By Charlie Barone, Policy Director
Today over at Vox, Libby Nelson did some much-needed reporting on Mayor Bill De Blasio’s rush to offer universal Pre-K in New York City. Nelson rightly zeroes in on the biggest risk of hasty implementation: poor quality Pre-K programs. No other major city has implemented Pre-K as quickly. Not even close.
So, why the rush? Universal Pre-K is certainly a worthy goal; the positive findings for the short- and long-term outcomes following high-quality early childhood education argue for urgency. But if Pre-K in NYC is implemented at the expense of quality, it’s at best a wasted effort. Even worse, research shows sending kids to a crummy program can actually be harmful to students.
The elephant the room—or in this case more aptly half a donkey—is the adult interests that could trump the needs of kids. It’s no secret the push for Pre-K in New York City was been driven in large part by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). Pre-K, like class size reduction, is a winning issue for unions because it dovetails popular and, under certain circumstances, effective policy with union self-interest (i.e., more dues-paying members). It’s not talked about much in polite company, but it’s a very real and potent dynamic. In all fairness, self-interest, in terms of added revenues, may also be an issue in non-union, community-based programs.
One need only look at the implementation of class size reduction (CSR) in California in the late 1990’s to see how a rushed policy—the dominant force behind which was the California Teachers Association—that involves union jobs can work against the interests of students. In no time at all, 40,000 “emergency-certified” teachers were placed in California classrooms, mostly in schools with high proportions of poor and minority children. Rushing this policy defeated the purpose it meant to serve, which was to raise the quality of instruction in classrooms and provide students more individualized attention.
Certification is a poor measure of teacher effectiveness. Certainly some of the emergency-certified teachers did a fabulous job. But whatever hiring standards school districts had in addition to certification largely went out the window. Teaching out-of-field in subjects like math is related to poor performance and that went up sharply under CSR. So intimidating was the CTA that the experts at California’s flagship schools of education (Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA), who are now so concerned with alternative preparation programs like TFA and who tout the importance of years of experience, pretty much sat the whole thing out. Some civil rights groups tried to push back. But once the train left the station, it never really slowed down.
Nitzan Pelman, founder of Citizen Schools, made similar points in a January op-ed in the New York Daily News and succinctly summed up the risk of overzealous Pre-K implementation: “This initiative risks becoming a jobs program instead of an education initiative.”
In the Vox piece, the knowledgeable and astute Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, asserts that, ultimately, there is a built-in safeguard in that “you can pick and choose and let the poor-quality places go out of business.”
I’m not so sure that’s a realistic expectation. It’s hard to imagine that a mayor who has criticized the closing of low-performing K-12 schools will be any more willing to close low-performing Pre-K programs. It’s not something the city does now. And it would be a real change of course for a mayor whose agenda is very much driven by union wish lists. Oversight won’t be any easier with a boatload more children being served.
Time will tell. But anyone who’s concerned about how kids will fare in this high-stakes gamble should watch closely as this unfolds and be ready, willing and able to push for a course-correction if and when it is needed.
Charles Barone has more than 25 years of experience in education service, research, policy, and advocacy. Prior to joining Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) full-time in January of 2009, Barone worked for five years as an independent consultant on education policy and advocacy. His clients, in addition to DFER, included the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, the Education Trust, The Education Sector, and the National Academy of Sciences. Read more here.