It’s been asked a lot lately with budgetary challenges running up against a lack of tax capacity, and the backdrop of DOGE findings of government waste at the federal level, “Do our elected representatives ever go back and evaluate the programs they pass to see if they are working as promised?” Not really, no. And a key example of this is Vermont’s taxpayer funded, public-school-run Pre-K program.
The Vermont legislature embarked on what amounts to a hostile takeover of the independent childcare cottage industry – small businesses mostly run by women – by the government public-school monopoly in 2006 with the passage of Act 62. The promises made heralding this law into statute were many. We will save $7 for every dollar invested! Test scores will rise! Special education needs will decrease! Youth crime rates will fall! And childcare will be more accessible and more affordable!
This takeover made a dramatic expansion in 2014 with Act 166 when the voluntary public school administered program became mandatory in every district (you only get “local control” when you do what Montpelier wants) and new regulations drove 26% of the small, independent providers out of business within three years. In 2023 we saw another major expansion with Act 76, creating a $100 million a year payroll tax to fund further expansion of the program.
So, nearly two decades into this government Pre-K experiment and hundreds of millions of property tax dollars and now a new payroll tax added into the mix spent, have any of these promises/predictions come to pass? No. In point of fact, just about every metric where improvement was promised we have seen the opposite result.
Let’s compare these three charts showing Pre-K enrollment increasing from 16%/45% for three- and four-year-olds respectively in 2007 to 71%/64% in 2023, all while test scores consistently drop from 2015-2022 in both math and reading. Note: a three-year-old enrolled in pre-k in 2008 would be a fourth grader taking the NEAP test in 2015 and an eighth grader in 2019.
Beyond the test scores, has students’ social/emotional behavior generally improved since we expanded these so called “high quality” government run preschool options? No, they have not. Have special education needs in K-12 decreased or increased? Pretty sure the latter. Are teen and young adult crime rates going down? I don’t think so. Are we saving money on K-12 education as a result of this Pre-K “investment”? That would be a hard no.
Now, I understand that correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but shouldn’t this evidence, circumstantial though it may be, give lawmakers pause? Maybe spend a few minutes investigating whether or not there is a negative connection between enrolment in these programs and academic and social/emotional outcomes for kids. Maybe do this before exposing more kids to a potentially harmful experience and taxpayers to a bill we really can’t afford, especially if it is resulting in a negative return on investment.
Tennessee, a state with a similar program to Vermont’s that also started in the mid-2000s, has done such evaluations – and the results they found are not good. The most recent study by Vanderbilt University, published in January 2022 found:
Data through sixth grade from state education records showed that the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade. A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.
We are dealing with an education tax crisis on the one hand and a student outcomes problem on the other. Maybe a two-birds-with-one-stone solution here is to scrap the program that is both costing property taxpayers and anyone who earns a paycheck a couple hundred million a year and is more than likely contributing to some of the most glaring problems occurring in our classrooms.
Maybe a better solution for parents and taxpayers is to return to a private market where small, local, providers can once again offer childcare that is more accessible, lower cost, and – guess what! – higher quality in terms of outcomes than the so-called “high quality” government run system. In fact, in its 2019 report on universal Pre-K, the VT Agency of Education, “…did not detect a difference in child outcomes or classroom quality between teachers with a BA vs. an AA, or between teachers with and without a BA.” So, the whole basis for the “high quality” label and reason for the program – ostensibly better trained teachers — is fraudulent.
One thing’s for sure, the last thing we should be doing as part of fixing an inarguably broken public education system in Vermont is expanding that broken system — and pouring hundreds of millions of more dollars into it — to include two, three, four, five more “grades.” That’s ludicrous. Even a fourth grader could tell you that, though they might choose a different word.
