All-day kindergarten is just more expensive snake oil from Queen’s Park

They told us that all-day kindergarten would create a bettereducated generation, with the math and literacy chops to take on the challenges of the 21st century.

But — and I know you will be shocked to hear this! — it has achieved nothing of the kind.

Unless, of course, you think it’s an achievement to spend $1.5 billion a year of public money to hire more teachers and early childhood educators to provide “play-based learning” programs.

Dalton McGuinty, the selfstyled “education premier,” announced the start of all-day kindergarten, along with an expanded program of child care before and after school, in 2010.

Meanwhile, our then-Kitchener Centre MPP and Liberal cabinet minister, John Milloy, said this was a top priority for the government despite the high cost.

“It’s about the economic future of our province,” he told me during a news conference at Queen Elizabeth Public School in Kitchener, one of the first local schools to get all-day kindergarten.

“The future of our province includes having a highly skilled and highly educated workforce.”

No one in his or her right mind would argue with that. Most people agree that it’s important to invest public resources in education and skills development for children.

But whatever is happening in those all-day classrooms, it’s not providing those basic skills of math and literacy that form the foundation of all educational achievement.

All-day kindergarten was rolled out over five years, starting in 2010. The first students to receive it were in Grade 3 in 2014-15.

You would expect standardized literacy and math test scores to go up starting that year, wouldn’t you, as a result of all this expensive classroom education? But it didn’t. In the spring of 2015, results were not published because of job actions by many unionized teachers who refused to give the test.

Testing was fully restored in 2016 and 2017. Even more students who had received all-day kindergarten took those tests.

Yet there was no change in overall achievement from previous years.

About 65 per cent of Waterloo Region public school students, about 73 per cent of local Catholic students, and about 70 per cent of all students across the province met or exceeded provincial standards in math, reading and writing.

The percentage of students who were successful was the same, before and after the introduction of full-day kindergarten.

Even the people who sold us this high-priced snake oil now admit the academic benefits don’t last past Grade 2.

A team of researchers from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto tracked about 550 children through their early grades.

Full-day kindergarten students did better at some skills like knowing more vocabulary and being better able to control their behaviour when frustrated.

But at the end of Grade 1, there was no significant difference between children who attended two years of full-day kindergarten and those in the half-day program when it came to alphabet knowledge, counting and number tasks, and writing a sentence.

Now we know that by the end of Grade 3 there is no difference in overall literacy and math abilities.

Anyone else want their money back?