Dale Farran has been studying early childhood education for half a century, but her most recent study has her questioning everything she thought she knew:
“It really has required a lot of soul-searching, a lot of reading of the literature to try to think of what were plausible reasons that might account for this.”
And by “this,” she means the outcome of a study that lasted more than a decade. It included 2,990 low-income children in Tennessee who applied to free, public prekindergarten programs. Some were admitted by lottery, and the others were rejected, creating the closest thing you can get in the real world to a randomized, controlled trial — the gold standard in showing causality in science.
Farran and her co-authors at Vanderbilt University followed both groups of children all the way through sixth grade. At the end of their first year, the kids who went to pre-K scored higher on school readiness — as expected.
But after third grade, they were doing worse than the control group. And at the end of sixth grade, they were doing even worse. They had lower test scores, were more likely to be in special education, and were more likely to get into trouble in school, including serious trouble like suspensions.
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That’s right. A statewide public pre-K program, taught by licensed teachers, housed in public schools, had a measurable and statistically significant negative effect on the children in this study.
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To put it crudely, policymakers and experts have touted for decades now that if you give a 4-year-old who is growing up in poverty a good dose of story time and block play, they’ll be more likely to grow up to become a high-earning, productive citizen.
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Farran points out that families of means tend to choose play-based preschool programs with art, movement, music and nature. Children are asked open-ended questions, and they are listened to.
This is not what Farran is seeing in classrooms full of kids in poverty, where “teachers talk a lot, but they seldom listen to children.”
Nobody listens to children because children don’t know anything.
Teachers don’t answer questions because they don’t know anything either. That’s why I don’t listen to the teaching profession.
The only thing kids learn in public schools is that you can embarrass an ignoramus by asking questions.
You can’t learn from the ignorant.
Suppose that in a particular state, all the furniture is made by individual craftsmen, working at home. But at some point, someone decides that furniture will now be made in a factory…but not just any factory. This will be a factory staffed largely by resentful employees who are members of an especially bad union…and managed by ‘executives’ who do not need to worry about either quality or revenue, given their near-monopoly status.
What would happen to furniture quality?
If the answer to a problem is a government program, then failure is the likely result.
When the state harms children and their prospects are dimmed along with their potential, the System is working as designed and intended.
Someday people will realize they do harm because they mean harm.
Someday maybe a puzzled group of future historians or archaeologists will be reading this study, perhaps even this blog, wondering why we let ourselves be destroyed.
Here are your answers future historian: Education, and Laws. Both conditioned us first for slavery and then for extinction.
The answer to the suffering children is to make “school” 24x7x365: Boys’ homes and Girls’ homes.
They grow up in chaos, abuse. A few hours a day doesn’t change the home.
And of course they’re ruined about the 6th grade [puberty, adolescence onset].
Education is the key to hiding truth from our educated ruling class, and, more importantly. to keeping the rest of us in bondage.
“System set up one hundred years ago to prevent children from acquiring skills, becoming literate, developing personalities of independence and sticktoitiveness, and competing in business prevents children from acquiring skills, becoming literate, developing personalities of independence and sticktoitiveness, and competing in business.”
No wayyyyyyy…