Early childhood “success” based on what?

One of the most frustrating aspects of New Mexico public policy is politicians  and their sycophants who claim success for some government program or another without evidence.

Elizabeth Groginsky, MLG’s Secretary of Early Childhood Education and Care is the latest New Mexico bureaucrat to do this with her new opinion piece in the Albuquerque Journal. The Secretary makes all manner of arguments for “bold investments” in early childhood education. The problem is that New Mexico has been making such “bold” investments for a decade (see chart below).

Rather than relying on a bunch of studies that purport to show this spending has been a success, it would seem that after a decade we’d have some positive REAL academic outcomes from those 0-5 year olds who are now students in New Mexico’s K-12 system (there should be plenty of current 4th graders who went through New Mexico’s pre-K program).

Unfortunately, as we discussed recently, the NAEP scores that just came out (which tested both 4th graders and 8th graders) were disastrous. It’s easy to spend more money on government programs. It’s considerably more difficult to achieve results.