Feeble foundation of pre-school panacea

As the Connecticut General Assembly begins another session, the drumbeat for expansion of pre-school education grows louder. And in the education reform debate, the most exaggerated claims are being made by advocates of universal public pre-school education - adding two new grades to the 13 from K to 12 - and they offer the Perry Pre-school Project as validation of their cause.

Perry is not the evidence that you'd expect in support of such a sweeping proposal.

Perry was an extremely small 1960s experiment involving 123 "at risk" low-IQ (70-85) children from one poor minority neighborhood divided into a study group that received two years of high-quality pre-school and a control group that did not. The Project has followed these 123 people through life.

Perry was definitely high quality: daily weekday frequency; four certified public school teachers for a class of 20-25 kids; weekly 1.5-hour teacher visits to the home; monthly teacher meetings with parents; a public school facility.

This quality exceeds that in virtually all public school grades - then and now. Naturally, the study group outperformed the control group, which experienced the opposite extreme - no organized day care/pre-K program (Perry predated Head Start) and an un-enriching home environment relative to non-poor families, then and now.

Here's the point. The Perry Program would be unaffordable on a universal basis (5-to-1 student-teacher ratio). And Perry did not involve non-poor kids, who would constitute the overwhelming majority of kids in universal public pre-school.

It is simply not valid to suggest that a study of the atypical - a minority experience from a half-century ago - should inform policy today for the typical, i.e. non-poor kids.

Nevertheless, universal public pre-K advocates stand by Perry; indeed, they boast of an abundance of supportive research.

Maybe in the echo chamber of the movement itself. But the Rand Corporation, the general-purpose research organization, conducts more objective analysis, including perhaps the most recent (2005) general survey of early education research. Rand found only 20 programs, including Head Start, which showed any "evidence of effectiveness." Nineteen focused exclusively upon disadvantaged children. The atypical again.

Moreover, the advocates make overreaching claims about the efficacy of pre-school based upon the research generated around these programs. The most commonly claimed benefit was an increase in IQ or achievement test scores, which generally "fade" within a few years as documented in reviews of Head Start and in other general research. Perry claimed the largest gain (15 IQ points) of the 20 programs, and all of Perry's gains disappeared by the end of 2nd grade.

The programs with long-term follow-up, including Perry, claimed huge gains for society. Well, 80 percent of Perry's gains derived from fewer crimes committed by the study group. Obviously, most parents don't see education as a crime prevention program.

Almost lost in the overreach, were more realistic gains, including less grade repetition, less remedial/special education placement and higher high school graduation rates, again, as compared to control groups of disadvantaged children.

More broadly, Perry and these other programs are virtually irrelevant to any universal public pre-school proposal since their control groups do not represent today's comparative reality. While Perry's control group received no care whatsoever, today, most of our population of 8.5 to 9 million threes and fours do receive care.

About 900,000 poor kids attend Head Start and other poor kids attend state-funded programs, fulfilling most need amongst the 15 percent of the citizenry who are poor. And a clear and growing majority of non-poor fours attend private pre-schools. While most non-poor threes stay home, as toddlers have for centuries without any disadvantage, more and more are attending pre-school.

Nevertheless, the universal public pre-K advocates continue to cite Perry and other experimental programs for the poor in their push for universal public pre-school - the transfer of the current independent public-private system into the public schools, adding two whole new classes, and enormous additional cost, to the existing thirteen grades. This is grandiosity on steroids.

Sometimes, fables and grand schemes are more captivating than hard evidence and solid affordable incremental progress, so we may be hearing about the larger-than-life version of the Perry Pre-school Project for some time to come.

Red Jahncke heads the Townsend Group, a business consulting firm in Greenwich and is an occasional contributor to The Day.