Over and over again, the Biden administration has touted the benefits of “universal” preschool and pre-kindergarten (pre-K) education. These programs, a White House fact sheet declares, are “critical to ensuring that children start kindergarten with the skills and supports that set them up for success in school.” Indeed, they are so critical, in this view, that President Joe Biden’s stalled spending bill plans to devote what the White House calls a “historic $200 billion investment in America’s future” to expanding access to preschool and pre-K schooling.
Biden himself has advertised the supposed benefits of the new spending, which would roll out through state-based partnerships, on his Twitter feed, with an October post declaring that “studies show that the earlier our children begin to learn in school, the better. That’s why we’re going to make two years of high-quality preschool available to every child.”
On the contrary, a recently published study of a state-run pre-K program in Tennessee found that not only did the program not produce any long-term educational gains, by sixth grade, the children who attended the state’s pre-K program were actually performing worse on both educational attainment and behavioral metrics relative to their peers. State-run pre-K appears to have entirely negative effects for children enrolled.
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