U.S. needs preschool spending that adds up

What’s worse — spending less on something, or spending more with no clear strategy for ensuring that money will deliver results?

This week U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius heralded as “pretty grim news” the fact that state preschool funding had its largest drop ever last year.

But New Mexico defied the trend and has increased early childhood education funding by 44 percent in two years — to around $197 million in fiscal 2014 — even though there is no data-driven or results-based rationale for where that money would do the most good.

Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University and author of the federal report, says “the state of preschool in America is a state of emergency.” And Sebelius says it “highlights the urgency for the historic investment in early education that the president called for in his State of the Union.”

But they are mistaken that the crisis is a lack of spending. The crisis is a dearth of proven programs that deliver positive, lasting, measurable results.

Then again, Sebelius’ department runs taxpayerfinanced Head Start, which has yet to deliver academic improvements that last past the early grades.

During his State of the Union speech, Obama proposed funding public preschool for any 4-year-old from a family with an income below twice the federal poverty rate; students from families who earn more could enroll but would have to pay tuition. For what, exactly? Despite New Mexico spending almost half of its budget on K-12 public education, just around half of its students can read and do math at their grade level. Under the Sebelius rationale, if the Land of Enchantment would only spend 100 percent of its budget on K-12, every child would be proficient.

Certainly the U.S. must invest in its youngest children, no one disputes that. But unless state and federal bureaucrats can get beyond the feel-good panacea of spending more on children and actually vet and adopt programs that make that spending count, students do face a grim future. And so do taxpayers.