Tucsonans will be voting on an initiative, Strong Start Tucson, which, if it passes, will provide money to make preschool more available and affordable for the city’s children. It will be funded by a half cent sales tax. That sounds like a wonderful idea to me, but some people have voiced strong objections to the details of the initiative, including people I generally agree with. So which side should I be on? Is the upside of the initiative greater than the downside, or is it the other way around?
The Tucson Sentinel has two columns about Strong Start Tucson, one for and one against the initiative. Both of them are informative and well written. If you’re interested, they’re worth your time.
Let me cut to the chase. My answer is yes, Tucson should vote for Strong Start Tucson. Now, let’s discuss.
The argument for Strong Start Tucson is direct and straightforward. Most Tucson children don’t have the opportunity to attend a quality preschool. The programs are very expensive, out of the reach of most families. Yet the vast majority of research agrees that the benefits of early childhood education starts when the child enters school and continues into adulthood. Comparing similar children, especially low income children, who attended a preschool with a strong educational foundation (basic daycare doesn’t count, it’s a different thing altogether) and children who didn’t, studies conclude that the children with a strong preschool experience graduate high school with greater frequency, are less likely to need government assistance, earn more money as adults, are more likely to have stable families and are less likely to get in trouble with the law.
That’s a heady list of positive effects with significant personal and economic consequences. People who went to preschool are more likely to have stable, fulfilling lives and less likely to be social and economic burdens on society. With most educational programs, the long term benefits outweigh the short term costs. It may be the preschool experience has the biggest bang for the buck.
So if Tucson can place up to 8,000 children in preschool who otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity, the children and the city will reap long lasting dividends. And the other side of the coin is also true. Inaction is also a course of action. If we decide not to increase the availability of preschool, our inaction will be detrimental to the lives of many of the city’s children.
The argument against Strong Start Tucson is clear and straightforward as well. The idea of providing more preschool opportunities may be a good one, opponents say, but the initiative lacks specifics to assure that children will be well served and the money will be well spent. It doesn’t specify where the money will go, what the term “high quality preschool” means, who will be chosen to manage the program, the sliding scale which will determine how much families pay for preschool and what kind of reporting about the program will be made public. If the initiative passes, a seven member board appointed by the Mayor and City Council will work out all the details and oversee the program. Should we really trust all those unknowns to a seven member committee?
The concerns are genuine, but I believe they are far outweighed by the value the city and its children will derive from the Strong Start program.
There’s a pretty good chance that somewhere, somehow, some of the money will be wasted. I’ve never seen a public program or a private business that uses every dollar to maximum effect. A certain level of waste is built into any system, no matter how effective. We live in the real world, so we have to decide whether the concern that some money will be wasted if the initiative passes is greater than the certain waste of human capital if we pass up the opportunity to enrich children’s lives. I’ll put the value to children’s lives over the value of some misspent dollars any day of the week.
What’s a high quality preschool? We have lots of observation of early childhood education and decades of research to give us some solid parameters. Putting together a list of qualifications a preschool must meet to accept Strong Start children should be reasonably simple. But no list will guarantee that every accepted program and every classroom within that program will do an excellent job. The only certainty in education is uncertainty. Every parent who has seen their child have a great school year with a gifted teacher and a less successful year with a teacher who isn’t as skilled knows that. So does every teacher who has taught classes where everything goes beautifully and others where they feel like banging their heads against the wall in frustration simply because one mix of children clicks and another is a teacher’s nightmare. A thousand variables determine the level of success a given child will have in a given classroom. It’s foolish to believe any list of qualifications or any committee of seven people can guarantee quality preschool for every child in every program.
All this means we’re dependent on the committee of seven chosen by the Mayor and the City Council to make good decisions. That’s a bit of a gamble, but so is every other public or private venture. The results won’t be perfect, but they also won’t happen all at once, so the people administering the program will have time to modify their approach as they see the preliminary results. The goal is to place up to 8,000 three and four year olds in school. That’s going to take about 450 separate classrooms of 15 to 20 children. There’s probably room to accommodate some of those children in existing preschools, but it’s going to take a lot of ramping up to pull together enough spaces and enough teachers to offer education to thousands of new children. TUSD has empty space in a number of its schools, and no doubt the district will be eager to set up preschool programs scattered around the city if Strong Start Tucson is supplying the funding. It’s a triple win for the district. Schools will make use of unused space, children will enter kindergarten more prepared and parents will be likely to keep their children in schools they have grown accustomed to. That also means those classes will be in facilities built for education and administered by a system which is set up to provide curriculum and educational oversight. That will add stability to the process and help the program grow more quickly as other schools get up to speed.
Strong Start Tucson isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty much guaranteed to answer a pressing need by increasing access to preschool in the city, and it’s very likely that most of the early childhood education programs will be of a high quality. And what do we have if it doesn’t pass? Nothing as far as the eye can see that hints at increased access to early childhood education. No one in the opposition has brought forth a better idea, or an idea of any kind. I know the Mayor and the City Council are wary of the initiative, but I have yet to hear any of them say, “If Strong Start Tucson goes down, here’s what we’re planning to do the next day to begin the process of providing the preschool opportunities our children need and deserve.” Not a sound so far. Nothing but crickets. If this initiative goes down, it will be years before anything happens. So I ask the opponents of the initiative, if you agree the idea is good but the execution leaves something to be desired, what d’ya got? If you got nothin’, well, I don’t want the perfect be the enemy of the good. I’m going to take a good program rather than waiting for something better that may be hiding somewhere out there just below the horizon.
This article appears in Jul 27 – Aug 2, 2017.
If you like it I know it has to suck.
Mr Safier, many of the concerns/questions you raised are easily answered on Strong Start Tucson’s website… please don’t keep spreading the idea that we “don’t know” more about this initiative. Local nonprofits will bid to be the one to oversee it (that only happens after it’s passed) and quality is clearly defined on the website as a 3,4 or 5 star rating from first things first’s Quality First rating system. I posted on fb, too – just don’t want more misinformation out there!
Yet the vast majority of research agrees…
Not so fast. Yes, their are hundreds of studies waxing poetic about the benefits of preschool and kindergarten.
And, then there is the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. A random sample of 20,000 children, the best tests ever designed to measure young child cognition, measurement of affective outcomes from every perspective, the student, the parent, the teacher. Measurement of motor skills. Recording every aspect of student’s life so that all things can be held constant.
$140 million dollars spent just collecting the data.
Separation of data gathering from data analysis to prevent bias from corrupting the data collection.
Followed the students for 9 years, all the way through 8th grade.
Result: at the end of 8th grade, all-day kindergartners are behind half day kindergartners by .1 standard deviations – the equivalent of the entire 12th grade.
The ECLS is the Hubble telescope of education studies. You never hear about it because Education culture prefers its myths.
The ECLS data exactly parallels a similar longitudinal study done on preschool.
The National Reading Panel began their work by spending $10 million analyzing over 10,000 reading studies and ended up concluding that 96% of them weren’t worth the paper that they were written on and the other 400 had weaknesses.
Why would early childhood research be any different?
Katie, in the interest of presenting both sides of the argument accurately, I stated the anti-Strong Start concerns in a paragraph which said clearly that it was their argument, not mine. I don’t think summarizing their views is putting out “misinformation.” I did say, “Their concerns are genuine,” because I believe they are, though, as I go on to say, they are minor compared to the value of the program. I then went on to address their concerns one by one. I also say in the introductory paragraphs and at the end that I am a supporter of Strong Start.
As we get closer to the election, both sides will likely become more visible and vocal. I think it’s valuable to put both arguments side by side and see how they line up next to one another.
John, I usually don’t bother responding to you, but my God, what are you talking about? Your data, if it means anything, goes through 8th grade. I wrote about research on high school graduation, earning power, family stability and lack of negative confrontations with the law. It followed people years beyond high school graduation. And I wrote about two years of preschool for 3 and 4 year olds, not the difference between half day and all day K’s effects on academic achievement. (Some studies on the effects of preschool say the reading and math gains level out by the 4th grade, but they see lifelong benefits which go beyond test scores).
If you wish, I’d love for you to link to the study or studies you’re referring to. Please point to where it says $140 million was spent collecting the data.
David,
The $140 million came directly from the Institute of Education Sciences as a public records request, the oversight entity for the ECLS.
Your adult impacts almost certainly came from the famous Perry Preschool project – a sample of only 64 students followed from preschool till adulthood.
By comparison, the ECLS was a random sample of 20,000 students randomly drawn from 2,000 different schools and randomly drawn right from within each classroom.
They found that all day kindergartners lost ground on prosocial, antisocial behavior and motivation. And, the damage appears to be permanent – they lost ground to half-day kindergartners every year after kindergarten all the way till the end of the study.
A similar but smaller longitudinal study of 600 students found the same outcomes for preschool.
Everyone talks about “fade out” but it is not fade out – it is damage – slightly higher cognitive gains in one year at the expense of permanently lowered attitudes.
It hasn’t been understood to be damage because few studies are as comprehensive as ECLS and few have followed students as long.
As far as Perry Preschool project it should be understood as mythology, not research. If you assign a trail guide to 64 students and his life outcomes depend on their well being, they will do well. It has little or nothing to do with the trail they follow.
Link please, John, for your kindergarten study, and if possible point to the conclusions section? And a link and quote verifying that $140 million was spent collecting data for the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study? If you want me to trust, or even understand what you’re talking about, you need to verify.
Isn’t this initiative a system where Vouchers are provided to send kids to Private School. Albeit that it is locally produced. But if the Public Tax Supported Voucher system starts with Preschool, how much more would it take for Vouchers to become the norm for All Students. Maybe the City should look at PreSchool supported by the existing Public School system?
” research agrees that the benefits of early childhood education starts when the child enters school and continues into adulthood. “
This is simply not so. Plenty of research seems to show that the effects of preschool wear off or could even be negative.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-evi…
Only in low income and neglectful homes does the research seem to agree. In those homes removing the child from the home helps simply because they’re no longer neglected. In that case CPS should step in and remove them.
The best place for children below the age of 5 is in the home with a loving parent. I absolutely don’t want my tax dollars wasted on what amounts to a baby sitting service.
Why is cradle to adulthood (and beyond) care by the government always seem to be the goal of liberals?
Before we decide to spend more money on pre-K, we might want to look at the Head Start data and last year’s Vanderbilt study. The research on pre-K benefits is, at best, equivocal. The correlations that Safier asserts as causal relationships might be due to the fact that involved, high-IQ parents (who tend to have high-IQ children) also tend to send their children to preschool, and not due to the preschool itself.
David,
This is the analysis through 5th grade performed by RAND. The 8th grade results and the dollars spent on collecting data came directly from IES via email. Amazingly, I could not find a research study presenting the final results.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/…
Attendance in a Full-Day Kindergarten Program
Had Little Eff ect on Reading Achievement but Was
Negatively Associated with Mathematics Achievement
and the Development of Nonacademic School Readiness
Skills.
Th ere was little diff erence in the reading achievement of students
attending full-day or half-day kindergarten programs
as they progressed through school. However, in mathematics,
attendance in a full-day kindergarten program was
negatively associated with later fi ft h-grade performance
when the nonacademic readiness skills of students were
taken into account.
Children who participated in a full-day kindergarten
program demonstrated lower levels of nonacademic
readiness skills through the fi ft h grade, including poorer
dispositions toward learning, lower self-control, and
worse interpersonal skills than children in part-day
programs. Children in full-day programs also showed a
greater tendency to engage in externalizing and internalizing
problem behaviors than did children in part-day
programs.
John, you gave me a Rand study about full day and half day K that goes through the fifth grade, not the eighth grade. And you know about the 8th grade results through an email which doesn’t include a link to the actual research. You’ll have to pardon me if I don’t take that as a reasonable comment on my post about preschool’s effects on people’s lives beginning with high school graduation and going into early adulthood.
I got the 8th grade data directly from IES via email while Superintendent. Three years further along than 5th grade same data.
The Hubbell telescope of education studies and you are mystified by results. Tells us all you need to know about education culture. Politically incorrect to present the truth.
This is the 98/99 kindergarten class, one that left 8th grade in 06/07.
They have since followed another entire cohort. Wonder why you never heard of that one either?
Why have we never heard about the 98/99 students who skipped kindergarten completely?
Why have we never heard about the 98/99 students who attended preschool versus those who didn’t?
20,000 sample size, randomly selected.
John, I still don’t understand how you can use a study of full day vs. half day K as a proxy for an additional two years of education starting when the children are 3, but I’ll set that aside.
I still haven’t seen the study you’re referring to. You say it’s the “Hubbell telescope of education studies,” but all I know about it is what I’ve heard from the Falcon 9 of commenters.
Here’s an idea. Forward that IES email to me at tucsonweekly@tucsonlocalmedia.com, and it will be forwarded to me. I’ll take a look at it. Maybe it’s a terrific study, I don’t know, but whenever someone says “Trust me,” I’m hesitant to take them at their word without some confirmation.
David,
Remember, the ECLS data collection was separated from the analysis to prevent the pervasive bias in research from polluting the data collection.
The multiple RAND studies are the ECLS study. RAND was paid $10 million from Rockefeller and Ford to analyze the ECLS data which had already cost $140 million to collect.
You are quoting a one researcher, 64 student sample where the data collector clearly had an overwhelming interest in the outcome. At the same time you are attempting to dismiss a $150 million dollar, 20,000 student student where the data collectors could have lost their contract over improper data collection.
There has since been an entire additional cohort. Aren’t you curious at all about the dead silence surrounding the two most massive, rigorous studies ever performed in the history of education?
No other study has ever followed 20 thousand student for 9 years.
The relevance is that there was another longitudinal study done for preschool in California that had the same pattern – slightly higher cognitive gains, loss of social strength.
John, I’m going to stop this back-and-forth with this comment. I just want to say that you continue to cite a study without linking to the source on the web, or even a web page citing the study. You say you have it in an email, yet you haven’t forwarded the email or quoted from it. Repeating what you said over and over doesn’t make your argument stronger. It leaves the impression with me that you have nothing.
You are right. I don’t have an email sent to me at ADE by the Institute of Education Sciences four years ago.
But, we can just go with the RAND study of ECLS data which went up through 5th grade. Full day kindergartners were behind half day kindergartners on both cognitive and emotional measures.
And, by the way, where are your citations?
John, I’m surprised you can’t find a 4 year old email. I’ve got relevant emails going back a decade or more, and they’re easily searchable by subject line, name of sender and content. Clearly, your remarks on the study are based on your memory of what it said 4 years ago, and memory tends to be selective. So even if the study is as good as you say, your analysis of the study is only as good as your memory and your ability to view the study objectively. And as I’ve said before, a study of kindergarten effects has little bearing on the effects of adding quality preschool for 3 and 4 year olds.
As for my citation, a good, nuanced study of studies and various types of preschools is Impacts of
Early Childhood Programs from the Brookings Institute. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploa…
If you want to cherry-pick it, you can find quotes to make it sound like the effects of preschool are minimal. If you read the whole thing, you’ll find that the research is mainly positive. Because the author is careful, she acknowledges the gaps in and problems with the research. She would rather draw cautious conclusions than overstate what the research indicates. I’ve looked at countless pieces of educational research, and the honest authors tend to state their conclusions without a high degree of certainty. That’s the nature of research into education. Conclusions are never conclusive.
“Should we really trust all those unknowns to a seven member committee?”
David,
Here’s one of the reasons I changed my mind and will vote yes on 204:
Many of the people with whom I volunteer are retired teachers or are still teaching. They are the kinds of people that will be appointed by mayor and council to the commission. My conversations with them showed me that teachers are obsessed (I don’t think that’s too strong of a word) with quality education.
I trust them to come up with a plan that benefits children.
Also: the commission’s meetings will be public, must follow open meeting laws, and will be open to public input.
A.M. Kennedy
Sorry but I now see the criteria used used to hire the Police Chief, by the Mayor and Council. The fewer decisions they make, the safer we all are. I will vote NO on 204.