EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

Early childhood education has been found to be effective, if it’s high quality. The gold standard is a North Carolina program that dates to the early 1970s and mid-’80s. The Abecedarian Project enrolled a dozen babies a year from low-income families and gave them five years of intensive schooling. It was designed using the best knowledge about educating tykes, and it was highly interactive, with teachers playing “peekabo” and language games with the children. Researchers have been tracking the graduates, recording measures of intelligence, test scores, college attainment, employment and even physical health. They generally had done better than those not picked to participate in the program, which used a lottery system for admissions. That kind of luxury model may be impractical to implement at scale, experts say.

New results from a study of Tennessee’s pre-K program would seem to underscore that point. Students who attended pre-K did better in kindergarten than similar students who did not, but by first grade that advantage was gone. By third grade, they were doing worse on math, reading and science tests. Dale Farran, one of the author’s, cautioned that the results are influenced by the quality of Tennessee’s program.

As a researcher, Farran participated in the Abecedarian Project for a decade, and said Tennessee’s pre-K is less interactive, more rigid, comprising mostly lectures. She doubts her own grandson, 5, could take it.“I think to myself, would my grandson sit in the middle of a whole group instruction for 40 minutes without moving? Only if you yell at him the whole time.”

It is exclusively for children from low-income households, and that’s likely the problem, she said. The pre-K classrooms were placed in the schools in those children’s neighborhoods.

“Those schools have been failing children for years,” said Farran, director of the Peabody Research Institute at Vanderbilt University. “I don’t know why putting a pre-K there is suddenly going to make those schools successful.”