All I Really Need To Know (About Policy) I Learned In (Pre-) Kindergarten
A dispatch from a city that seems to be doing something right
“Universal pre-kindergarten” is one of those ideas that almost everybody in politics seems to like. But a proposal to create a national pre-K program didn’t get through Congress last year, partly because President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders couldn’t get the votes to support the new spending such an initiative would require.
And that wasn’t the only problem. A core purpose of universal pre-K is to help low-income children, whose parents frequently can’t afford to pay for quality private programs on their own. Studies about two famous pilot programs, one in Michigan and one in North Carolina, have shown that these programs can significantly boost the chances that these kids will succeed later in life.
Replicating those results hasn’t been easy, however. Studies of larger programs, which several states now operate, have produced decidedly mixed results. That includes some particularly dispiriting findings from Tennessee, where researchers detected a now-familiar pattern of "fade out" — i.e., gains fading quickly once the kids get into grade school — and then discovered that some of the children actually seemed to be *worse* off after a few years. Yikes!
But we've seen some more encouraging findings, too. High on that list was a paper on pre-K in Boston that got my attention when it first appeared in 2021. That study followed kids from the program into early adulthood, and determined they were significantly more likely to graduate from high school and to attend college. They were also significantly less likely to spend time in juvenile detention.
I made a mental note to get a closer look at the program — to see what's really going on and what lessons, if any, we can take from it.
It took me a while. (I’m slow!) But I finally got a chance to visit some classrooms a few weeks ago. I also spoke with officials who run the program, and some outside researchers too.
My new article at HuffPost tells you what I learned.
Just to be crystal-clear, I can't tell you the evidence of its success is definitive. As with so much research in this field — including that Tennessee study — the findings on Boston’s program are ambiguous and tentative. But there's certainly good reason to be optimistic that it's meaningfully helping the kids who need help the most.
And it's not like “closing the achievement gap” is pre-K's only goal. Like other early childhood initiatives, pre-K serves many functions, like providing working parents with a reliable, quality source of child care and stabilizing the work force. (Rachel Cohen made this point in a terrific Vox piece a little while back.)
One person who understands this is Michelle Wu, Boston's new mayor, who has pledged to make Boston the "most family-friendly city in the country." She spoke with me about the pre-K program and emphasized its importance as a true public good — something that ultimately benefits everybody in the community and that only government can provide.
One obvious question, if you believe Boston is doing it right, is whether other communities can too, potentially justifying the kind of large national initiative that Biden and the Democrats tried to pass when they were working on "Build Back Better."
In theory, the answer is yes — any community can replicate this formula or come up with a more customized version of its own. But it hardly seems coincidental that this is happening in a city that is practically synonymous with education and where voters have been (by American standards) sympathetic to the idea that government can do big things.
In other words, there's a virtuous cycle at work here: People believe in government, giving government support to succeed, which in turn makes more people believe in government. It doesn't work that way everywhere and in a lot of places, for understandable reasons, the cycle has been moving in the opposite direction.
I'm not sure how you change that. But the fact that Boston's program seems to be making the lives of real people better in a significant way seems worth noting — and, perhaps, celebrating.
You can find my new article here.
NEW SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS FOR CITIZEN COHN
As most of you know, the troubles at Twitter under Elon Musk’s management has led to a proliferation of new social media channels. I’m on them!
If you want to follow me on one or more, here’s where you should go…
Substack Notes: https://substack.com/@citizencohn
Threads: https://www.threads.net/@citizencohn
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/citizencohn.bsky.social
Post: https://post.news/@/citizencohn
Mastodon: https://journa.host/@CitizenCohn
Alternatively, you can just search for “citizencohn” on any of these channels. That should take you to my feed. I think.
Note also that I am staying on Twitter — https://twitter.com/CitizenCohn — and plan to keep posting there, if a bit less frequently in the past.
At some point, I’ll probably winnow down the list. Who has time to keep up with so many different information sources? But first I’m waiting to see how they evolve, who uses which, etc.
Thank you!
It was a lot of fun to report -- the kids were adorable -- and I learned a great deal.
Fantastic piece. I read the Boston article earlier this week too and learned a lot from it. Change is possible!