The Negative Impact Of Universal Preschool

As the tax burden on the American Family has increased and the value of our currency has decreased, many families now have two parents who work outside the home. One result of this is a growing daycare industry that takes care of children from the time they are three or four months old. What impact does this have on the children and what impact does this have on our society?

The Heritage Foundation posted the results of research on the impact of universal preschool on its website today. We might want to rethink what we are doing.

Some highlights from the article:

Evidence continues to mount that government-funded preschool fails to fulfill the promises of its proponents. New studies of large-scale preschool programs in Quebec and Tennessee show that vastly expanding access to free or subsidized preschool may worsen behavioral and emotional outcomes. Even proponents of universal preschool admit that it does nothing to improve future academic performance.

As proponents of government preschool programs continue to appeal to findings from 50 years ago that have never been replicated, current, large-scale, rigorous evaluations of major programs at the federal level, in the states, and internationally make a strong case against such initiatives and deserve serious consideration from policymakers wont to further expand government intervention in the care of the youngest Americans.

…The Head Start Impact Study. In late 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services released the Head Start Impact Study, a scientifically rigorous evaluation that tracked 5,000 three-year-old and four-year-old children through the end of third grade. The study found little to no impact on the parenting practices or the cognitive, social-emotional, and health outcomes of participants. Notably, on a few measures, access to Head Start had harmful effects on participating children.[7] For both the three-year-old and four-year-old cohorts, access to Head Start had no statistically measurable effects on any measure of cognitive ability, including reading, language, and math.[8] In other words, by the time they finished third grade, there was no difference between those children who attended Head Start and the control group of their peers who did not.

Vanderbilt Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K Study. In 2015, a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University released an evaluation of Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K (VPK) Program, a state-subsidized preschool program open to low-income children in the state. Some 18,000 children participate in the program, which was introduced in 1996. Proponents have long claimed Tennessee’s VPK program is a model state-based preschool program, with standards aligned to the Obama Administration’s Preschool for All initiative.[9] Teachers must be licensed, the child-adult ratio is limited to 10:1, and a structured “age-appropriate” curriculum must be used in classrooms. The program is available first to children from low-income Tennessee families, and then, space permitting, to children with special needs and children with limited English proficiency, among other children deemed “at-risk.” An earlier evaluation found that gains made by participating four-year-olds had faded by kindergarten. In a follow-up evaluation released in September 2015, Mark Lipsey, Dale Farrar, and Kerry Hofer reported that there were no sustained benefits for the same children through the end of third grade.[10]

These studies showed no benefit. Some studies show that preschool can be harmful. The article reports:

The province of Quebec introduced universal low-cost day care for children through age four beginning in 1997. The program has had a large impact: privately funded child care arrangements have almost disappeared, and Quebec has the highest rate of subsidized child care in Canada, at 58 percent in 2011.[13] The program caused a 14.5 percent increase in the share of mothers of young children working outside the home.[14] The Quebec experience offers more guidance for the potential introduction of universal child care than small, targeted programs, because it implicitly includes indirect effects on non-participants and any general equilibrium effects due to the drastic shift in the way child care was funded and conducted.

Regrettably, new research has found that children who became eligible for the program in Quebec were more anxious as children and have committed more crimes as teenagers. The availability of day care clearly worsened children’s non-cognitive “soft” skills.

Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan found that children exposed to the program were 4.6 percent more likely to be convicted of a crime and 17 percent more likely to commit a drug crime. Their health and life satisfaction were worse.

I realize that staying at home is not an option for every mother. However, the decision to have someone else with your young child for most of their waking hours does have consequences. Mothers are one of America’s most important assets.

When Justice Looks The Other Way

The American military is struggling right now with the issue of sexual assault in its ranks. The lax moral standards of our society make it rather difficult to distinguish between morning-after regret and genuine sexual assault. When you add to the mix the chain of command in the military and the culture of the military, things don’t always seem to be sorted out correctly.

The Wall Street Journal posted an article yesterday which illustrates this problem. The incident in the article deals with Raymond Cromartie. Raymond Cromartie entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., in 2010. In 2011 he was charged with sex crimes against a female cadet. He was acquitted of those charges, but now faces expulsion from the military.

The article reports:

The alleged attack turned out to have occurred during an academy-sponsored ski trip to Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, in January 2011. The 180 cadets on the trip had been told they were permitted to drink, but only if they were over 21 (Quebec‘s drinking age is 18) and only in public places like bars and restaurants. Both those limits were widely flouted.

…He also acknowledges a sexual “hookup” with the accuser, which occurred in the hotel bedroom she shared with three other female cadets. But while her account and his agree on some of the physical details, he denies her claim that he forced himself on her.

…Although the accuser waited half a year to file charges, on the night of the incident she did phone Second Lt. Scott Wright, a young Army officer she described as a family friend. After hearing her version of events, Lt. Wright assumed the role of white knight. He demanded that she file a formal complaint. She demurred, so the next day, over her objection, he alerted the academy. “What that bastard did to you is vile and unforgivable,” he texted her. “You can’t let this go. I did what I had to do; what I knew in my heart to be right.”

It seems that there were some other connections here. In July 2011, Mr. Cromartie was summoned to the campus military police station after completing a grueling three-day combat simulation field training exercise in 90-degree summer heat. At that point, without fully understanding what he was doing, he signed a waiver of his right to counsel.

The article further reports:

Mr. Cromartie was acquitted of all the accuser’s charges. A few days later, he sent a brief no-hard-feelings email to now First Lt. Wright, who responded with a long, effusive apology. Lt. Wright wrote that after learning the facts of the case, “I was shocked and appalled. I felt as though I had been used and manipulated.” When he heard of the acquittal, “I thanked God that I didn’t play a part in sending an innocent man to prison.”

The article then explains the problem of unlawful command influence (UCI):

In addition, in October 2011 the accuser’s father sent an inflammatory three-page handwritten letter to the commandant, Gen. Martin. The father asserted that his daughter had been “raped” and repeatedly referred to Mr. Cromartie as a “rapist.” (This was not in fact a rape case; even the accuser said the sexual activity stopped well short of intercourse.) The letter began “Dear Ted.” The father and Gen. Martin were classmates at the academy 30 years ago, and West Point classes are famously tightknit.

Perhaps the clearest indication of UCI came in April 2012, when the defense counsel asked Maj. Jeffrey Pickler, Mr. Cromartie’s company tactical officer, to write a letter attesting to the cadet’s good character. Maj. Pickler agreed, then sought advice from his superior, Lt. Col. John Vermeesch, who discouraged him from writing the letter. Maj. Pickler testified that Col. Vermeesch prefaced his recommendation with a pre-emptive denial: “Just to be clear, this is not UCI.”

The military command is a tight-knit group. Generally speaking, they look out for each other, and generally speaking, that is a good thing. However, the father of the accuser could not be expected to be objective about this case and should not have gotten involved.

Because Mr. Cromartie revised some of the details of his original statement, he is now facing perjury charges, which could get him court-martialed from the Army.

The article concludes:

After the court-martial panel read its verdict, Mr. Cromartie took the stand in the proceeding’s sentencing phase to show remorse for the misstatement: “I should have reviewed my statement thoroughly. I just skimmed it and it was my fault,” he testified. “I should have asked for a lawyer.”

If that is the most important lesson a young man can learn at West Point, it is an indictment of both the academy’s leadership and the country’s.

It is unfortunate that we may lose a good leader over an unprovable charge because politicians have decided that they need to meddle with the military’s sexual assault policies. It seems to me that the guilt over this incident is shared by both parties–it’s just that one of those parties shared her regret in ways that were destructive to the other. If Mr. Cromartie is to be discharged because of this incident, the other party should also be discharged. This is much more a reflection of the sexual morals we have taught our young people than it is a crime.

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If The Mainstream Media Doesn’t Scream About It, It Didn’t Happen

In April of this year, I noted the differences in coverage the media gave to two stories regarding oil spills (rightwinggranny.com). One story involved a pipe leak and one story involved a train derailment. The train spill was three times the size of the pipe leak, but because it wasn’t a pipe leak and would not feed into the narrative of the anti-Keystone Pipeline sentiment, the train leak was not widely covered.

Today, the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page (I am not including a link–the article is subscribers only) notes that the Saturday explosion in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, of a train carrying North Dakota shale oil will probably not get a lot of extended coverage.

The article in the Wall Street Journal reminds us:

The reason oil is moved on trains from places like North Dakota and Alberta is because there aren’t enough pipelines to carry it. The provincial governments of Alberta and New Brunswick are talking about building a pipeline to cover the 3,000-odd mile distance. But last month President Obama put the future of the Keystone XL pipeline again in doubt, telling a Georgetown University audience “our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”

Did the explosion at Lac-Megantic not significantly exacerbate the problem of pollution, carbon or otherwise?

The article points out that there is about half as much oil spilled from pipelines as railroads on a gallon-per-mile basis. Pipelines tend to be away from populated areas–railroads tend to run through populated areas. Common sense would choose pipelines over railroads for both safety and pollution reasons.

The other aspect of the Keystone pipeline debate is the money. As long as there is no pipeline, Burlington Northern Santa Fe will continue to move shale oil to its destination. Burlington Northern Santa Fe is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Obama supporter and Omaha billionaire Warren Buffett.

Environmentalists are being taken for a ride by the very people (Obama supporters) that they consider their allies in the fight to ‘save’ the environment. Amazing.

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