Tuesday, February 21, 2006

CRAZY CALIFORNIA PRESCHOOL INITIATIVE

For those who believe that Rob Reiner's initiative to create a government-run preschool program for all four-year-olds is a slam-dunk for passage in June, think again. True, preschool seems like a warm and fuzzy issue. However, Reiner's proposed preschool program, which would be funded by a tax increase on high-income earners, is so replete with problems that it offers a vast array of targets for critics. And, it is important to point out, those critics are not just limited to limited-government conservatives.

For instance, one of Reiner's toughest opponents has been the Los Angeles Times. Last year, when Reiner first proposed his initiative, a Times editorial skewered the initiative. The Times slammed the concept of taxing the rich to fund specific programs: [In November 2004], voters approved a poorly thought-out measure to tax million-dollar earners to fund mental health programs. The line of good causes calling out for tax on the rich will only get longer. Citing the continuing structural deficit in the state budget and the cost of Reiner's initiative, the Times observed, The last thing California needs right now is to raise another huge sum of money -- $2.3 billion a year to start that can't be used to close existing gaps. Warning against ballot-box budgeting, the Times thundered: Let's repeat: The voting booth isn't the place to draw up the state budget.

The Times attack on the Reiner initiative has continued. Earlier this month, Michael Hiltzik, the papers usually liberal business columnist, described the initiative as another attempt at ballot-box budgeting featuring misleading PR and misguided pied-piper appeal. Hiltzik then ripped the RAND Corporation study, which has become the bible of Reiner's campaign, that claims that for every $1 spent on preschool, society will get back $2.62 in long-term benefits such as better student performance and lower crime.

Hiltzik notes that RAND's calculations are based on a Chicago program aimed at black children in that city's poorest neighborhoods. Although the study's main author says that the Chicago program is the most relevant for comparison purposes with Reiner's envisioned California program, Hiltzik notes that the two programs are hardly identical. The Chicago program provides health screening, speech therapy services, meals, home visits and continual and intensive parental involvement efforts. None of these elements, observes Hiltzik, is specifically funded by the Reiner initiative.

Further, whereas the estimates of the benefits of the Chicago program are based on tracking students for decades, the estimates of the benefits of a California program are, in Hiltzik's words, an extrapolation applied to a program that doesn't yet exist. Thus, RAND's benefit claims should be seen as a projection, not a measurement.

The Times, however, is not the only unlikely home of Reiner skeptics. Academics at the University of California have issued studies that have undercut key arguments of the Reiner campaign. In January, UC Santa Barbara researchers found that whatever student achievement gains can be attributed to preschool attendance largely evaporates after a few years in elementary school. Because of this fade-out effect, the researchers question the long-term impact of preschool: Yet because the achievement impact of preschool appears to diminish during the first four years of school, while the achievement gap especially for Spanish-dominant language minority students increases, preschool alone may have limited use as a long-term strategy for improving the achievement gap without strengthening the schools these students attend or without additional support during the school years. In other words, unless California?s under-performing public K-12 system improves, don't expect preschool to produce all those long-term benefits that Reiner claims.

Reiner and his campaign try to dismiss such evidence by arguing that unlike many current preschool programs, their initiative will guarantee "high-quality preschool." Key to their definition of "high-quality" is the initiative's requirement that all preschool teachers must have a bachelor's degree and a post-bachelor's teaching credential in early childhood education. Yet, there is a great deal of data to suggest that a four-year degree and a special teaching credential have little, if any, effect on student achievement.

UC Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller, who has battled conservatives over school choice issues, and two fellow researchers issued a study last year that examined the research on teacher education and preschool. What they found was that many of the studies claiming to show a connection between teachers holding bachelor's degrees and better student performance were statistically and methodologically flawed. Thus, they concluded, Claims that a Bachelor's degree further advances child development simply cannot be substantiated by studies conducted to date. In addition, given the higher salaries that will have to be paid to preschool teachers under the Reiner initiative, To pay-out higher reimbursement rates based on the number of BA-credentialed teachers will be costly and may not yield significant benefits to children.

Finally, even Georgetown University professor William Gormley, who supports universal preschool and whose research on Oklahoma's universal preschool program is often cited by the Reiner campaign, admits that, A universal pre-K program may or may not be the best path to school readiness. This acknowledgement is probably due to the fact that in Gormley's own studies of the Oklahoma program, there is inconsistent evidence as to whether universal preschool helps improve the short-term performance of middle and upper-income children. And, indeed, there is no long-term evidence that preschool helps non-disadvantaged children a fact that undercuts the entire basis for a universal program.

Given the opposition of key elements of the major mainstream media and academia, plus the gaping holes in the evidence supporting a universal preschool program, Reiner's initiative is vulnerable. The recent Public Policy Institute of California poll that found 63 percent of Californians support the Reiner initiative may be flawed because poll respondents were read only a concept description of the initiative rather than the official title and summary. In other surveys, much lower levels of support were recorded when the official title and summary were read to respondents. Even if the 63 percent is accurate, however, it is a relatively low level of support given the warm fuzziness of the issue and the media ad campaign that has already started in support of preschool for all children.

Exposing the initiative's inherent problems will certainly cause a great deal of doubt, if not outright opposition, from many of those who now think the initiative sounds good. Thus, a determined, informed, substantive and adequately funded campaign against the initiative stands a good chance of succeeding.

Source





Williams Does Diversity

A rather restrained post (in the circumstances) lifted from the NAS

K.C. Johnson, Brooklyn College—CUNY

On EphBlog, I've been following the debate at my former institution, Williams College, which is in the process of launching a new "diversity" initiative. This is "diversity" defined very narrowly: as college president Morton Shapiro explained, ideological or even religious diversity "are considered to be a characteristic that is acquired rather than intrinsic," so this initiative will focus exclusively on race. Among the initiative's chief recommendations: "Continue to allocate FTE to curricular areas in which we are likely to attract minority candidates." In other words, the skin color of the likely applicant pool will play as important, or even more important, a role as curricular or pedagogical need in allocating new lines. This is a disconcerting revelation.

For an outside perspective on faculty issues, the college turned to Professor Evelyn Hu-DeHart director of Brown's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Hu-DeHart last published a scholarly monograph in 1984; since then, she seems to have devoted herself almost full-time to administrative tasks geared toward championing a peculiar vision of higher education. Hu-DeHart seems to believe that on issues associated with "diversity," people of good faith cannot disagree. Scholarly critics of the diversity agenda, she has contended "provided cover for white supremacists to oppose affirmative action," while subjecting African-American and Hispanic students to "oppressive public scrutiny" and "extremely harsh attacks." And what typified this "oppressive" activity? Publication of Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom's America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible. In Hu-DeHart's academy, apparently even scholars of the prestige and talent of the Thernstroms cannot explore issues related to race and ethnicity in America unless they affirm Hu-DeHart's conclusions.

While Hu-DeHart has absurdly labeled scholarship questioning some of the foundations for affirmative action as an "extremely harsh" attack on students of color, she herself has demonstrated a tendency to issue blanket statements based on race or ethnicity calling into question her ability to envision a campus in which all students can do their best. To provide one example: in fall 2005, talking with students at Wesleyan College, Professor Hu-DeHart wondered why more people didn't question the objectivity of "all these dominant white professors [who] are studying European history or the [history of] white Europe." Can a scholar's objectivity be questioned solely on the basis of the color of his or her skin? Imagine the (appropriate) outrage if a white professor leveled such a condemnation of "all these minority black professors who are studying African history or the history of black Africa."

On curricular matters, Hu-DeHart has championed the Curriculum Transformation Project -- an initiative that seems to have more to do with imposing a specific ideological perspective on all classes rather than on "diversity" as commonly understood. The CTP's "curriculumt [sic] transformation" website urges colleges to utilize "the classroom as democratic space in which students can dialogue about and practice new ways of relating across race, class, and gender." (An education in the traditional disciplines of the liberal arts, apparently, does not allow for a sufficiently "diverse" perspective.) The CTB's first "resource" is a guide to "teaching about Hurricane Katrina," developed by the New York Collective of Radical Educators. The site urges professors to focus on how Katrina illustrates "the criminalization of poor people of color"; "the capitalist interests that govern public policy"; "militarism"; and "consumerism and related environmental degradation." Such analysis was last fresh around 1969.

These curricular proposals all revolve around what Professor Hu-DeHart terms the "social action approach," in which courses identify "important social issues and take actions to help solve them." This concept, she maintains, is "central to the values of a liberal arts education." Literally and theoretically, though never in practice, Williams could define a number of causes as "important social issues," and "take actions to help solve them." Perhaps the diversity curriculum could champion Israel's right to self-defense, so as to defend innocent civilians against suicide murderers; or celebrate a Roman Catholic anti-abortion initiative, so as to promote justice by preventing the destruction of innocent life; or oppose affirmative action, so as to achieve a socially just, color-blind, legal code. We all know, of course, that Professor Hu-DeHart does not have such initiatives in mind.

These ideas, while extreme even among "diversity" advocates, might not distinguish Hu-DeHart from the roster of consultants from which a college might choose when seeking to embrace the "diversity" approach. But Hu-DeHart also has an administrative record of translating her ideas into action. Before coming to Brown, she chaired Colorado's ethnic studies department for more than a decade. Her highest-profile hire was none other than Ward Churchill. Indeed, in April 2005, Hu-DeHart described Churchill as "her hire." Most observers consider the hiring, early tenuring, and finally promotion of Churchill, who lacked a Ph.D. and has faced credible charges of massive plagiarism, weak scholarship, and lying about his ethnic heritage, as an example of exactly how institutions of higher education ought not to function.

Moreover, Hu-DeHart has been less than candid about the relationship between her "diversity" ideas and Churchill's career. To a reporter at Brown, she claimed that no special considerations relating to "diversity" helped Churchill get his job. But this assertion that was directly contradicted by internal documents recently released by Colorado, which showed that the then-chair of the Communications Department, which originally hired Churchill, listed two reasons for doing so: Hu-DeHart's request, and how Churchill's claim that he was a "Native American" would improve the department's diversity. Ironically, one of Hu-DeHart's final acts before leaving her department chairmanship at Colorado in 2002 was to put in motion the first of four merit-pay raises that Churchill received between 2001 and 2005.

I would think that a figure who played the key role in rewarding Churchill with a lifetime position would not be in a position to supply guidance on academic policy to other institutions.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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