The Santa Fe New Mexican recently ran a story touting yet another study which supposedly promotes the benefits of pre-K and early childhood spending. The report is the National Institute for Early Education Research’s State of Preschool 2022 Yearbook. The report claims that New Mexico’s early childhood programs are “a rare bright spot in New Mexico’s education system.”
Does the report tout the success of kids who have gone through New Mexico’s pre-K programs starting in 2005-2006 school year with the enactment of the PreK Act? No, in fact the study doesn’t even consider student outcomes. Everything is based on access, spending, academic credentials, and class sizes.
Sadly, for nearly two decades New Mexico has had some kind of taxpayer-financed pre-K yet we have no evidence of outcomes one way or the other. We DO know that 2022 NAEP scores were (if anything) a big step backward due to our dead-last overall ranking but this report provides zero evidence that New Mexico’s new universal pre-K system is going to improve our State’s lousy education outcomes.
I don’t know if your assertions about pre K are true or not. I would hope they aren’t but I am willing to accept the possibility. But I would appreciate more from the RGF, including suggestions for identifying why it isn’t working and how to improve. But you are just pushing a right wing corporate agenda. Tax breaks for the rich, drill baby drill, and cuts or elimination of the social safety net. You aren’t hypocritical enough to push for more guns, yet anyway.
A start would be to establish some testable desired outcomes and test for. Otherwise you don’t where you are going until you get there.