorance, lack of medical care, etc?
What makes you think that UBI is actually all that popular? People tell polls that the Biden tax credit wasn’t actually all that popular. Certainly less popular than a bunch of other stuff.
Maybe reread what I said. (btw, let me know which polls indicated the Child Tax Credit wasn’t popular.)
I did, and I didn't see anything in the comments that show that the voting populace strongly supports just handing money out to people. Here's a poll where a majority doesn't think the expanded children tax credit should be extended: https://thehill.com/policy/finance/564063-majority-in-new-poll-says-expanded-child-tax-credit-should-not-be-permanent
Ehh, i think my idea is kind of out of the scope of pre-k. Just seems more efficient to me. I mean, my mom quit her job to raise me, so anecdotally it seems optimal.
Do you have any evidence for the claim that most mothers (because we all know this doesn't apply to fathers) want to drop out of the workforce and be housewives?
Coming from a country that had daycare like this since the 60s, day care works, period. Maybe not in the unregulated world of the US with little requirements or even a definition of what it is. That is fixable. The trust in the market to provide good day care is <insert expletive here>.
Giving parents the money and subsidizing child care works pretty well. Most parents will chose day care instead of staying home, when it works well. It's also a huge benefit for mainly women who (typically are expected to make the sacrifice) won't have to stay home, impacting their careers.
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.
From my completely different background, culture, and landmass, this seems like a very likely 'false positive', and the actual pre-K is still very valuable.
Pre-K is not there for children, it's there for the parents. To understand the value of pre-K we would have to compare incomes, living standards and amounts of leisure time of parents of both groups.
In Britain, the whole compulsory education up to university is segmented so elite people send children to elite schools, well-off people get well-run schools, and people living in poor districts basically get zoos with guards, so their children somehow stay physically intact and under control while their parents toil away the day. The society is fine with that - from the rich to the poor - and british labour productivity is expectedly disastrous (something like Mississippi or Alabama).
Similar thing happens in this pre-K study I think; poor people who are stuck with their children make amends, and try to give them what best they can (it's their child, they mostly love it and care for it more than any pre-K teacher ever will), while the ones chucking them off to pre-K might feel a load has been lifted off their shoulders... but it hasn't.
We should not be surprised that a poor child getting the focus of one of his parents/grandparents is developing better than one who is put in a room with 15-20 other poor children, supervised by a poor and uninterested adult who probably thinks he/she is wasting his/her life here.
Agreed. In the US (feels like permanently living in the 50s) women are expected to be ok with it.
But we now have new data to consider as part of the longitudinal component. As one of the authors noted, the latest findings are even more alarming because the negative effects for academic and behavioral outcomes were more pronounced as students aged and cannot be explained by the quality of elementary schooling, since this did not vary across treatment and control groups. All of this sheds new light and raises new questions about the immediate and long-term impact of state-sponsored pre-k education, along with factors such as program quality and family characteristics that influence student outcomes.
Perhaps parents who did not get the pre-K are used to dealing and assisting their child more than the ones who got them to pre-K. If there is anything that really makes a difference to the child's developement, it's the attention of his parents, whether the child is rich or poor, smart or dumb, in pre-K or at home.
Maybe we should never expect pre-K to be able to do as much as a devoted parent, but should merely measure how close it gets.
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.
Maybe, but to be honest all of these studies are on the same 7 data sets, so basically researchers have done everything they can with these, and there's little chance of publication bias. They've all replicated each other's results in their own papers...
Yeah I was going to say the same thing. The other thing I’d add is that if you see some studies that say “PreK is pretty effective” and a second set of studies that say “PreK isn’t effective at all” I’m not sure you get to say “well it proves the first studies just did Good PreK and the second set did Bad PreK.” If you want to prove that you really should have some pre-registered objective criterion for what Good PreK and Bad PreK look like, or you’re just cherry picking.
Thanks for writing this up and explaining the state of the evidence on this. It really puts that latest study into context.
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.
I don't really understand the comparison. There weren't a lot of families during this time period where only one spouse was working. Sure, there were a lot of families where only one spouse was in the labor market. But the other spouse was doing domestic labor, and it took up a great deal of the day. Everything from house cleaning to laundry to dishes to food purchasing, all of which has benefited from labor-saving devices since then. I don't think the household amount of hours doing work has changed all that much.
Of course people could have used the time freed up by technological advancement for additional leisure. But by and large they haven't, and they've chosen instead to work a similar amount and to have more consumption. For example, the median house in 1950 was 983 square feet. Today, it's 2333. The summer vacation of the 1950s was a pale shadow of what people do today.
It's not like there was a central planning board that sat down and decided more people must work. This is what people have chosen to do.
There might not have been a central planning board, but the baby boom itself put pressure on land prices. A lot of people wanted homes. There was limited land near employment centers, limited financing for new transportation infrastructure and existing neighborhoods and HOAs put limits on land usage.
You can't finance a house that costs much less than the land it is built on. There are formulas that banks and builders use for this. Higher land prices meant higher house prices. The easiest way to spend more building a house is to build a bigger house. If land were cheaper, builders would build smaller houses. It isn't all about consumer preference. Sometimes you have to buy what is being sold even if it meant both of you working and having to put your kids in day care.
(I think that economics as it is traditionally taught is extremely unrealistic. That whole thing about free economic actors and continuous functions seems bogus. Look at how productivity keeps rising but wages remain more or less flat. In theory, that increased productivity could have gone to more leisure. Instead, it went to higher profits. Workers and consumers really don't have all that many economic choices within the existing framework.)
"Back in the capitalist 50s to 70s, when the US was commercially dominating a world digging out from WWII....." FTFY
"We can raise wages so most families can get by on a single income."
The world got a lot more competitive in the 1970s as Japan and Germany became fully operational. And that has only increased.
You can try significantly raising wages, but I wager you'll see a lot more unemployment as services become more expensive and consequently a lot less consumption.
We're sort of doing that experiment right now. My guess is that the Federal Reserve will tank the economy by squelching credit and that this will lead to unemployment, so you are probably right. This may just be my bias having lived through the 1970s.
Right now, we're seeing all sorts of services getting more expensive, but we aren't seeing unemployment because wage growth is also fueling demand. Instead, people are buying fewer services but paying roughly the same or more for them. At restaurants, menus are smaller and the offerings have been simplified. Hotels provide less frequent maid service. Hospitals are squeezing by with less medical staff. Restaurants, hotels and hospitals, at least where I live, are still hiring.
Ignoring the Federal Reserve threat, I'm wondering if there is a point at which this breaks down. Will the services be stripped down so far or become so costly that people stop buying them completely? Will providers stop offering services as demand slackens and profits vanish? Get out the popcorn. We'll see.
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.
We're looking at one of the most important jobs in our society, and the pay is embarrassingly low. Hopefully that would change, but since it's a female-dominated sector, I'm not counting on it. Unless they're unionized, of course.
Yeah, my sister has a newborn and a toddler while getting her PhD so pre-k is probably gonna be her respite.
Where's the comment that says handing out money or day care to families that haven't shown the ability to take care of themselves sufficiently to afford to have a child, correlates at all to improving that child's life (much less educational experience), or the parents' motivation and success in working?
The counterpoint has been repeatedly demonstrated: giving people handouts de-motivates their productivity, it does not catalyze it. That's why people that are the most *actively productively engaged* eschew these sorts of ideas: they take hard-earned resources from them and re-distribute those resources to people that have demonstrated they fritter away, or worse, grift, said resources
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.