The Dayton education agenda's pre-K obsession

"Instead of talking about how to spend more money and finding ways to spend more money, we ought to be talking about how to focus the resources we have on something we can measure." —Sen. David Hann (R-Eden Prairie), Star Tribune, February 5

Do you get the point that Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton really believes in early childhood education? The governor's seven-point education plan is not content with dedicating one or two of these points to early childhood education, he embeds "ready for K" goals into five of them:

• Invest in Early Childhood and All-Day Kindergarten
• Target All-Day Kindergarten
• Expand existing K-12 system into a comprehensive pre-K-12 system
• Adopt pre-K - 3 reading standards
• Support early childhood teacher observation and development
• Reauthorize Statewide Early Childhood Advisory Council and reestablish Children's Cabinet
• Charge Commissioner of Education with leadership of early childhood initiatives

Considering the state's barely ten-month old kindergarten-readiness study, this obsession with pre-K seems odd.

The Minnesota School Readiness Study found that between 91 percent and 97 percent of Minnesota five-year-olds were In Process or Proficient in five developmental areas necessary for school success: physical development, the arts, personal and social development, language and literacy, and mathematical thinking. This compares to last year’s study with numbers between 87 percent and 96 percent. The increases are within the margin of error between the two years.

When you couple these findings with national empirical studies on Head Start and other preschool programs that show little if any benefit to pre-K programs, you may wonder why Governor Dayton is so bent on a significant expansion of government pre-K and all-day kindergarten.

"There's nothing terribly new in here," said Rep. Mindy Greiling (DFL-Roseville) in the February 5 Star Tribune article, "Dayton renews pledge to raise school funding." "We're going to have more commissions and more advisory councils. I think we've been there and done that," remarked Rep. Sondra Erickson (R-Princeton), chair of the House Educationn Reform Committee in the February 5 Star Tribune article.

Dayton's myopic focus on pre-K and kindergarten to the exclusion of other education reforms such as streamlining the process for sponsors of successful charter schools to open new sites, and education tax credits is a missed opportunity for much-needed education reform for Minnesota students and families. Dayton's omissions provide an excellent opportunity for the Republican majorities in the Legislature to display some leadership in state education policy initiatives.

The manufactured crisis in kindergarten readiness

The good news is that the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) evaluated a random sample of children entering kindergarten in the fall of 2006, and found that only 3-10% of this cohort had not acquired a skill, knowledge, or behavior in a selected "developmental domain."

The bad news is that the kindergarten readiness industry, led by the powerful Ready4K lobby, is still pushing its aggressive, "it takes the government to raise a child" takeover of parenting.

Ready4K's mantra is "Only 50% of Minnesota’s children are fully prepared for kindergarten." It is based on a glass-is-half-empty view of the 2002 counterpart to the aforementioned Minnesota School Readiness Study: Developmental Assessment at Kindergarten Entrance Fall 2006. If you count only the "Proficient" group, then yes, about half are in this group (in 2006, between 52% and 71% in the five domains studied), but if you count the "In Process" group, then you could also say that "between 90%-97% of Minnesota's children are fully prepared or almost fully prepared for kindergarten."

You won't find the following table on the Ready4K web site or in its TV advertising, even though it is the foundation for its entire legislative agenda. Look for yourself and see if you can find the kindergarten readiness crisis:

Domain	"Not Yet"	"In Progress"	"Proficient"
Physical Development	3%	26%	71%
The Arts	6%	36%	58%
Personal & Social Development	8%	35%	57%
Language & Literacy	10%	36%	54%
Mathematical Thinking	9%	39%	52%

Ready4K also doesn't show you this statement from the MDE study:

Because children develop and grow along a continuum with great variability, the goal of these studies is to assess children’s proficiency within and across these developmental domains and not establish whether or not children are ready for school with the use of a composite "ready" or "not ready" score. [Emphasis added.]

What you will find featured quite prominently by Ready4K is its legislative agenda, i.e., government funding wish list, which in its original form in 2007 totaled an even $300 million.

While state spending targeted to at-risk populations makes sense (for example, the $6 million signed into law this year for Governor Tim Pawlenty’s early childhood scholarship program for families of at-risk pre-kindergarteners), Baby Ed programs like universal preschool or all-day kindergarten aimed at all Minnesotans are at best an unnecessary expansion of the nanny state.

Minnesota: The Nanny $tate

In “All-day kindergarten funding overdue (April 25),” Sun Newspapers Minnetonka Community Editor Joe Kieser chastises the state of Minnesota for falling “behind states like Mississippi, Alabama and most of our neighboring states in funding all-day kindergarten.” He says that “Minnesota is also in need of more special education and early childhood funding. We are leaving our youngest and most vulnerable students behind.”

Kieser’s rhetoric of fear would grow the “nanny state” government by transferring evermore responsibility for childrearing from parents to the state. Proposals now at the Legislature would take all-day kindergarten to its logical extremes, advocating universal preschool and psychiatric screening, and infant home visitation programs that undermine parental autonomy and authority, while increasing the state payroll and budget to unsustainable levels.

Kieser says, “Studies have shown that kids who are enrolled in an all-day, every-day kindergarten program benefit academically and emotionally more so than their half-day counterparts.” He seems to imply that there is no controversy among these studies. How would the all-day, every-day kindergarteners stack up against their peers who stay at home with one of their parents?

“The Association of Metropolitan School Districts estimates,” says Kieser, “that it would cost the state $160 million annually to fully fund an all-day, every-day kindergarten program if every student enrolled. That is a lot of money, but can you think of a better way to spend it?”

As a matter of fact, I can. Reduce taxes on all Minnesotans to give parents the freedom to stay home and raise their young children as they see fit, instead of making them wards of the state from cradle to grave. Do you really think that the government would do a better job of raising your children than you could?