Friday, February 7, 2014

"Pre-K decay" in February 24th issue of National Review

Read pp. 21-22 !
I have an article in the print version of National Review that brings together a lot of the points I've been making about government preschool over the past few months. "Pre-K Decay"--I don't come up with the titles, all right?--describes how preschool advocates have persistently exaggerated the empirical evidence that underlies their movement. They are utterly confident that preschool is effective, but their arguments from the data require hope and speculation:
That’s the strange thing about the preschool movement. It mixes scholarship and advocacy in a way that leads some academics to put themselves far out in front of what the evidence supports. Preschool advocates inundate their audiences with long and authoritative-looking lists of academic citations, but they rarely seem troubled by the rigorous gold-standard evaluations that generate contrary results. Healthy skepticism—which is crucial to a good scholarly mindset—is too often absent among the preschool movement’s most vocal leaders.
Download a pdf of the article here.

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