By Charles Barone, Director of Policy
In last night’s State of the Union speech President Obama made education a central theme and staked out several new education policies he aims to pursue in his second term.
Two of the biggest news items were: 1) Pre-school and 2) The value, relative to the costs, of a college education.
On pre-school, Obama proclaimed, “Tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America.” The two key watchwords here, for wonks and politicos alike, are “high-quality” and “every.”
And, here’s why:
Making high-quality pre-school available to every child is a worthy goal. But it’s an expensive proposition and it’s hard to see big new investments by the federal government when education is already facing cuts in the upcoming sequestration and appropriations fights. Congressman Rob Andrews (D-NJ), as quoted in Politics K-12, succinctly cut to the chase when he said, “I think it’s really smart, I think it’s a doable” idea” and then, in seeming recognition of the gap between the President’s aspirations and available federal funds added: “I think it’s not going to be a lot of new money.”
Another problem is party politics. Republicans tend to favor even less of a federal role in early childhood than they do for K-12 and higher education. Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-VA), Chair of the Higher Education Subcommittee, said, “States are doing fine on pre-K . They don’t need the federal government stepping in.”
This is not true by a long shot. Some states don’t even have kindergarten let alone pre-K programs.
Quality is also an issue. President Obama clearly recognizes its importance because he made sure to make “high-quality” part and parcel of his universal pre-school proposal. In “Four Reasons Pre-K Faces An Uphill Climb,” Andy Rotherham’s #3 reason is: “There is no center to hold. The basic battle lines are people who think expanding access to pre-K is paramount and those who think improving quality in pre-K is more important.” (The other 3 reasons are valid and worth reading as well.)
Sara Mead, the go-to source on all things early childhood, was a little more nuanced when she made this comment:
“Ultimately, I think that significant learning deficits with which poor kids enter pre-k and the political demand that public pre-k investments produce significant evidence of learning results mean that an emphasis on higher quality programs is both better for kids and more likely to be sustainable over time. But the alternative perspective should not be summarily dismissed here.” Read the whole piece for more.
The political elephants in the room on this, especially for Democrats, are the competing interests of teachers unions. In his comments on the State of the Union, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel praised “investing in early childhood.” But, in contrast to Obama, he was not careful to preface that investment as having to be “high quality.” In fact, the word “quality” appears nowhere in Van Roekel’s statement.
In all fairness, in Van Roekel’s February 8th letter to Obama specifying what he wanted to hear in the State of Union address, early education had quality all over it. But therein lies the rub. More public school early childhood educators means more NEA dues-paying members. That doesn’t mean Van Roekel wasn’t being sincere about the need for quality. But one need look no further than the California Class Size Reduction debacle of the late 1990’s (short story: Quality lost. Big time. And poor kids were the biggest losers), of which the California Teachers Union was the driving force, to see what can happen when principles regarding quality go up against the politics of expanded union membership and increased union revenue.