As the universal child care proposals in Build Back Better take a break from the spotlight—Democrats are regrouping after failing to pass the president’s high-priority bill last year—a team of researchers has dropped a major pre-K study in the journal, Developmental Psychology. The news is not good, and it joins a mixed literature showing, at minimum, that the effectiveness of pre-K programs is far from assured.
The study is based on what was, essentially, a controlled experiment: Some schools in Tennessee’s state-funded pre-K program (TN-VPK) were “oversubscribed,” and the contested seats were handed out through a random lottery. The researchers have been following a group of kids from the cohort that started in the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years, comparing those who won these lotteries with those who lost. The new study tracks the kids all the way through the sixth grade.
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in Institute for Family Studies