There are often studies that come out from national researches that address critical issues the Rio Grande Foundation is working on.
This fall, New Mexico voters will have an opportunity to vote on a constitutional amendment You can read the full study here which is based on the findings of a randomized controlled experiment that looked at nearly 3,000 children in Tennessee. Reason Magazine discusses the article here.
On the contrary, a recently published study of a state-run pre-K program in Tennessee found that not only did the program not produce any long-term educational gains, by sixth grade, the children who attended the state’s pre-K program were actually performing worse on both educational attainment and behavioral metrics relative to their peers. State-run pre-K appears to have entirely negative effects for children enrolled.
A second, unrelated new working paper from Johns Hopkins University’s “Studies in Applied Economics” found that:
COVID-19 lockdowns imposed by a variety of governments worldwide had “little to no effect” on COVID-19 mortality. The study, conducted by three professors from around the world, also found that lockdowns “imposed enormous economic and social costs” and are “ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
Both of these studies are no surprise to the Rio Grande Foundation which has been critical of the case for government-funded pre-K AND has been critical of Michelle Lujan Grisham’s failed COVID policies which had a heavy emphasis on lockdowns.
We know why the government is so insistent on taking children early. It’s called brainwashing. Parents should resist with all they have.
As far as science and data related to COVID, forget that, they have already gained enough power to do what they desire.
Years ago when I kept hearing that the “root cause” of our poor educational performance is poverty and that the “root cause” of poverty is poor education, I knew something else is actually at play. In my opinion, bad parenting is not only the root cause of both poor educational performance and poverty, but also most of our social problems including drug abuse, teen pregnancies, and crime.
In order to become a functional member of society, children must learn self discipline and in order to learn self discipline a child needs to learn discipline. Then once they experience the thrills of learning, accomplishment, and charity, they are well on their way to academic and economic success and becoming contributing members of society.
Early childhood education does not address these fundamental needs and, if anything, encourages bad parenting. The Tennessee study results are, therefore, not surprising.
Instead of early childhood education, how about early parenting education?
I’d like to share a podcast I recorded with Katharine Stevens, an education expert at American Enterprise Institute. That is exactly her point. Invest a small amount of resources (relatively) in helping people who don’t know what they are doing be better parents. You don’t need universal pre-K: https://tippingpointnm.com/audio/214-katharine-stevens-improving-outcomes-for-new-mexico-children/
While working on my doctorate, we reviewed many studies that showed the benefits of pre-K education. In fact, the more the better (but with diminishing returns). Perhaps the difference is State vs. private pre-K programs. Most of the studies at the time showed a marked increase in performance delivered through then, private pre-K programs. I would hazard that any NM state program launch would not garner similar returns based upon our abysmal education performance rankings nationally.